In The Very Letter of Time: Phenomenology, Photography, and other Moving Pictures, John Muse, a candidate for the Ph.D. in Rhetoric and also a working artist, asks why twentieth century philosophers have judged visual works in terms of linguistic arts. In so doing, Muse argues, they render images as merely derivative and secondary, the effect of discourses that necessarily precede them and condition their intelligibility. Seeking another way to think about the relation between language and the visual, John Muse engages Martin Heidegger and Paul deMan, two thinkers who have given language its current priority in the humanities, and Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, two whose work views words as just as visible and material as images, and images as just as coded and immaterial as words. John Muse will support his critical analysis with evidence from the photography of Roni Horn and Sophie Calle, and films by Hollis Frampton and Chris Marker.