This is exactly it. What is cheiropoietic? What is acheiropoietic?

Isn’t the act of photography in this sense properly acheiropoietic? Automatic writing by virtue of light, without interference from the real or the idea of the real? Such automaticity would make photography the prototype of the literalness of a world from which the human hand has disappeared. The world as self-generator, radical illusion, pure trace, with no simulation, no human interference, above all without truth. If there is a product par excellence of the human mind, a cheiropoietic product, it has got to be the truth, objective reality.

Have we not had, ever since the beginning, the profound fantasy of a world functioning without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, exempt of all human intervention, the all too human willpower? What is so immensely pleasurable in poetic language, in le mot d’esprit, is to see language operate by itself, in its materiality, its literalness, without being mindful of meaning. This is what fascinates us so much. The same thing goes for anagrams, anamorphosis, the “figure hidden in the carpet.” Does not photography also operate as a means of revelation in both senses of the word in French – it develops, technically; and it reveals, metaphysically – “the figure in the carpet”? Italo Calvino wrote: “The lesson of a myth is in the literalness of its narrative. Every interpretation impoverishes the myth and strangles it. Better to meditate on each detail patiently, never abandoning its figurative language.”

Even dreams, in their psychoanalytic versions, lose their literal character. They fall prey to meaning and interpretation. Dreams, however, like myths, are cunning. They contest, like language in general, what we want them to signify. There is a cunning of literalness that goes against analytic exegesis and that resuscitates ever so subtly (is this not the secret of literacy?) the world-as-is, a world which is, literally speaking, only what it is.

These are the stakes nowadays. We are being faced with a new fundamentalism, a genuine fanaticism that, with the help of all the data provided by all the technologies, is taking us further and further from the literal and material world, further and further from a truly literal world, off toward a world technically “real.”