On several occasions, Walter Benjamin, in his letters of 1936, acknowledges his delight at the talent of Pierre Klossowski, then embarked on a translation of his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” It was a task that was to leave its mark on the Frenchman's later work. For Benjamin's celebrated meditation on the “revolutionary” esthetic import of photography, an art whose very mode of production is inseparable from a technique of reproduction, furnishes several motifs of the almost Baudelairean prose poem on photography in La Révocation de l'Edit de Nantes. Octave, in his journal (in that novel), praises the blessed days when Daguerre “fixait la vie quotidienne d'alors sur le point d'être atteinte par l'austérité enlaidissante des premières industries …” (p. 47). The nostalgic phase, however, is eclipsed by a rhetorical explosion attempting to convey the energy unleashed by the new technique (“centuplant les intentions agressives de la pensée … désarticulant les structures”) and whose upshot is that painting itself (in the figure of van Gogh) is no longer the same. That retroactive effect of photography on all of art, the “primary question” of Benjamin's essay, furnishes the conclusion of Klossowski's prose poem: “La photographie a libéré la peinture du besoin d'imiter la nature …” (p. 47). The essential relation to presence, in Klossowski as in Benjamin, is the principal casualty of photographic technique.

Painting/photography: the split around which Benjamin's article is organized reproduces a crucial division between the first and second volumes of Klossowski's novelistic trilogy, Les Lois de l'hospitalité.