Camera Obscura

An Archeological Survey from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age

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by Sarah Kofman

Type: Essays
Subject: Theory
Keywords: ideology, theory
Publishing date: 1998
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 112 pages
5 ¼ x 8 ¾ inches (13.5 x 22 cm)

ISBN-10 ISBN-13

0-8014-8593-2
978-0-8014-8593-0

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Book Presentation:
Marx, Freud, Nietzsche--in vastly different ways all three employed the metaphor of the camera obscura in their work. In this classic book--at last available in an English translation--the distinguished French philosopher Sarah Kofman offers an extended reflection on this metaphor. She contrasts the mechanical function of the camera obscura as a kind of copy machine, rendering a mirror-image of the work, with its use in the writings of master thinkers. In her opening chapter on Marx, Kofman provides a reading of inversion as necessary to the ideological process. She then explores the metaphor of the camera obscura in Freud's description of the unconscious. For Nietzsche the camera obscura is a "metaphor for forgetting." Kofman asks here whether the "magical apparatus" of the camera obscura, rather than bringing about clarity, serves some thinkers as fetish. Camera Obscura is a powerful discussion of a metaphor that dominates contemporary theory from philosophy to film.

About the Author:
SARAH KOFMAN held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Paris I. Among her numerous books are Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher and The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings, both published by Cornell. WILL STRAW is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University.

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