Abstract
Inspired by Jacques Derrida's thinking, this book proposes an innovative philosophic insight in the problem of conditions of possibility of representation of a percieved event. To anwer the question whether it is possible to take a photographic picture of a memory, the first chapter suggests to turn from Rancière's to Derrida's and Nancy's perspective.
It focuses on the contradiction in Rancière's concept of the regime of depiction, which inevitably keeps the principal of representation in every regime and, simmultaneously, claims the new "aesthetic regime" has got rid of representation. To contrast this contradition, the author introduces Derrida's conception of the unique event, which remains unreacheable by any regime and any representation.
The second chapter suggests that if an event "survives" in the archive, it is thanks to its technologically constructed representation, which can be deconstructed. In order to be photographically depicted, the event must be fragmented and framed: the parergonic technology chooses and frames a percievable part of it, which is translated into its material version, labeled as "the event", and stored for further percpetions.
Neverthelsss, if the photography is functional as a surviving "relic" of an event, it is thanks to the metonymic schematism, which wards off the fragmentary insufficiency of the representational "ruin" of the percieved event. The third chapter introduces to Nancy's conception of technological "survival" of the fragments of life.
For Derrida, the motor that forces to take photographic pictures is the archive fever, which spreads the metaphysical violence of the expression of the essence. Contrary to Derrida, Nancy claims that the archived recording "survives" the event thanks to its risky exposition to the other's gaze.
The conclusion is rooted in Nancy's conception of technology as a beneficial metaphysical necessity: thanks to the principal of representation, it is even possible to take a photographic picture of a past perception, of a memory; to compose it metonymically out of the fragments of a present preception.