When we say of a portrait that it lacks only speech, we evoke something more and other than the sole privation of verbal expression. This very privation, in manifesting itself as the unique lack that would separate representation from life, already transports us into the sentiment or the sensation of a speech of the portrait. The lack affecting the portrait is designated at the same time as considerable and imponderable, so much does its annulment appear accessible and even imminent. In fact, the portrait speaks, it is already in the midst of speaking and it speaks to us from its privation of speech. It makes us hear a speaking before or after speech, the very speaking of the lack of speech. And we understand it, it communicates this saying, its sense and its truth.

In a similar manner, we desire to hear the voice of she or of he who is absent. Their aspect can be carried with us in a photograph, or indeed a film, to which the recording of the voice can also be associated. But listening to this voice still remains of an order other than the order of the visual. Its resonance attunes us to an order of sense and of truth whose essence differs from the visual order of recognition. Love and hate are always that by which recognition is judged indigent.