English

“There is no perception that is not steeped in memories. To the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details from our past experience. Most often these memories displace our real perceptions, of which we then retain only a few indications, mere ‘signs’ meant to remind us of earlier images. The convenience and rapidity of perception come at this price; but from this also arise illusions of every kind. Nothing would prevent us from perceiving things as they are if we had no interest in perceiving them as we can make use of them. In reality, pure perception, that which would be a simple presence of things, is only an ideal and a limit. Every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the imperceptible progress of the past devouring the future.”

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896)

– Do you see… looking at an image does not simply consist in receiving visual information.
– What does it consist in then?
– It means entering into a relation…
– Like us!
– Certainly, but a relation in which the visible detaches itself from the ordinary world…
– If I understand you correctly… that is indeed what is happening…
– Yes, but this visible must acquire autonomy.
– And what is required for that?
– That the image suspend its utility and make things available for contemplation by withdrawing them from their immediate function.
– I think I am troubled…
– That is why the image can be troubling… Yes, it resembles the thing, but it is not the thing. It is presence and absence at the same time. It exists within that interval.
– And we would be that interval… That seems rather ambiguous…
– This ambiguity is inscribed in the language itself. In French, the word image can designate a visible figure, but also a mental figure, a memory, a metaphor. An image can be seen or thought. It can be external or internal. It circulates between the world and the mind.
“Is this confirmed by science?
“In an unexpected way… yes… contemporary neuroscience confirms this phenomenon. It seems that the same regions of the brain can be activated when we see an object and when we imagine it.
“Is that an abstraction?
“A mental image is not a pure abstraction. It is a real activation, a physiological event. It is a form that maintains itself without immediate external support.
The image is therefore what allows a form to subsist outside its source.
This character also explains the power of images in memory. An image is not merely a recording. It is an active reconstruction. It transforms itself each time it reappears. It is never identical to itself.
That is why the image is close to the verb to appear. It belongs to that moment when something detaches itself from the background and becomes perceptible. It is not the thing itself, but it is that through which the thing can still come into being.
Thus, the word image does not designate only a representation. It designates a surviving form, a displaced presence, a face that continues to show itself when the source has withdrawn.