Graven images: photography after Heidegger, Lyotard and Deleuze

This chapter connects Heidegger’s critique of identity and metaphysics with his later work on the question of technology to propose that photography, understood as an image making technology, provides a privileged point of entry into the question of ontological difference. The work of Lyotard and Deleuze, while not directly engaging with photography, seems to be pointing in this direction. My assertion is that the ‘step back’ out of metaphysics does not proceed by way of language (as Heidegger would have it) but by the way of the technical image. For this reason, photography is the visual counterpart of non-representational thinking. This paper argues that Heidegger’s inability to exit metaphysics is tied to his failure to recognise that such a leap is accomplished by means of an automata, or technology that is capable of mimetic expression. The understanding of photography as the poetic expression of techne, implies that photography is the ‘graven image’ of the age of cybernetics and allows to suggest that a leap out of metaphysics is best performed not in the field of language but in the space of the technical image. This leap, if successful, might open a path towards philosophy that works with technical images instead, or alongside of language.