































8

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MERLEAU-PONTY AND BARTHES ON 
IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS:

Probing the (Im)possibility of Meaning

 NATASHA BEAUDIN PEARSON

For both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Roland Barthes, images are not merely 
objects in space; they belong to the realm of the metaphysical. Paintings “move” 

us, according to Merleau-Ponty: their “quality, light, color, depth […] awaken an 
echo in our bod[y] and […] our body welcomes them.”1 To encounter a painting is 
to apprehend it through one’s body. We constitute “brute meaning” by drawing upon 
the “fabric of the world” in which our bodies are inextricably caught.2 Conversely, for 
Barthes, poignant photographs “wound” us: they contain an “element [the punctum] 
that rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces” us.3 Unlike 
Merleau-Ponty, Barthes believes that pictures resist meaning-making. They provoke 
an “internal agitation,” an “animation” in the viewer. Yet this “affect” cannot wholly 
be reduced or explained.4 Hence, I think the crux of Merleau-Ponty’s and Barthes’ 
disagreement about the ontology of image consciousness has to do with the possibility 
of meaning-making (or lack thereof ). While Merleau-Ponty believes that a painting 
can be meaningful and express the essential “indivisible whole[ness]” and “imperious 

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston, 
IL: Northwestern UP, 1993), 125.

2 Ibid., 123.
3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26.
4 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 19-20.



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Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness

unity” of the world,5  Barthes contends that “since every photograph is contingent 
(and thereby outside of meaning), photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) 
except by assuming a mask.”6 In this paper, I outline Barthes’ critique of Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of painting—and his phenomenology more generally—and 
propose how we might explain the two philosophers’ disagreements on the subject. 

For Merleau-Ponty, paintings do more than just depict the world: they “attempt” to 
become “a piece of nature.”7 Phenomenology, the philosophical current Merleau-
Ponty belonged to, posits that as humans, we are embodied subjects living in the 
world, which we experience through our sensations (our perception). One’s body 
is not merely “a chunk of space or a bundle of functions” distinct from one’s 
consciousness; rather, one’s body is one’s consciousness.8 The soul “thinks according 
to the body, not according to itself ” because the body is what grounds all cognition. 
It is the “degree zero of spatiality” from which I see the world around me.9 In other 
words, it is impossible to understand the world “from the exterior” because I am 
“immersed” in it; I live it “from the inside.”10 The meaning that I give to the world 
is thus fundamentally informed by how I perceive it through my body. Paintings, 
Merleau-Ponty contends, are the repositories of the meaning given to the painter 
through her vision and movement. The painter’s eye “is an instrument that moves 
itself, a means which invents its own ends; it is that which has been moved by some 
impact of the world, which it then restores to the visible through the traces of a 
hand.”11 For this reason, when we view a landscape painting by Paul Cézanne, we 
see how Cézanne translated onto the canvas the sensations that he experienced when 
he laid eyes on a particular landscape.12 Cézanne’s body was moved by the landscape 
that his eyes perceived, and this movement was transformed into the movement of 
his hands painting the landscape onto the canvas.13 As viewers, we see the painted 
landscape and are ourselves moved by it. Thereby we imbue the painting with our 
own meaning(s). Thus, the painting allows us not only to see as Cézanne saw, but 
also to impart on it the countless other meanings that we may choose to give to it.

For Merleau-Ponty, paintings are indeed inherently and endlessly meaningful. A 
person unfamiliar with the work of Vincent van Gogh might look at his painting 
Wheatfield with Crows (figure 1) and simply see a bright ochre wheat field under an 
inky blue sky. Individuals who know that this was (supposedly) the last painting van 
Gogh completed before committing suicide will likely add an extra layer of meaning 

5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston, 
IL: Northwestern UP, 1993), 65. 

6 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34.
7 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 62
8 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 124.
9 Ibid., 138.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 127.
12 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 63.
13 Ibid.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

onto this first interpretation: they may see the artwork as an evocation of death 
(symbolized by the dark sky) looming over and encroaching upon life (symbolized 
by the vibrant wheat field). Alternatively, an art historian might look at this painting 
and instead understand it through the lens of Western art historical scholarship: she 
might take the flatness of the pictorial elements and the visibility of the brushstrokes 
as evidence that van Gogh’s art foreshadowed modernism. A person who grew up on 
a farm and spent his childhood ploughing wheat fields may, upon viewing Wheatfield 
with Crows, be flooded with memories of his early years (such memories may include 
the first time his father showed him how to mount a horse, or the memory of running 
around the fields with his friends, or of how the fields smelled after the first snowfall). 
In each of these cases, individuals bestow onto van Gogh’s painting meaning(s) 
that are informed by—but not limited to—her personal lived experience. Giving 
meaning(s) to a painting, Merleau-Ponty argues, is an infinite act of interpretation: 
it is a hermeneutic.14  It is interpersonal and timeless; in fact, one person may give 
Wheatfield with Crows multiple different layers of meaning at different moments in 
her life. This shows that the process of meaning-making is never sterile nor static, but, 
instead, rich, fertile, and bound to never be fully complete.15 

Barthes’ account of meaning-making in photographs is markedly different. Much like 
Merleau-Ponty, Barthes thinks that pictures have the ability to “move” us (to borrow 
Merleau-Ponty’s language): they provoke a “pathos,” an “affect” in the “Spectator 
[the viewer].”16 He pinpoints the source of affect as a detail he calls the “punctum,” 
which is present in every “attractive” photograph.17 On a mission to “formulate the 
fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography,” 
Barthes employs a “cynical phenomenology”18  in his analysis of photographs, which 
ultimately leads him to the conclusion that every compelling photo contains both 
a “studium” and a “punctum.”19 The studium, Barthes posits, consists in “a kind of 
general, enthusiastic commitment […] without special acuity” that every photograph 
possesses.20 Meaning “study” in Latin, studium designates both a vague disinterest in 
the consumption of certain cultural products and a “kind of education” that allows 
one “to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to 
disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself for 
culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and 
consumers.”21 The photographer (“Operator”) communicates her intended meaning 
by using visual codes that are universal and can thus be deciphered by Spectators.22 
Barthes uses William Klein’s photo, “Mayday, 1959,” as an example. In this picture, 

14 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 149.
15 Ibid.
16 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 21.
17 Ibid, 27.
18 Ibid., 9.
19 Ibid., 26.
20 Ibid.
21 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27-28.
22 Ibid., 28.



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Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness

the studium would be the fact that I can make sense of the subject of the photo, and 
that I can learn certain ethnographical and historical details by examining it.23 I can 
discern a black and white photograph of an old woman with a suspicious glance, 
who is surrounded by a few men of different ages. I notice that one boy is wearing a 
blazer, that another has a youthful haircut, and that the old woman is wearing a scarf 
around her head, for instance. The photograph “teaches me how Russians dress” in 
Moscow in 1959.24 In other words, I recognize this picture as a “good [coherent and 
identifiable] historical scene.”25 

However, without searching for it, there is an “element” in this photograph that “rises 
from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.”26 Barthes names this 
element the punctum and defines it as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises 
me, is poignant to me).”27 He claims that the punctum is usually a small detail that 
was not strictly intended by the Operator. Its “wounding” quality cannot be analyzed 
or studied, but is instead “given right there on the page” and resonates with the 
Spectator.28  Barthes seems to imply that a photograph’s punctum may differ from one 
Spectator to another when he says that “to give examples of punctum is, in a certain 
fashion, to give myself up.”29 If we accept this and grant that a punctum is subjective, 
then we may posit that what “wounds” an individual depends on that individual’s 
past lived experiences. Nevertheless, if one tests this out phenomenologically, one 
quickly finds that what wounds someone does not always directly map onto that 
person’s past memories, and thus cannot be easily explained. For example, in James 
van der Zee’s “Family Portrait” (figure 3), Barthes identifies the punctum as the “belt 
worn low” by, and the “strapped pumps”30 of, the woman standing behind the chair. 
Barthes is baffled by the fact that this detail strikes him: “(Mary Janes – why does 
this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?).”31 Personally, 
when I look at this picture, the detail I identify as the punctum is the seated woman’s 
right hand. When I try to understand why this element in particular “pricks” me, I 
can only say that the way in which the hand curves awkwardly over the armrest, and 
how one finger seems abnormally long, makes me uncomfortable, or “creeps me out.” 
This, however, is not a satisfying answer. What exactly bothers me about this woman’s 
hand? Why do the strapped pumps arouse “great sympathy [and] almost a kind of 
tenderness” in Barthes?32

23 Ibid., 30.
24 Ibid., 30.
25 Ibid., 26.
26 Ibid.
27 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26.
28 Ibid., 43.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 43



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

The punctum significantly impacts one’s understanding of the photograph: it 
“lashe[s]” the order and facile meaning of the studium and “changes my reading [of 
the photograph]”, “mark[ing] [it] in my eyes with a higher value.”33 Ever since the 
woman’s right hand in James van der Zee’s “Family Portrait” “punctured” me, the 
only thing I can see when I look at that photograph is that gnarled hand. As Barthes 
succinctly puts it, the punctum suddenly—and paradoxically—“while remaining a 
‘detail,’ fills the whole picture.”34 Yet, as Barthes asks, why is this the case? Why must 
I disturb the “unity of composition” that was found in the studium that constituted 
“Family Portrait” before the punctum wounded me?35 After all, “whether or not [the 
punctum] is triggered, it is an addition. It is what I add to the photograph and what 
is nonetheless already there.”36 Why must this addition—this newfound meaning I 
give to “Family Portrait”—be made? Why must the facile meaning of its studium 
(which allows me to understand the picture in historical/ethnographical terms, 
as a family portrait of an African American family living in Harlem in 1926) be 
supplanted by the deeply disturbing and incomplete meaning engendered by the 
punctum, which reduces the entire photograph to the creepy hand? Moreover, why do 
I choose to impart meaning to something that seems irreducible, that seems to resist 
it?37 I continue to ask: why do I think the woman’s hand is creepy? If this persistent 
uncertainty tells me anything, it is that “the incapacity to name is a good symptom 
of disturbance.”38

Attempting to answer these questions, Barthes draws on certain notions of 
psychoanalytic theory. He introduces the concept of heimlich39 (German for 
“familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”), which closely relates to its opposite 
notion, unheimlich (German for “uncanny”), an idea that is discussed in Freud’s essay, 
“The Uncanny.”40 Freud defines “the uncanny” as “an experience of tension” that 
belongs to “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known 
to us, once very familiar.”41 Freud uses “the double” as an example of the uncanny: 
having connections with “reflections in mirrors, with shadows, spirits, with the belief 
in the soul and the fear of death,” seeing one’s doppelgänger (for instance, when I 
look at a picture of myself or catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror) “arouses dread 
and creeping horror.”42 Though uncanny situations occur in real life, Freud argues 
that the uncanny is also “an aesthetic category”: the feeling can emerge when we 
consume literature, songs, movies, and other art forms.43 Personally, one of the first 

33 Ibid., 42.
34 Ibid., 45.
35 Ibid., 41.
36 Ibid., 55.
37 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 21.
38 Ibid., 51.
39 Ibid., 40.
40 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 2, accessed 2 December 2017, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf.
41 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 2.
42 Ibid., 10.
43 Ibid., 2.



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artworks that comes to mind when I think of the uncanny is Lars von Trier’s film 
Breaking the Waves (1996) (figure 4), which tells the story of Bess, an unusual woman 
who is in love with her husband Jan, an oil rig worker who asks her to have sex with 
other men after he is gravely injured in a work accident. It is a dark, tragic story 
of sexual debasement, religious paranoia and death. These are certainly disturbing 
themes, but I do not know exactly why Breaking the Waves disturbs me more than 
most horror movies, which deal with similarly frightening topics such as murder, 
torture, and ghosts. This inability to explain fully my uneasiness or to give meaning 
to my experience is precisely what constitutes the uncanny, according to Freud: “We, 
with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this 
knowledge does not lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree.”44

In photographs, what is uncanny is the punctum, which, as we have said, is the detail in 
the photo that pricks me, that disrupts the studium’s harmony, order, and identifiable 
meaning. To make sense of the punctum and of the uncanny, we may turn to Freud’s 
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In his 1920 essay, he postulates the existence of 
two fundamental principles that drive human behavior: the pleasure principle and 
the “death instinct.”45 The pleasure principle states that our bodies (and minds) are 
designed to rid themselves of tension (what Freud calls “unpleasure”; this includes 
hunger, thirst, and sexual desire), such that all of our actions are motivated by “a 
lowering of that tension – that is, […] an avoidance of unpleasure or a production 
of pleasure.”46 This drive is productive and life-sustaining, as it seeks to restore our 
constitution to a state of balance and harmony. At first glance, this seems intuitive 
and accurate. Yet, upon treating numerous patients who suffered from post-traumatic 
stress disorder, Freud realized that the pleasure principle offered an incomplete 
account of human behaviour. His patients, most of whom had fought in World War 
I, would constantly recall their most painful memories (consciously, in therapy and 
unconsciously, in dreams), “reviv[ing] them with the greatest ingenuity.”47 But this 
repetition is stale, unproductive, and contradicts the pleasure principle: instead of 
releasing tension, this “compulsion to repeat” only heightens tension, only disturbs 
our constitution, and only generates imbalance and chaos.48 Freud cannot explain 
these “mysterious masochistic trends of the ego” that all humans seem to bear, but 
nonetheless we cannot deny their existence.49 This leads him to posit the existence of 
a second fundamental drive that opposes the pleasure principle and seeks to negate 
it: the “death instinct.”50

44 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 7.
45 Sigmund Freud, Salman Akhtar, and Mary K. O'Neil, On Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (London: 

Karnac Books, 2011), 55.
46 Freud et al., “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 13.
47 Freud et al., “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 27.
48 Ibid., 25.
49 Ibid., 19.
50 Ibid., 55.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Freud’s account of these two antagonistic—but intertwined—drives maps onto 
Barthes’ theory of photography. The pleasure principle (or “Eros”) corresponds to the 
studium: both embody harmony, order, balance, cohesion, and meaning. Meanwhile, 
the death instinct is analogous to the punctum. Both the death instinct and the 
punctum disturb the harmony and meaning of the pleasure principle and the studium, 
respectively. This meaning is intelligible: James van der Zee’s “Family Portrait” is the 
picture of an African-American family living in Harlem in 1926. The woman’s eerie 
hand becomes such a fixation to me that I ignore all of the other elements present 
in “Family Portrait”; the death instinct causes traumatic war memories to repeatedly 
resurface in Freud’s patients’ minds, thereby shattering all semblance of serenity, 
harmony, or meaning. Both cases indeed resist meaning: nothing can fully capture 
what makes the contorted hand creepy to me, and nothing can explain why this 
particular detail resonates within me but not necessarily within every other Spectator. 
Likewise, the veterans’ stale repetition of painful memories cannot be contextualized 
by any philosophical or scientific system; it refuses to be understood within the 
organized, satisfying framework of the pleasure principle.

Thus, Barthes’ main disagreement with Merleau-Ponty has to do with the latter’s 
belief that images (and especially paintings) are endlessly meaningful. According to 
Barthes, pictures have a limited semiology: “all we can say is that the [photograph] 
speaks, it induces us, vaguely to think.”51 The photograph’s meaning is evident and 
restrained: it can be recognized by any Spectator. Indeed, anyone who looks at 
William Klein’s “Mayday, 1959” will say that it is a picture of an old woman with a 
scarf wrapped around her head, gazing menacingly at the lens, and surrounded by 
seven men of varying ages. More specifically, the work’s title informs us that these 
people are in Moscow in 1959. This is the definite subject of “Mayday, 1959”: the 
photo will never be about tulips in seventeenth century Amsterdam, or fishermen 
in nineteenth century Brazil. Thus, even though an image may provoke different 
emotions in viewers, the image’s meaning will always be contingent, circumscribed, 
and “a closed field of forces.”52 It is therefore incorrect to claim, as Merleau-Ponty 
would, that “Mayday, 1959” can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. 
Spectators might be wounded by different punctums, which are, as Barthes puts it, 
“outside of meaning.”53 However, for all viewers the photo’s studium, which “aim[s] 
at generality […] by assuming a mask,” is the same.54

Barthes challenges Merleau-Ponty’s contention that paintings “come to life” and 
make visible “the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis […] of time.”55 
Instead, Barthes claims, they freeze time: they capture a moment that is dead and that 
is bound never to happen again. Barthes indeed believes that Death “is the eidos” (the 
51 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 38.
52 Ibid., 13.
53 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34. 
54 Ibid.
55 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 145.



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Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness

essence) of Photography.56  To view a photo capturing a moment that one has lived 
is to be reminded of the fleetingness of one’s life and of the inevitability of death. 
Many photographs—especially ones dating back to a time when sitters had to pose 
for several hours when they had their picture taken—possess a haunting, “deathly” 
quality. (“Family Portrait” is the perfect example of this phenomenon: the figures 
appear to be spectral—far from “life-like.”) Barthes argues that the experience of being 
photographed is also like death: the photographer’s “target” (subject) experiences “a 
micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter, […] Death in 
person.”57 This is because I feel like I am being transformed from a “subject into [an] 
object”: whenever someone takes my picture, I feel a strange sense of inauthenticity, 
for I perceive my “real” self being misrepresented—distorted even—by the camera 
lens.58 Conscious that I am being watched (and “captured” by another person), I 
pose and change my behaviour in a “cunning dissociation of consciousness from 
identity.”59 Moreover, when I look at a portrait of myself, I feel alienated, for my deep 
“self ” “never coincides with my image”: while I am “light,” moving, and alive, my 
image is “heavy [and] motionless”—in short, dead.60 It is no coincidence then that 
Barthes relates photography to Freud’s “death instinct.” Death punctures life much 
like the punctum disrupts the studium and the death drive obstructs the pleasure 
principle. Life is not intrinsically meaningful; rather, we bestow meaning onto it 
because our existence would seem pointless otherwise. By extension, paintings can 
never be “alive” or meaningful in the way that Merleau-Ponty claims they are.

Hence, Merleau-Ponty and Barthes appear to be in a stalemate on the question 
of meaning-making in image consciousness. Merleau-Ponty offers a convincing 
argument for the hermeneutic possibilities of painting, but his theory does not 
consider the death instinct. Moreover, while both philosophers agree that images 
have the ability to affect us (whether by wounding us or by moving us), Barthes’ 
concepts of the studium and the punctum do not easily map onto Merleau-Ponty’s 
theory. This makes comparing both accounts tricky. Added to this is the fact that they 
focus on different visual mediums: Barthes mostly talks about photography, whereas 
Merleau-Ponty only discusses painting. The two thus seem to approach the same 
question with a different set of considerations, and this might be why they arrive at 
radically different conclusions. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty crystallizes the conundrum 
best: “ambiguity is the essence of human existence, and everything we live or think 
has always several meanings,”—including meaninglessness.61 ◆

56 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 15.
57 Barthes, 14.
58 Ibid., 13.
59 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12.
60 Ibid.
61  Richard Askay and Jensen Farquhar, Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential 

Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 296.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Figure 1: Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890. 50.2 cm × 103 cm (19.9 
in × 40.6 in). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Figure 2: William Klein, “Mayday, 1959”. Moscow, 1959.



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Figure 3: James van der Zee, “Family Portrait”. Harlem, 1926.

Figure 4: Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves (1996).



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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Askay, Richard, and Jensen Farquhar. Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian 
Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern 
University Press, 2006. 

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and 
Wang, 1981.

Freud, Sigmund, Salman Akhtar, and Mary K. O'Neil. On Freud's "Beyond the 
Pleasure Principle." London: Karnac Books, 2011.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Accessed 2 December 2017. http://web.mit.edu/
allanmc/www/freud1.pdf. 

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 
59-75. Edited by Galen Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1993.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind”. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 
121-149. Edited by Galen Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1993.


