At the very moment that Marx employs it as a metaphor for ideological inversion, science begins to think that the problem of inversion is a false one.” Freud uses the camera obscura to describe the unconscious. “Before it was the metaphor for objective knowledge, as with Rousseau, or of perspectivist knowledge, as in Marx and Nietzsche, or of the unconscious, as in Freud, the camera obscura was a technical apparatus which served as a model for vision. Each thinker uses the metaphor of the camera obscura to illustrate their theories. In her 1973 work, Camera Obscura of Ideology, the French philosopher, Sarah Kofman, synthesizes the common denominator of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke on Race, Writing, and Friendship.Kenneth Burke on Reading for Identification.Lost in Translation: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.Ray Bradbury on the Seduction of Space in The Rocket Man.Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read.Walter Benjamin on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.Simone Weil on the Generosity of Attention in Gravity and Grace.Simone de Beauvoir on The Ethics of Ambiguity and Existential Courage.

The Role of Reciprocity in Nature in Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes.

Bridge and Door: Georg Simmel on How Separation Inspires Human Connection.

Mary Oliver Finds the Antidote to Confusion in Literature.

Transforming 1984: The Pursuit of Wisdom and Wonder With How We Read.

Ethics of the Infinite: The Origins of Radical Responsibility in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes