Have you noticed that split second moment when you so fleetingly glimpse a detail in an object, a person, the urban environment or an interior space wherein a pleasure beyond normal pleasure is generated? A kind of jouissance where the object of the glimpse as a zoomed detail immediately evaporates and only an impression remains. The impression as a kind of indentation or debossing is seared in the mind not as an image but as a sensation. This glimpse is so quick, immediate almost intangible that what remains is without bearing or context; the detail immediately transforms from the visual to what is not there—it could never take as an image; the signifiers would not stick. The key condition of this affect is that it cannot be sought, premediated or provoked. It happens randomly without notice. However, it does generally occur during states of daydreaming or drowsiness. The image never coalesces and thus there is this prevailing sense of loss, not the loss of the image per se, but a deeper sense of the subject’s displacement and alienation. A certain excess of pleasure in the form of a piercing of the subject. Yet it is more than what Barthes calls the ‘punctum’ when discovering something unintended in a photographic portrait, because the photographic print or any image fails to take form with this experience. This sense of loss for something that could not gel with language may be a trace of the real or Derrida’s cinder that erases itself before it takes form, while foreshadowing something that never could be. This glanced detail that disappears as soon as it inscribes itself leaves the subject dismembered, fragmented.

Artefacts that remain

What remains?

‘Cinders there are’

Their remains

The reminders of something that never was

What is the remainder?

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