Invisible and Unrepresentable: Waste is not Death. Notes on the Aporetics of Image in the Contemporary World

Abstract

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.