Photopoetics: Sisyphus Outdone, the Apostrophal Subject and the Elusive Image

Abstract

Abstract In Sisyphus Outdone (2012), Nathanaël’s particular tribute to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the reader faces a challenging hybrid text in which the verbal and visual dimensions intermingle to produce an idiosyncratic type of narrative. Fragmentary, elliptical, a web of quotations, dictums, and meditations on the difficult condition of the individual in the current image-saturated scenario of the first decades of the 21st century, the text manages to propose a rigorous reflection upon crucial aspects of representation from History and temporality, to the Subject now, photography, catastrophe theory, architecture, failure and translation, among the most salient. Sisyphus, I suggest, exhibits a strategic photopoetics which operates as a self-reflective mechanism contributing to the persistence of an impermanent liminal subject and to the (re)production of textuality and the proliferation of voices against silence.