Camera Obscura: Of Ideology

by Sarah Kofman

Camera Obscura is a powerful discussion of a metaphor that dominates contemporary theory from philosophy to film. 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.

Genres: Philosophy

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Sarah Kofmans philosophical works currently available in English are: The Childhood of Art (1988), The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings (1985), Freud and Fiction (1991), and Nietzsche and Metaphor (Stanford, 1994).

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ein sehr spannende Essaysammlung über die Metapher der Camera Obscura bei Marx, Freud, Nietzsche und Descartes.

[Jean Baird · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please Goodreads, correct the title. Camera Obscura of Ideology...It's an extraordinary book for those who want to think about contemporary photography and the way that the camera image works, what it means, all that is behind our assumptions of photography. It is particularly valuable to be read somewhere between Crary's Techniques of the Observer - and Barthes' Camera Lucida. Not for the faint-hearted, or those looking for easy answers to difficult questions. Kofman has condensed her thoughts into a small essay. The section on Nietzsche and the Painter's Chamber is possibly the finest. There is much more here than simply the idea of the camera as a metaphor for forgetting - her contribution to the discussion of fetishism is superb.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

she’s obviously an extremely intelligent person, but these essays are linked together by the thin thread of one image that seem tenuous at best. my failure in reading this may have emerged from focusing too heavily on her reading of marx when people seem to be suggesting her reading of nietzsche was the strongest of the essays. ultimately, I do not feel that my understanding of ideology has been enhanced in any meaningful way by her wrangling with a single metaphor

[v. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non entendín nada, hulio

[Nadya Wijaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I died from overdose

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is incorrect. It's called "Camera Obscura, Of Ideology." A good, brief primer into Kofman's thinking on her favorite subjects (Freud, Nietzche, Marx). Her books isolating those subjects are sturdier, but this offers an interesting take on topics she goes on to develop at greater length. Here, she approaches the camera obscura not as a technical device, but as a rhetorical tool - as metaphor - in various philosophical writings. Nietzche is given the heaviest burden here, as Kofman finds in his work an obliteration of the camera obscura as a metaphysical tool (a la metaphor for vision, recording the natural world, etc.) that maintains ideological and oppositional strategies. She shows how Nietzche generalizes the principle of the camera obscura through metaphor, and, in so doing, recognizes originary difference by bringing together/flatlining/"inverting the inversion" the metaphysical oppositions and ideological systems that Marx/Freud attempt to overcome but remain caught within. A provocative read for those interested in such things.

[Andrew]

I know little about Sarah Kofman as a thinker other than that she was supposed to be important. The Internet is rather unhelpful in this regard, which I find annoying. The text itself is mostly just meditation on a single obscure metaphor as it's found in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche-- three important thinkers to say the least, but rather than mining the best from these three Kofman just kind of riffs, and then fills half this slender volume with footnotes. And of the 50 or so pages where she's actually presenting her ideas, there's about 10 pages of actual value. And most of those are really questionable too.