Narcisse et la photographie. De l’objectivation à l’objectivité

Abstract

Baudelaire blamed the bourgeois society and its photographic narcissism, which leads to a perversion of the mythical posture and to a loss of consciousness of the ontological dissimilarity between reality and its image. That is why literature has to develop the imagination of the photographic image, which is both useful and magical, both referential and wondrous. Writers of the romantic era may disdain or admire photography, but they all experience the photographic objectivity and thus develop an antidote to the vain objectification of the collective Narcissus.