Abstract

BARRIOS, José Luis. Invisible and Unrepresentable: Waste is not Death. Notes on the Aporetics of Image in the Contemporary World. Tóp. Sem [online]. 2007, n.18, pp.139-161. ISSN 2594-0619.

In this work the relationships between image, death and the impossibility of representation are approached. This is done by first problematizing the technological support (the photograph) as a “representation” of waste and ruin like denials of death. Starting from an analysis of different photographs of death produced in different moments of armed violence in the twentieth century, the essay develops an argument concerning the aporetic condition of this type of images in order to show how the means of production, reproduction and distribution of these images make death impossible and how this impossibility is intimately linked with the same technology as a means of representation. Starting from this argument, the essay explores the contradiction between death and its representation to show the condition of negativity of the image in modern and contemporary society: an aporetics of the image.

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