Derrida and photography theory

This essay provides a philosophical context for the ideas of Jacques Derrida and explains clearly and for the first time how those ideas inform his writing on photography theory. The essay argues that Derrida’s work radicalizes the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and shows how his complication of time and temporality is used to critique the work of Roland Barthes on the studium and the punctum. It argues that Derrida’s work on the constitutive role of absence has major consequences for existing conceptions of art and the archive, and of the roles of memory and mourning in photography theory.