Meanwhile, behind us, the drawing I had brought, whose origin I did not know, nor even the name of its author, was taking on disturbing proportions. My friend Lucian, though visibly anxious, stood upon an arkchair and told me he had begun writing a series of articles, not to be done with images, but to learn to see them otherwise.
And for that… it was hard for me to pretend not to notice how clearly he was fleeing from something to which I had no access. Yet patience was on my side… I let him continue… He spoke of his articles, and I listened, not without a certain pleasure.
– In this series of articles, I wanted to move forward gropingly, in the company of painters, photographers, philosophers, mystics, and others, in an attempt to approach what it means, today, to have an image of the world — or perhaps, more radically still, to be an image within the world. For it is not a matter of treating the “concept of the image” as one would treat an academic topic, but of letting oneself be traversed by it, as by a wave.
While he spoke, his whole body moved without his noticing it. Curiously, his voice, meanwhile, remained almost perfectly calm. As I gathered my thoughts, he went on in the same tone:
– … For me, the point was not to understand what the image is, but what it does, what it performs, within us, between us, around us.
The image, before being an object of thought, is an experience. Perhaps that is where we must begin to draw the map of our inquiry: from the points where the image acts, slips in, asserts itself, withdraws.
And indeed, the image, now indistinct, that we had hung upon his wall was acting… growing… imposing itself to such a degree that the figure, once standing upon a rock, and in whom I had from afar imagined some faint resemblance to Lucian, could no longer be seen.
The fish, representing the Leviathan, seemed to have moved forward… From where I sat, one might have said that the figure, now invisible, had been replaced by my friend Lucian standing upon his red armchair. Was this one of those effects we call chance?
– I see, in the distance, several paths crossing one another, and each bears the name of a fellow traveler.
During the time of this reflection, I had lost the thread of his discourse, so much so that I thought he was speaking to me having had the same thoughts as I… which was far from the case. He was merely continuing. I refrained from questioning him, knowing full well that in such circumstances, nothing could stop him, not even the jaws of the monster that now approached the foot of his chair.
– There will be the path of the philosophers, of course, from Plato, the founding suspicion, to Deleuze, for whom the image is pure movement, a flux of perception. We must pass through Merleau-Ponty, who saw in vision a kind of reversibility: the visible and the seer interlace. To see is to be seen.
To see—he had seen it… he was seeing it… Standing upon his chair, he could not ignore the tongues of fire curling around him, yet they did not prevent him in the least from continuing.
– But there will also be the path of the artists: those for whom the image is not a concept but matter, light, pigment, rhythm. We shall visit the painters — Giotto, Caravaggio, Turner, Rothko — and the photographers: Nadar, Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Francesca Woodman. All of them, in one way or another, question the same thing: not what they show, but how it looks back at us.
And to be looked at, he was; we were. Mimicking the path of those tongues of fire, the tentacles that ended in eyes, like the whiskered limbs of a catfish.
– And then, we shall follow the path of the mystics, for they too were confronted with the image, not as representation, but as manifestation.
To manifest itself, our image was manifesting.
– For the Byzantine iconophiles, the image was not a copy: it made present what it showed.
If the drawing was meant to make present what it depicted… then it was time to be alarmed. How could Lucian remain so calm?
– For them, the image is not “like” God; it is His trace, His radiance upon the visible. Perhaps this is one of the earliest theories of presence through the image.
Finally, there will be the path of the moderns, where the image becomes technical, industrial, algorithmic — the screen, the camera, the endless flow of pixels. Here, faces merge with their reflections. The image is no longer merely a picture: it is a world, an economy, a force. Debord already spoke of the “society of the spectacle,” but today the spectacle has taken our faces, our gestures, even our thoughts.
Faced with such multiplicity, it is not a matter of imposing a hierarchy, nor a chronology. On the contrary, one must accept losing control — turning this journey into a shifting archaeology of the image.
The truth would be to say that neither of us had the courage to face the mystery unfolding before us, and from which both of us wished to escape… Lucian did so through words, and I through the futile gesture of trying to step out of the image.
– In the manner of Didi-Huberman, it will be a matter of reading images as survivals, shards of time, scars of vision.
I do not yet know how many stages this crossing will entail. I know only that it must follow the very forms of the image itself: fragmentary, reversible, uncertain.
There will be stopovers:
– on the image as memory, where Benjamin meets Proust;
– on the image as wound, where Barthes speaks of photography and mourning;
– on the image as resistance, in Pasolini or Godard;
– on the image as simulacrum, in Baudrillard and Virilio;
– and finally on the image as body, when the visible becomes flesh.
So many fragments of a single desire: to understand why, today, we no longer know whether we are looking at the world or whether it is the world that is looking at us.
Did he see how much this last thought had taken shape, embodied itself ,in that image that should have troubled us?
– For perhaps, in the end, it is not we who possess images, but they who hold us. And it is from this unease, that of a gaze turned back upon us, that the true journey will begin.
From my point of view, I may say, without much foundation, it is true, that it had already begun.
I do not know how… but without knowing all the details, I was certain of it.
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