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| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Street with Red Streetwalker ca. 1914-25 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Carington Bowles (publisher) Wantonness Mask'd 1771 hand-colored mezzotint British Museum |
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| Carington Bowles (publisher) A Foolish Woman 1780 hand-colored mezzotint British Museum |
For she sitteth at the door of her house on a seat, in the high places of the city. To call passengers, who go right on their ways. – Proverbs, Ch. IX, verses 14 & 15
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| Philip-Lorca diCorcia Mike Miller, 24 years old, Allentown, Pennsylvania, $25 1990-92 C-print Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Philip-Lorca diCorcia Tim 1990 C-print Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Eugène Atget Versailles Brothel 1921 albumen print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Eugène Atget La Villette, Rue Asselin Prostitute waiting in front of her door 1921 albumen print Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Eugène Atget Rue Asselin 1924-25 albumen print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Édouard Manet Olympia 1867 etching and aquatint Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Mark Morrisroe I, Mark Morrisroe 1999 posthumous book jacket, designed by Jack Woody Twin Palms Publishers, Los Angeles |
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| Mark Morrisroe Self Portrait - To Brent 1980 Polaroid private collection |
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| Nan Goldin Yogo in the Mirror, Bangkok, Second Tip Bar 1992 C-print Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Nan Goldin Yogo putting on Powder 1992 C-print Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec The Sofa 1894-96 oil on cardboard Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Woman with Black Boa 1892 oil on board Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
Éloge ambigu du contrat – Ambiguous praise of the contract
His first image of the contract (the pact) is more or less objective: sign, language, narrative, society function by contract, but since the contract is generally masked, the critical operation consists in deciphering the confusion of reasons, alibis, appearances, in short, the whole of the social natural, in order to make manifest the controlled exchange on which the semantic process and collective life are based. Yet, at another level, the contract is a bad object: a bourgeois value which merely legalizes a kind of economic talion: making for nothing, says the bourgeois contract: under the praise of bookkeeping, of profit-making, we must therefore read the Base, the Paltry. At the same time, and at yet another level, the contract is ceaselessly desired, as the justice of a world finally "regular": the preference for the contract in human relations, the security once a contract can be interposed between them, the reluctance to receive without giving, etc. At this point – since the body intervenes directly here, the model of the good contract is the contract of Prostitution. For this contract, declared immoral by all societies and by all systems (except the most archaic), liberates in fact from what might be called the imaginary embarrassments of the exchange: what am I to count on in the other's desire, in what I am for him? The contract eliminates this confusion: it is in fact the only position which the subject can assume without falling into two inverse but equally abhorred images: that of the "egoist" (who demands without caring that he has nothing to give) and that of the "saint" (who gives but forbids himself ever to demand): thus the discourse of the contract eludes two plenitudes; it permits observing the golden rule of any habitation, discerned in the Shikidai* passageway: no will-to-seize and yet no oblation.
* a low, broad step or platform of timber at the threshold of a traditional Japanese house
– Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (Hill & Wang, 1977)