Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Recasting of the Photographic Image
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article takes Jean-Luc Nancy’s analogy of ‘the photograph itself, as a death mask’ at the conclusion of ‘Masked Imagination’ as its starting point to investigate and extrapolate what his thinking has to offer to contemporary photography theory. In contrast to the indexical approach of Sontag and Bazin, Nancy recasts the photographic image as a mode of exposure (posed in exteriority) to being-in-common. The author situates Nancy’s debt to Maurice Blanchot’s ‘Two Versions of the Imaginary’ for thinking the photographic image in terms of ‘absence as presence.’ The author also reviews Nancy’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s use of the death mask as the ground of the image as well as Nancy’s affirmation of photographic alterity, strangeness, and straying in ‘ Nous Autres.’ Nancy’s views on photography’s hallucinatory quality are compared with Roland Barthes to underscore his expository approach and the article concludes with some thoughts on the ‘exscription’ of photographic meaning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it