VI. Where does the image begin?

 Images are like mirrors: they show nothing but what we project onto them. We believe we are looking at the world, yet it is ourselves we see, in the trembling reflection of our own dreams.”
Jean Starobinski, The Living Eye

 

 

I had approached, rather indiscreetly and abruptly, the notebook in which he seemed, to my eyes, merely to be pretending to write…

but once again he managed to conceal what he was doing, turning the page with astonishing speed, the very page on which I thought I had glimpsed something I cannot even begin to describe. I questioned him with conviction… perhaps with a trace of aggression, born of the disturbance I felt within myself.

— You see, I understand you… replied Lucian, my psychiatrist friend, who had regained his composure.

I owe you a small confession… It happens that not long ago I received a proposal to write an article for a well-known magazine whose name I shall withhold. The article was to discuss the notion of the image, and how this notion might be developed from my own point of view. You can imagine, if I may say so, that I was flattered. At first, I thought it would not be an insurmountable task. So I began, and quite quickly I gathered the elements of my article, starting with what concerned Plato. As I began to write, I realized that although, like everyone else, I had always used this word, I only knew its general meaning — I had never really thought about it. So, I did not truly know what an image is, and I had to set out, intellectually, of course, to find and develop my own understanding of what “the image” means. While waiting for “it” to come, as I told you, I began with Plato.

 

Impossible to stop my friend. Had he wished to prevent me from speaking, he could not have done it better, and moreover, what he was saying was not without interest. So I let him go on without interrupting, waiting for my moment, which would surely come.

 

– I titled my article: Where Does the Image Begin?

And there I was, faced with this request, embarrassed, as one is before a mirror in which one does not yet recognize oneself.

What is an image? We think we know, but as soon as we approach, the ground gives way.

I look around me: screens, posters, faces, reflections, memories, ghosts. Everything seems to be an image, everything seems to want to image itself.

We are told that we live in a “reign of the image,” but what exactly reigns?

Is it the luminous surface — or that which, behind it, points toward an absence?

I accepted the commission without knowing exactly what was being asked of me — other than to question that word so simple and yet so obscure: image.

Since Plato, we have been haunted by it.

For the Greek philosopher, the image is doubly suspect: imitation of an imitation, shadow of a shadow, deceptive by its very nature.

And yet, how can we think without images? Even the most austere philosopher, in seeking truth, advances only through figures: the cave, the line, the sun. Thought itself needs images to imagine what it pursues.

Perhaps we must begin there — with an admission of ignorance.

Like Socrates, to say “I do not know what an image is” — and walk.

To walk through that forest of forms, of glimmers and simulacra.

To seek not a definition, but a path — an experience of the image, in all its life, its disturbance, its uncertainty.

Walter Benjamin wrote that the image is what flashes forth in a moment of danger.

For him, it is not representation, but a standstill of time, a collision between past and present.

Roland Barthes, on the other hand, saw in photography not the eternal return of the same, but the wound of time: that-has-been.

Between these two gestures — the Benjaminian flash and the Barthesian punctum — there may lie a territory:

that in which the image is neither copy nor symbol, but event.

I tell myself that perhaps, before thinking the image, we must live it.

Let come what it does — in us, to us.

For an image is not only what we see; it is what looks back at us.

In this series of articles, I wish to move forward by touch, in the company of others — painters, photographers, philosophers, mystics too — in an attempt to approach what it means today to have an image of the world. Not to put an end to images, but to learn to see them otherwise.

And for that...

To be continued…