EXCERPT The Continent of Flat Thoughts To elucidate the essence of photography within the horizon of science rather than that of philosophy – what would that mean? If it is not a sufficient reason but merely an occasion, that doesn’t mean it is a meaningless coincidence: the invention of photography is contemporary with the definitive and massive emergence of thoughts of the automatic, blind or symbolic type, ‘levelled’ or ‘flat thoughts’ (logic and the mathematicization of logic; but also phenomenology, the science of ‘pure phenomena’); and of thoughts that destroy the perceptual and reflexive basis of philosophy and of its image of the sciences: the various generalizations of scientific knowledge (axiomatization, logicization, ‘non-Euclidean’ mathematics, etc.). It is at least in this theoretical context—that of the invention and the definitively scientific use of blind thought—that we shall interpret it…