critique (via Being and Event and Logics of Worlds) is certainly apropos of the moment (as it attempts the same short circuit of representational orders that he seeks in political and economic regimes), and foremost because art, and most clearly photography, once again stands up against the apparent wall of endless contradictions implicit to instrumental logic DRAFT 07/19/10 2 (instrumental reason).3 It is the speculative intelligence of art that, in fact, saves art, and it is the embedded speculative intelligence of photography that reveals it is secretly allied with painting in, as Badiou might say, the production and instantiation of other worlds. Pictorial regimes (and this includes architecture, as long as it is essentially an optical, versus haptic art) have long been shown to embody ideological regimes. (Theappropriate when one considers his valorization of Tintoretto or Veronese.4 What remained inviolable in both of the latter artists was a form of moral agency that Ruskin saw slowly evaporating with the onset of the late Renaissance and Mannerism, and all but absent in his own day. Despite all attempts to dismiss Ruskin as a Victorian aesthete mired in endless neurotic readings of art as a means of moral suasion, it is also all but impossible to dismiss the fact that his agenda was carried into the twentieth century under the "red" flag of formalism, and, in the process, the moral agenda was either bracketed or thrown out altogether for various postures reducible to "the political" or "the ethical."5 Thus, in present-day photography that has attempted to reduce