Derrida & Digital Photography

Marc Brüseke -

'Previously, erasures and added words left a sort of scar on the paper or a visible image in the memory. There was a temporal resistance, a thickness in the duration of the erasure. But now everything negative is drowned, deleted; it evaporates immediately, sometimes from one instant to the next.’[1]

What Derrida[2] says about the word processor, we can say about digital photography. The destruction of an analogue photo is a physical act. You must hold it, rip it apart, and dispose of it. It’s a tangible erasure. Deleting a digital image is a few soft taps on a screen. It seems less brutal, but the detachment amplifies the violence. We simplify the act of elimination. We diminish its emotional impact. We turn raw emotion into routine.

  1. Jacques Derrida, 'The Word Processor', in Paper Machine (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 19-32 (p.24). ↩︎

  2. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction theory. His work challenged traditional ideas about language, meaning, and the very foundations of Western philosophy. Although often associated with post-structuralism, Derrida's influence extends across multiple disciplines, including literature, law, and politics. ↩︎