Let us look again at this splendid being from which beauty streams: he is, I see this, perfectly

like himself: he resembles himself. The cadaver is its own image. It no longer entertains any
relation with this world, where it still appears, except that of an image, an obscure possibility, a
shadow ever present behind the living form which now, far from separating itself from this form,
transforms it entirely into shadow. The corpse is a reflection becoming master of the life it
reflects -- absorbing it, identifying substantively with it by moving it from its use value and from
its truth value to something incredible -- something neutral which there is no getting used to.
And if the cadaver is so similar, it is because it is, at a certain moment, similarity par excellence:
altogether similarity, and also nothing more. It is the likeness, like to an absolute degree,
overwhelming and marvelous. But what is it like? Nothing. That is why no man alive, in fact,
bears any resemblance yet. In the rare instances when a living person shows similitude with
himself, he only seems to us more remote, closer to a dangerous neutral region, astray in himself
and like his own ghost already: he seems to return no longer having any but an echo life. By
analogy, we might also recall that a tool, when damaged, becomes its image (and sometimes an
esthetic object like "those outmoded objects, fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible,
perverse," which Andr Breton loved). In this case the tool, no longer disappearing into its use,
appears. This appearance of the object is that of resemblance and reflection: the object's double,
if you will. The -258category of art is linked to this possibility for objects to "appear," to
surrender, that is, to the pure and simple resemblance behind which there is nothing -- but being.
Only that which is abandoned to the image appears, and everything that appears is, in this sense,
imaginary. The cadaverous resemblance haunts us. But its haunting presence is not the unreal
visitation of the ideal. What haunts us is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate
ourselves. It is that which cannot be found and therefore cannot be avoided. What no one can
grasp is the inescapable. The fixed image knows no repose, and this is above all because it poses
nothing, establishes nothing. Its fixity, like that of the corpse, is the position of what stays with
us because it has no place. (The ide fixe is not a point of departure, a position from which one
could start off and progress, it is not a beginning, it begins again.) We dress the corpse, and we
bring it as close as possible to a normal appearance by effacing the hurtful marks of sickness, but
we know that in its ever so peaceful and secure immobility it does not rest. The place which it
occupies is drawn down by it, sinks with it, and in this dissolution attacks the possibility of a
dwelling place even for us who remain. We know that at "a certain moment" the power of death
makes it keep no longer to the handsome spot assigned it. No matter how calmly the corpse has
been laid out upon its bed for final viewing, it is also everywhere in the room, all over the house.
At every instant it can be elsewhere than where it is. It is where we are apart from it, where there
is nothing; it is an invading presence, an obscure and vain abundance. The belief that at a certain
moment the deceased begins to wander, to stray from his place, must be understood as stemming
from the premonition of the error which now he represents. Eventually we have to put a term to
the interminable. We do not cohabit with the dead for fear of seeing here collapse into the
unfathomable nowhere -- a fall the House of Usher illustrated. And