hubris (the act of seeing and being seen) leads not further into the house of mirrors but away from it in these late examples of photography as painting, in that the purpose is no longer to indulge endless multiplication of image (mise en abîme) but to signal the presence of the speculative intelligence of the work of art itself (a non-discursive intelligence) that silences all narrative and all documentary pretenses to presence (signification). It is this escape from false presence that marks the crossing (nexus) of art as speculative intellect, and it is photography as painting that has brought us the closest in perhaps half a century to the resurrection of formal agency as moral agency. This specter is also the bête noire of capitalist reification. Art whilepaint, double the elemental force in mimesis bringing into play the very reason Nietzsche, in 1879, found in the mountains and lake in the Upper Engadine of Switzerland the perfect embodiment of a supernal "limit": "the same direct exposure to the laws of Nature that he had experienced in his artistic creation to the basic principles of morals and aesthetics; these laws completely reshaped his concepts, forms, images, and comparisons."14 The Eternal Return of the Same is the supernal limit par excellence. The force of visual knowledge has repeatedly been eclipsed by exegetical exercises in criticism and literal readings of the image. The often deranged discursivity of such exercises did not begin with Roland Barthes. Yet New Criticism and its reliance on formal properties of the artwork in/for