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Upcomimg: A Series of Writings on Friendship and Love



All but the pieties of lovers' hands.

— Hart Crane


I am so gripped by this love
that when I run towards her
I feel like I am walking backwards
and like she is fleeing from me.

— Jaufre Rudel



‘To liberate secrets, to invent them’ was, for Hervé Guibert, the

measure of friendship, something like a parcelling out of singular

existence, always without ground. In his roman à clef To the

Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), Guibert introduces a 

character named ‘Muzil,’ who barely disguises Michel Foucault, 

through whom he recounts previously untold stories from the 

abolitionist’s life. Following the book’s release, he made an infamous 

appearance on national television amid the ensuing ‘scandal’ to defend 

his disclosures, and spoke of a “common thanatological destiny,” as he 

called it, shared with his friend, lover and interlocutor. Guibert’s narrative

 begins in that forbidden space where fiction feeds on ‘reality’ until the 

two become indistinguishable. He writes in the opening lines:

‘I had AIDS for three months.’


Shortly after Foucault’s death, 6 years prior, Le Seul Visage (The

Only Face) (1984) surfaced as the catalogue to Guibert’s

exhibition of the same name held at Agathe Gaillard’s gallery in

Paris. Now reissued with images restored to their original

sequence, the deceptively modest and slender volume of

photographs reveals itself as a Guibertian novel in its own right.

Characters move through and recede from The Only Face, and in

its distinct photographic narrative mode, Guibert refuses to find a

community in a stable, constituent body, the very condition that

elsewhere attests to the violence that keeps it intelligible.


This can be explained in part by Guibert and Foucault’s ways of

considering homosexuality and friendship together against ‘the

recognition that we are.’ Of course, Foucault devotes much of his

life to showing that the very idea of an ‘essential self’ must be

abandoned; the task is not to uncover a hidden truth about who we

are, but to renounce the search altogether. Guibert’s

‘homosexuality’ has been described as ‘a quietly revolutionary

stance in line with his particular brand of rebelliousness’ –

rebellious, I’d argue, not only in his partial-refusal to express an

inner truth or sexual essence, but also in his questioning of the

conditions that demand them and render them legible.


It is in this spirit that Guibert's diaries anticipate a novel that will

never be written, yet become a novel in themselves through their

‘fictitious’ narratives. Better put, from the moment Guibert writes

‘I’ here, any attempt to distinguish between figuration and the real

is dismantled. By putting his body ‘at risk’ within narrations,

situations, relations, as he writes, he becomes ‘his own character,’

neither seeking to return to nor magnify subjectivity. Taking his

photographs as an iconographic corollary to auto-fiction raises the

question poignantly posed on the back cover of The Only Face: ‘Isn’t 

a book with figures and places a novel?’


The Only Face begins with bodies withheld, faces averted or

obscured, silhouettes held just out of reach in the dim interiors of

private rooms. ‘Sienna’ recalls André Masson’s headless figure

seated at a desk, slumped forward, bathed in a soft yet piercing

beam of light from the open window, a thin plume of mist rising

from the body. ‘The Friend,’ the first image, shows only a hand

pressed firmly against the centre of a chest, establishing a tension

and ambiguous relationality that resonates throughout. It is, in a

sense, an image of distance, an art of distance – ‘because every

distance is a proximity, and every proximity is still a distance.’


The photobook’s rising action takes place through a series of

portraits in which the characters ‘appear’ under their first names.

Guibert photographs his parents and himself under the title ‘Moi’

[Me]. French actress Isabelle Adjani, who haunts his writings, also

enters the frame at the Jardin des Plantes. His gallerist, Agathe

Gaillard, and his friend Thierry Jouno appear. Mathieu Lindon too,

another who ‘shared their time, drugs, ambitions, and writings

with the older Foucault,’ and the latter, famously pictured in a

yukata in his Paris apartment, the meeting place for such activities.


I look at these images knowing Guibert’s refusal to be labelled a

photographer meant, for him, an attention only to the relational:

bearing witness, as he writes in the introduction, only to his ‘love’

for these bodies – the way they crash together or fail to, and the

impermanence of presence that attends all such intimacies.

Brigitte Ollier writes, ‘There was no parade, [Guibert’s] portraits

were infused by simplicity, as if he were trying to conjure up, or

get rid of, the mysterious link between him and his nearest and

dearest.’


This ‘simplicity’, I believe, lies in what Guibert later describes as

his ‘fractious, careful, and suspicious’ approach to photography,

with shooting being a kind of liturgy for him. His attention to the

‘mysterious link’ and his play with narrative and framing to

preserve its elusiveness recall the story behind the photograph

titled ‘East Berlin.’ Lindon once recalled the outing when the

image was made; later, having read Guibert’s account, Lindon told

Foucault, ‘It hadn’t happened like that.’ Foucault replied: ‘Only

false things happen to him.’


And yet, through such falseness, a form of friendship

appears not as the affirmation of an interior ‘I,’ but as its

dislocation. Friendship, it has been argued, does not arise from

recognising sameness or identity between subjects, but from

exposure to internal dispossession, a desubjectification where the

self no longer fully coincides with itself. It involves recognising

one another only alongside an awareness of their finitude,

the ongoing possibility of betrayal, and irreconcilable strangeness;

it is ‘precisely not recognising the self in the Other and not sharing

common ground,’ that gives friendship its ‘particular queer, and

thus activistic, valence,’ writes Tom Roach.



That is to say, following Lee Edelman, that Guibert’s portraits dwell in the 

nothingness at the heart of relationality. And it is friendship that renders this

nothingness (which is not the obliteration of difference, rather the

opposite) tangible as proximity and as an awareness of the

singular, incommunicable death that eludes possession. There

is a subtle, revealing power in these photographs then when they are

thought of as an early, shall we say, Guibertian conception of friendship – 

which can hardly be  said to stand apart from Patrick Ffrench’s remarks when 

he wrtites: ‘The friend speaks to the friend already from beyond the grave, 

if the friend speaks to the friend at all… .’


What fascinates the young Guibert, though, is not the inventory of

mortality that photography could provide, but what remains

beyond its reach in the intervals, the silences and the margins. I’m

not the first to recognise his preference for tight angles, paintings,

windows; the light that enters at an angle, the slanted shapes, the

objects suspended as if condemned to an eternal foreground, even

the emptiest spaces seeming quietly inhabited, all are relentlessly

methodical.


We see this best in the images that follow, where his beloved

bodies, not his characters, remain only as the image of absence. A

pair of photographs titled ‘Writing’ shows a desk strewn with

handwritten letters; the other, a figure turned away, seen from

above. ‘Reading,’ taken from beneath the desk, draws depth from

minimal means, with a book just visible in the distance. The same

sense of absence animates ‘Interior’ and ‘Cannes Festival,’ where

one is replaced by a scatter of belongings – a blazer, a camera, a

taxidermy owl, marbles in another. The titles are again sober and

the images deceptively austere.


As Mattie Colquhoun writes in Narcissus in Bloom, ‘Guibert loses

himself in this fractal representation of atemporal non-selves,

becoming alongside the objects in his possession. He makes

himself hidden, emancipating from the gaze of self and other.’

And if we think back to a young poet from Moorgate, ‘friendship’

 and ‘love’ are likewise conceived as ‘self-destroying.’


The Only Face might painfully remind us, as others before 

it have, that there is neither community nor 

the possibility of friendship 

among those 

who are

there.