the death-mask] I can directly see the thing that is primarily intended and depicted: the countenance of the dead person and thus the dead person himself. The countenance being depicted is directly visible in this [photographic] image-as-copy. And what is depicted, the depicted content [namely, the countenance], the content that appears in the photograph of the death-mask, leads us back (as we say) directly and exclusively to [362] what is being depicted, which is always a [single] this-here.
However, the specific thing being [photographically] depicted, that which I see in the [photographic] image—namely, this death-mask—could also be used as a determinate depiction of a concept. In that case the image, the [photographed] death-mask, now shows how a deathmask as such looks. That is, the photographic copy is used as an exemplary illustration of the sensible concept “death-mask.” In this case, it is the concept “death-mask” that gets depicted. The “aim” of the depiction is now “the unity in the determination of sensibility” (B 179), i.e., to show how this one determinate “whatness” (namely, “death-mask”) “looks” in distinction to every other thing.
That notwithstanding, the genuine meaning of a photographic image is not “illustrative example [of a concept]” and never can be.117 What the photographic depiction depicts, is the face of a specific dead person—Pascal, for example—and not one particular case of “Pascal” as an illustrative example of the concept “Pascal-ness.” Nonetheless, what we find emerging here is a notion of “image” that differs from the notion of image-as-copy and yet goes together with it as an “ image-of.” How that is so, we shall see in what follows.118
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b) Sensibilization of empirical sensible concepts
We have named the second kind of sensibilization as “the sensibilization of an empirical sensible concept.” To some degree we have already characterized this kind of image in what we have just said, namely: The goal of the depicted now aims at the general essence “mask” or “photograph” or the general essence of any other sensible thing (“house,” “dog,” “table,” and so on). But the depicted is always and necessarily an individual “this.” When I depict the concept “house” in a sensible form, I must necessarily draw or paint a specific house. I
117.[That is, the sense of a photographic copy as a depiction-of-something is usually and properly a depiction of a particular thing rather than an illustrative example of a sensible concept.]
118. [Here (Moser, p. 720) Heidegger ends his lecture of Tuesday, 16 February 1926, to be followed by that of Thursday, 18 February, which opened with a 760word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]