Camera Obscura: Of Ideology

Marx, Freud and Nietzsche all - in vastly different ways - employed the metaphor of the camera obscura in their work. In this volume, the author 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.