must exclude matter. The spirit/matter binary
defines spirit in opposition to matter while privile-
ging spirit over matter. Additional oppositions
include soul versus body and male versus female.
Such binaries deconstruct when the opposed
entities turn out to contaminate each other.
When humanity includes animal traits and ani-
mals merit an ethical consideration previously
reserved for humans, the human/animal binary
has undergone deconstruction. Deconstructing
the oppositions they posit, texts release the abject
terms from subordination to the privileged terms
and so redefine both. As the human/animal oppo-
sition deconstructs, humanity’s relation to ani-
mals will never be the same.
In deconstructing themselves, philosophical texts
undercut presence’s foundational status. Presence
emerges as interminably contaminated by represen-
tation, deconstructing the presence/representation
opposition. When this opposition deconstructs, the
sign becomes presence’s trace. And presence recon-
figures as a trace woven into a textual fabric that
presence neither founds, controls, nor escapes.
Rather than merely representing being as presence,
traces refer to an alterity or otherness irreducible to
presence and so unavailable for representation.
For the presence/representation binary, the only
possible referent is presence. This binary’s logic
precludes reference to otherness, rendering alterity
unthinkable. This whitening out of alterity’s traces
reduces others to the same, a homogenization that
facilitates such institutional violence as ‘‘racial’’
profiling. Another example: In defining singular
others as a presence’s mutually substitutable repre-
sentations, many but certainly not all ‘‘multicultur-
alisms’’ homogenize those others in the name of
‘‘diversity.’’ A violence at work in educational,
governmental, and corporate institutions seeking
to know, govern, and manage ‘‘the diverse’’ profit-
ably, such homogenizing reduction is virtually ines-
capable yet always deconstructable.
Understanding photographs through the pre-
sence/representation binary risks collaborating with
such violence and closing thought to otherness. The
trace underscores deconstruction’s political implica-
tions. Photos refer to alterity in deconstructing rep-
resentation. Reading photographs as singular others’
traces, Barthes and Baudrillard dismantle represen-
tational assumptions about photography in quite
distinct ways.
‘‘Punctum’’: Roland Barthes on the Trace
Roland Barthes’sCamera Lucida: Reflections on
Photography(1981) specifies how reading photo-
graphs with sensitivity to the trace departs from
representational reading. Barthes describes his
initial ‘‘‘ontological’ desire’’ to know what photo-
graphy is (3). This philosophical craving seeks a
foundational presence, an ontological basis, on
which to ground knowledge of photography. But
Barthes recounts how his ‘‘‘ontological’ desire [...]
to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in
itself’’’ gave way to the traces marking the photos
he found intriguing (3).
Unthinkable in representational terms, these
traces prompt Barthes to ask: ‘‘why mightn’t
there be, somehow, a new science for each object?
Amathesis singularis(and no longeruniversalis)?’’
(8). Deconstructing ‘‘‘ontological’ desire,’’ Barthes
argues that to do justice to the singular trace of
alterity marking a photo, one must invent a singu-
lar science. Barthes invents such a science to read
what he calls theWinter Garden Photograph,a
photo of Barthes’s mother. Barthes relates how
this photo ‘‘achieved for [him], utopically, the
impossible science of the unique being’’ (71). With
this ‘‘impossible science,’’ the irreplaceable other-
ness to which theWinter Garden Photographrefers
becomes thinkable.
In Camera LucidaBarthes names the trace a
photo’s ‘‘punctum’’ and distinguishes it from the
photo’s ‘‘studium’’ (26–27). The categorystudium
defines photographs through a presence/represen-
tation binary. The studium entails any photo-
graphic content thinkable in representational
terms. Reducing a photo to itsstudiumreads the
photo as a sign that represents a presence. For
example, ethnographers read photos as represent-
ing ‘‘ethnicity.’’ One can exchange any photo one
reads as representing ethnicity for any other such
photo in that one reads them all as representing
substitutable instances of the same presence: being
Irish, being Jewish, and so on. One homogenizes
singular others in knowing them through the pre-
dicates that constitute one’s answer to the question,
for example: ‘‘What is Chicano being?’’ A general
science of ethnographic photography may be inse-
parable from a representational understanding of
photographs and the concomitant reduction of
others to the same.
Barthes’s ‘‘impossible science of the unique being’’
reads a photo as irreplaceable in that its utterly
singular punctum evades representation’s homo-
genizing logic. To read a photo’spunctummay be
impossible, but deconstruction traverses im-
possibility. As Derrida’s The Deaths of Roland
Barthes(2001) underlines, deconstruction happens
inCamera Lucidaas the other’s impossible haunt-
ing of the same. A singularity’s trace, thepunctumDECONSTRUCTION