The Image in French Philosophy

The Image in French Philosophy

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Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board:

Anna Bonshek, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster

The Image in French Philosophy

TEMENUGA TRIFONOVA

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2159-4 ISSN: 1573-2193 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents

Introduction: The New Metaphysics of Immanence The revival of metaphysics 9 The unusual suspects 13 The scholarship 17 Organization 22 Bergson’s Matter-Image: The Degradation of the Impersonal Bergson and the problem of dualism 25 Matter: an aggregate of images 36 Bergson and associationism 42 Memory and memory-images 46 Pure memory and déjà-vu 53 Sartre’s Image-Consciousness: The Allergic Reaction to Matter

Sartre and the impersonal 63 Sartre’s dualism 65 Sartre and the phenomenology of the image 68 Sartre’s fantasy of ‘natural signification’ 70 Husserl and Sartre 73 The ‘bastardization’ of impersonal consciousness 81 Imagination 88 The Psychology of Imagination 95 Image-consciousness 107 Between Idealism and Realism 111

Lyotard’s Sublime: The Ontologization of the Image

The event 123 From nausea to sublimity: Sartre and Lyotard 124 The postmodern sublime: the image as event 128 The Kantian sublime 131



Lyotard’s critique 134 The sublime and time 148 Barnett Newman 151

Baudrillard’s Simulacrum: The End of Visibility

The involuntary Platonist 171 The real: Bergson and Baudrillard 172 The real: Sartre and Baudrillard 174 The virtual 176 The impersonal 183 The fatal 184 Giacometti 188 ‘Seduction’ and ‘production’ 189 The real and the hyperreal 196 The event 199 Nostalgia for the subject 209

Deleuze’s Time-Image: Getting Rid of Ourselves

The ontologization of the film image 221 Representation and point of view 223 Deleuze and the fantasy of ‘natural signification’ 226 Types of images 229 The time-image: between ontology and history 232 Deleuze and Kant 234 Deleuze and Baudrillard 237 The impersonal: banal, nauseating or sublime? 241 The falsification of time 246 Signification and a-signification 253 Getting rid of ourselves? 254

Imaginary Time in Contemporary Cinema

Prolegomena to a ‘metaphysical’ cinema 261 The impersonal, the infinite and the virtual 265 Time and point of view 270

Bibliography 307 Index 313

Acknowledgments

I would like to dedicate this book to my family who were (still are) thousands of miles away from me. Then there is Gustav. Earlier versions of parts of this book were first published as journal articles. I am grateful to the following journals for granting permission to reprint the work here: “The Question of the Appendix: The Kantian and the Inhuman Sublime” in International Studies in Philosophy, Volume XXXV/2 (2003) “Is There a Subject in Hyperreality?” in Postmodern Culture, Volume 13, Number 3 (2003) “A Nonhuman Eye: Deleuze on Cinema,” SubStance #104, Vol.33, no.2, 2004 “Time and Point of View in Contemporary Cinema” in CineAction #58, 2002

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Introduction The New Metaphysics of Immanence

The revival of metaphysics One of the distinguishing features of twentieth-century French philosophy—summed up in the Deleuzian fantasy of ‘getting rid of ourselves’—was an increasing aversion to subjectivity, which manifested itself as an aversion of the philosophical gaze away from the discourse of vision, visibility, visuality, imaging, in sum, away from the image. Insofar as the image was part of the discourse of subjectivity/representation, getting rid of the subject involved ‘smuggling’ the concept of the image out of the discourse of subjectivity/representation into a newly revived and ethically flavored metaphysical discourse, which, as we shall see, was more interested in consciousness rather than subjectivity, in the inhuman rather than the human, in the virtual rather than the real, in Time rather than temporalization, in Memory rather than memory-images, in Imagination rather than images, in sum, in impersonal forces, de-personalizing experiences and states of disembodiment characterized by the breaking down of sensory-motor schemata (Bergson’s pure memory, Sartre’s image-consciousness, Deleuze’s time-image), in that which remains beyond representation, beyond subjectivity (Lyotard’s sublime, Baudrillard’s fatal object). Apparently challenging the inherent dualism of traditional metaphysics with its notions of disembodied subjectivity or transcendental Reason, this new metaphysics rendered the formerly transcendental immanent or virtual and proposed to tackle Cartesian doubt by reducing the object of doubt—material reality—to impersonal forces, states or realms of being, which it no longer posited as external to consciousness. ‘Material reality’ was redefined as ‘the Impersonal’, a certain tendency or predisposition constitutive of what is traditionally understood as ‘mind’ to enlarge itself, virtualize itself, make itself infinite, universal, and thus real. The subject was reduced to a mere crossing point of various impersonal or virtual

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forces, powers, flows, desires, becomings, lines of flight and nihilations, all of which were supposed to particularize it in some unfathomable way. Although the ‘impersonal’ was embodied (pun intended) in a concept specific to the thought of each philosopher discussed here, it was always articulated within a discourse of the image. Furthermore, because the ‘impersonal’ was increasingly promoted as revealing the basic structure of consciousness, or as a condition of possibility for consciousness, the concept of the image was assigned the function of mediating between consciousness and reality. Bergson’s, Sartre’s, Lyotard’s, Baudrillard’s and Deleuze’s philosophies of the image provide us with a trajectory of the various transformations the image underwent as it was gradually transplanted from an aesthetic into a philosophical, and more specifically ontological, discourse and was reduced to a trope, whose main function was to guarantee the unity of being by revealing the fundamentally impersonal nature of consciousness. The five thinkers discussed in the following pages either attributed to the image the power of revealing the nature of the ‘impersonal’ and, thus, the basic structure of consciousness or, alternatively, dismissed the image as a ‘degradation’ of, or an ‘impurity’ within, the ‘impersonal’. Bergson isolated déjà vu—a particular form of recollection that tapped into an ontologically anterior impersonal memory—as a privileged experience revealing the mind’s essential difference from matter, namely its capacity for memory. Sartre credited image-consciousness— an impersonal, pre-reflective and spontaneous kind of consciousness lacking an object other than itself—with the power of disclosing the basic structure of consciousness as a nihilation of reality. Lyotard identified the postmodern sublime—the experience of consciousness as ‘event’ or ‘origin’—as an exemplary, privileged type of experience on account of its reduction of subjectivity to the mode of existence of a bare material point and its total interruption of any form of inscription (memory, thought, reason, history). He described the ‘sensation of being’ provoked by the sublime as an absolute loss of self, a certain self-forgetfulness or lack of self-consciousness more characteristic of an automat or a puppet than of a subject. Baudrillard suggested that our last chance for transcendence in a saturated, over-signified world is the Pure (Fatal) Object, which seduces by virtue of its ‘fatal’ unintelligibility or meaninglessness, by its total resistance to interpretation and representation. Deleuze’s ‘time-image’, a direct image of Time as

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a quasi-Nietzschean impersonal force of ‘falsification’, was the last in this series of concepts, whose main function (and effect) was to revive metaphysics as “a thinking pertaining to [impersonal] forces much more than to the subject” (Lyotard 1988b: 6), a thinking concerned with Pure Memory, Imagination, Event, Origin, Time, Destiny/Fatality, with the conditions of possibility for subjectivity (the pre-reflective, the pure, the impersonal, the inhuman) rather than with subjectivity itself. To underscore the pervasiveness of this new metaphysics of immanence, of the philosophy of the impersonal, I want to consider briefly its traces in the contemporary discourse of language, poetic language in particular. Even as postmodernism proclaimed language as constitutive of material reality, that material reality was resurrected within language through the idea of the materiality of language, indeed the materiality of everything: consciousness, language, thought, imagination and art. Everything is discourse and there is, supposedly, no outside, no material reality, and yet this outside has sneaked back in under the disguise of the metaphysics of immanence. Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Philosophy through the Looking Glass, in which he develops the idea of delire as the subversive side of language—the idea of language as the body’s ‘scream’—provides a good example of the subtle workings of the metaphysics of immanence. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space will serve as my second example. In Philosophy through the Looking Glass Lecercle distinguishes between the abstract idea of language as a means of expression and communication, on one hand, and the material, guttural force of language (an example of which he finds in the work of Artaud), on the other hand. For Lecercle, ‘nonsense’ (but not nonsense as a literary genre) comes to stand for the dispossession of the subject by language (language as delire or as the subject’s body) and is identified with, and thus reduced to, the materiality of the body, which Lecercle considers a kind of confused or frontier thought. Thus, he claims that language is the subject’s master—language proliferates itself, following its own rules; it is ‘material’ in the sense of ‘self-sufficient’—but, at the same time, in its delire or nonsense aspect language expresses the body’s drives i.e., it is ‘material’ insofar as the human body is (literally) material. One must carefully distinguish between two different types of materiality here: first, the materiality of language, its power to produce significations by itself without any intended meaning on the part of the subject; second, the materiality of the subject whose bodily existence is

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manifested in the delire aspect of language. Even as language is posited as constitutive of material reality, that material reality, having been assigned a secondary or derivative place with respect to language, returns disguised as the materiality of language (the second type of materiality identified above). In other words, what the first type of language’s materiality establishes, the second type takes away again: there is no material reality outside language, but now language itself (language as delire) is ‘material’ or ‘bodily’. Language is, at one and the same time, independent of the subject and the most immediate, intimate, unself-conscious expression of the subject’s bodily existence. The selfsufficiency of language, its independence from subjectivity is, so the argument goes, precisely what guarantees that it expresses the subject’s most primal drives and instincts. This leads Lecercle to suggest that the poet achieves his poetic ends through renouncing all means to achieving them: precisely when he lacks power he is (supposedly) most powerful, most ‘present’, expressing himself most fully and authentically through language. From this point of view language poetry would be, paradoxically, the most personal and authentic genre of poetry precisely by virtue of its impersonality. By situating language beyond representation, this line of thinking attempts to erase the subject but preserve its body, and even present that body as the condition of possibility for language. The discourse of the ‘materiality’ of language and thought is part of a broader trend in twentieth-century philosophy and aesthetics: the attempt to resurrect matter from a long period of oblivion and disparagement and raise it on a pedestal as the only thing that can ‘save’ us from a totalizing and telegraphable reality. As we shall see, this ‘recuperation’ of material reality demands that philosophy do away with the distinction between mind and matter, subject and object, by attributing the characteristics of one to the other i.e. by relativizing differences in kind are reducing them to differences in degree. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space provides further illustration of the tendency of the metaphysics of immanence to privilege experiences that reduce the subject to a bare sense of being and dissolve subjectivity into an impersonal consciousness. Like the experience of the sublime, the experience of the poetic, as described by Bachelard, is a type of ‘revivifying’ experience insofar as it revives (reminds us of) the basic conditions of possibility of language, of being. Bachelard divides being into material reality on one hand, and what he calls ‘poetic expression’, which surpasses objectivity, on the other hand: “To give an

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object poetic space is to give it more space than it has objectivity; or, better still, it is following the expansion of its intimate space” (1994: 202). The image of immensity, for example, is not an immense object but a consciousness of immensity or an enlarged consciousness: In other words, since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of the immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. (184)

Immensity is not geometrical; it does not concern objects in the real world but is rather an inner immensity, an expansion of intimate space. The image of immensity is nothing but an immense consciousness, since “[a]t the level of the poetic image, the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active on its inversions” (xix). For Bachelard, the poem as such remains incidental to aesthetic experience: the true work of art is consciousness itself, specifically the experience of consciousness as an event, an origin, a phenomenon of being, in general something ontologically ‘older’ than subjectivity. The unusual suspects French philosophy has been generally called ‘Cartesian’ though twentieth-century French philosophy was shaped by one particular aspect of Descartes’ thought. While Descartes was both an Augustinian philosopher of subjectivity and a Galilean philosopher of a modern physical science based on mathematics, twentieth-century French philosophy is principally indebted to Descartes’ Augustinian aspect: it is a response to the crisis precipitated by Descartes’ depersonalization of the subject summed up in his “I think, therefore I am” (Matthews 1996: 6). Insofar as Cartesian doubt bracketed out everything particular about the subject, the I, of whose existence Descartes claimed he could not doubt, was not an individual I but an impersonal, anonymous entity, consciousness as such but not my consciousness. The real conclusion Descartes reached on the basis of his meditations was not “that I exist as a thinking being, but just that thinking exists or perhaps a thinking subject exists” (9). It was namely the Cartesian idea of a disembodied, a-historical, self-transparent, universal human subject that Bergson, Sartre, Lyotard,

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Baudrillard and Deleuze wanted to call into question. As we shall see, what ultimately brings together these rather different thinkers is a shared ‘aversion’ to subjectivity, which motivated their search for the Absolute in some inhuman, unimaginable pre- (or post) subjective state. Bergson conceived matter as a kind of virtual perception, which eventually ‘degraded’ itself into conscious (actual) perception and Pure Memory a kind of virtual spiritual realm, which became fragmented/individualized in isolated memory-images. For Sartre, image-consciousness manifested the pre-reflective, absolute transparency of consciousness. Baudrillard appeared more ambivalent insofar as he considered the pre-reflective in two mutually exclusive ways: sometimes he identified it with the virtual or the hyperreal (which he then criticized), but on other occasions he identified it with the ‘fatal’ (unpresentable) object. Lyotard located the pre-subjective or the ‘inhuman’ in the experience of the postmodern sublime, which he formulated as a question: Is it happening? Finally, Deleuze offered the time-image as a direct expression of Time. Although I have chosen to discuss Bergson, Sartre, Lyotard, Deleuze and Baudrillard, the aversion to subjectivity, the aversion of the philosophical gaze away from the image, and the projection of an invisible, impersonal force or realm ‘behind’ the image, is by no means limited to their work. More recent studies of the imagination, such as Alan White’s The Language of Imagination and John Sallis’ Force of Imagination: the Sense of the Elemental are representative of a similar separation of faculties (conditions of possibility) from particular experiences, of ‘pure’ acts from their supposedly inert ‘products’, of the quod (that there is something) from the quid (what that something is) or, to take as an example the phrase ‘there is seeing’, the separation of ‘there is’ (time = being) from ‘seeing’ (space). Thus, Alan White denies that “to have an image, not only in imagination but also in memory, dreams, illusions etc., [is] to imagine” (1990: 5). The dominant theories of imagination, from Aristotle to the present day, have tended to limit the concept of imagination to the image, to that which can be pictured in an image, whereas the truth, according to White, is that quite often, if not most of the time, imagination deals with that which cannot be imaged. Images are “particular and determinate, whereas imagination can be general and indeterminate. […] Even more importantly, imagery does not express anything, whereas imagination does” (92 my italics). Images do not have a meaning as such:

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Our imagery, like a silent film of someone saying something, does not differ from that of someone criticizing, explaining, commending, repeating, or replying to something, but there is a world of difference between imagining each of these. (92)

The only reason we think of imagination in terms of images, White asserts, is because we cannot seem to shake off the linguistic habit of attributing an object to all intentional verbs, as in “I believe that” or “I hope that” or “I imagine that.” Following White, John Sallis questions the ‘reduction’ of imagination to imagery and obsessively searches for the most anterior operation or force ‘behind’ images: “Is it certain even that imagining is the primary mode in which the force of imagination is deployed, that it is the most anterior operation? What if there were a more anterior operation of imagination, an operation quite other than imagining, and what if this more anterior operation were constitutive even for perception?”(2000: 15). Sallis attributes this reduction of imagination to images to the very nature of phenomenology as a method, which bound by the demand for evidence, […] is obliged to analyze experiences or acts rather than powers or faculties. Yet this reason is binding only if one assumes a concept of the subject by which terms such as imagination would name a nonmanifest power that somehow produces a specific type of manifest act such as imagining. From the moment such a concept of subject—to say nothing of the concept of subject as such—is called into question, the alleged reason for the reduction disappears. (15 my italics)

Sallis is essentially concerned with ‘rescuing’ time (roughly identified with imagination, the sensible, and the impersonal) from its subordination to space (roughly identified with images, the intelligible, and the particular or the singular i.e. subjectivity). Since the spatialization of time ‘coincides’ with the ‘birth’ of subjectivity, what time must be rescued from is nothing else but subjectivity. For Sallis the problem is how to prevent ‘there is seeing’ from ‘degenerating’ into ‘I see’. Finally, as we shall see in chapter five, Deleuze repeats the Bergsonian distinction between Pure Recollection and memory-images when, in Cinema 2: the Time-Image, he argues that it is not recollection-images as such that constitute the new subjectivity characteristic of contemporary cinema, for they merely embody the virtual without being

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virtual themselves. Consciousness is expanded not by the successful recognition of recollection-images, but rather by the failure of recognition, by something beyond the images: When we cannot remember, sensory-motor extension remains suspended, and the actual image, the present optical perception, does not link up with either a motor image or a recollection-image which would re-establish contact. It rather enters into relation with genuinely virtual elements, feelings of déjà vu or past ‘in general’. […] In short, it is not the recollection-image or attentive recognition which gives us the proper equivalent of the optical-sound image, it is rather the disturbances of memory and the failures of recognition. (54-55)

The past or the virtual exists outside us: “Memory is not in us; it is we who move in a Being-memory, a world-memory. In short, the past appears as the most general form of an already-there, a pre-existence in general, which our recollections presuppose” (98). In true Bergsonian fashion, the philosophy of the impersonal posits a mysterious, invisible force (similar to a Platonic Form) ‘behind’ the image and asserts that the image does not even express this force but that we think it does only because of certain entrenched linguistic conventions (such as the linguistic habit of attributing an object to all intentional verbs). It draws attention away from the image as a representation and instead emphasizes its being. This, in turn, has important implications for the way in which we think of how images affect us or how we relate to them. By foregrounding the being of the image, this kind of thinking suggests—rather pessimistically—that the main way (or perhaps the only way) we can ‘link’ to an image (to use Lyotard’s vocabulary) in a world supersaturated with representations is if the image appeals to our own sense of being rather than to our aesthetic sense. Even if the original intention of the five thinkers discussed here was to challenge the universal categories of Cartesian philosophy, it seems to me they ended up coming full circle restoring the idea of the universality and impersonality of consciousness they tried to subvert. Their philosophy was no longer concerned with Pure Thought or Universal Reason but with the equally impersonal—metaphysical—concepts of Pure Memory (Bergson), Image-consciousness (Sartre), Fatal Object (Baudrillard), Event (Lyotard), and Time-image (Deleuze).

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The scholarship Most of the scholarship on Bergson, Sartre, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Deleuze can be divided into explorations of their entire corpus or studies of a particular concept within that corpus. The present book is unique in the way it draws connections between five philosophers that have been commonly perceived as too different in thinking and style as well as preoccupied with, supposedly, different subject matter. I bring together what on the surface appear to be unrelated topics—ontology (Bergson), the phenomenology of the image (Sartre), the Kantian and the postmodern sublime (Lyotard), the simulacrum (Baudrillard), film philosophy (Deleuze)—with a view to teasing out their shared disgust with, or ontological embarrassment by, subjectivity. Bergson’s work has been enjoying a great deal of critical attention thanks to the unwavering interest in Deleuze. Keith Ansell Pearson’s Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual discusses the major aspects of Bergsonism, focusing in particular on the notion of the virtual (time and life as virtual multiplicities, the virtuality of the élan vital, virtual or pure memory, the ontology of the virtual) and on Deleuze’s reading of Bergson. While Pearson examines the importance of the image within the context of Bergsonism as a whole, I am more interested in drawing connections between Bergson’s image ontology and a dominant trend in contemporary philosophy and aesthetics toward the de-aesthetization or ontologization of the image. The point at which Pearson’s analysis intersects with mine is the argument that insofar as Bergson’s virtual is always a means of going beyond subjectivity and psychology, it functions as a reconfiguration of the notion of the transcendental, or rather the immanently transcendental. My analysis of the ontologization of the image is concerned with precisely this notion of ‘immanent transcendence’. John Mullarkey’s Bergson and Philosophy is a survey of the central concepts of Bergsonism: time, space, duration, freedom, perception, pure memory, evolution, intellect and instinct. Accordingly, his book is structured around Bergson’s contribution to various disciplines: sociobiology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and metaphysics. Mullarkey seeks to defend Bergson from the two major types of critique usually leveled at him: on one hand, the phenomenologists’ critique of Bergson’s naturalism and, on the other hand, the naturalists’ critique of his subjectivism. Mullarkey argues that Bergsonism, specifically Bergson’s notion of duration, blends two different approaches to temporality: a

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humanist (phenomenological or existential) and a naturalist (scientific) one. Mullarkey’s goal is to show that Bergson’s philosophy is ultimately sustained precisely by this blend of ethics and empiricism i.e., he is particularly interested in demonstrating the perfect correspondence between the form and content of Bergsonism: he argues, for instance, that Bergson’s anti-systematic thought reflects the incomplete and incoherent nature of the world it examines. Since he approaches Bergson’s process philosophy as a metaphilosophy—a commentary on the nature of philosophy as such—for Mullarkey the importance of the concept of the image lies mainly in its adequacy: he asks whether the concept of the image supports or breaks the correspondence between the form and content of Bergson’s philosophy. As my analysis of Matter and Memory in chapter one suggests, I remain rather skeptical of Mullarkey’s defense of Bergson’s casualness and inconsistency as supposedly necessary buffers against the danger of philosophy becoming rigid or as integral features of a metaphilosophy whose main task is to reflect on its own development as a continuous production of new, fluid concepts. Following the model set up by Bergson and Philosophy, the collection The New Bergson dissects Bergsonism along the lines of methodology, ontology, aesthetic theory, philosophy of mind and sociobiology. In the introduction to the collection Mullarkey points out that thanks to Bergsonism’s potential to be easily appropriated by various philosophical movements—existentialism, phenomenology and structuralism, among others—Bergson’s ideas have gradually dissipated and lost their forcefulness and distinctiveness. Accordingly, the contributors to the collection deliberately refrain from using the dominant comparativist approach to Bergson’s work, which examines his philosophy merely as foreshadowing or anticipating the work of other philosophers; they also attempt to free Bergson’s thought from its subordination to broad movements such as psychologism, vitalism or spiritualism. While my approach is not strictly comparativist, I am indeed more interested in ‘using’ Bergson to inquire into the history of a concept—the concept of the image—rather than in studying his work on its own. Most of the recent books on Sartre are either surveys whose purpose is to introduce Sartre’s philosophy to readers lacking training in philosophy or more general studies that attempt to situate Sartre’s work in the larger context of twentieth-century philosophy. The essays collected in Situating Sartre in Twentieth-Century Thought and Culture, edited by Jean-Francois Fourny and Charles Minaéhen, present structuralist

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and poststructuralist critiques of Sartre, particularly of his philosophy of the subject. There is no mention of the two books on imagination, which are precisely the focal point of my discussion of Sartre. Richard Kamber’s On Sartre is intended as a guide to readers lacking a background in philosophy; thus, as is the case with many such studies, the author explicates a limited selection of Sartre’s most notable arguments. Sartre’s writings on the image are briefly discussed as part of what the author calls Sartre’s defense of ‘direct realism’ (as distinguished from ‘naïve realism’). Gregory McCulloch’s Using Sartre: an Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes includes one chapter on imaging, in which Sartre’s work on the image is situated in the context of the Descartes—Berkeley debate over the question of phenomenological presence (the question whether the relationship between our senses and reality is mediated or unmediated). The author is principally concerned with examining the nature of the intentional objects of image-consciousness and inquiring whether the phenomenological presence of things in our experience can be accounted for through a mediating term that is not a mental picture. Like Kamber, McCulloch argues that Sartre is a direct realist but to demonstrate this he abandons his analysis of the two books on imagination and looks for proof of Sartre’s realism in Being and Nothingness. Roxanne Clair Farrar’s Sartrean Dialectics: a Method for Critical Discourse on Aesthetic Experience sets out to modify Sartre’s progressive-regressive method for critical discourse on aesthetic experience. Although Farrar discusses Sartre’s critical discourse on aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects, she does not explore the place of the image in Sartre’s ontology but remains mostly concerned with the use of the dialectical method as a pedagogical tool in art history. The HypoCritical Imagination: between Kant and Levinas, by John Llewelyn, provides a good example of the trend toward the ontologization of the image I attempt to trace in this book. Llewelyn analyzes Kant’s concept of the imagination with the intention of demonstrating its inherently ethical nature. The imagination, argues Llewelyn, is not merely an empirical faculty for it precedes the opposition between sensibility and understanding: in other words, it is hypoCritical. Insisting on a distinction between ‘imaging’ and ‘imagining’, Llewelyn proposes that there are ‘degrees’ of imagination and that the imagination is at work in even the most elemental thoughts. He does consider several post-Kantian responses to, and reinterpretations of, Kantian aesthetic—Heidegger, Schelling, Michel Henry, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Levinas—but

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does not address Lyotard’s critique of the Kantian sublime, which is my main concern in the chapter on Lyotard. Since most of the essays in Judging Lyotard, edited by Andrew Benjamin, examine Lyotard’s ideas of justice and politics, they approach his thought through an interpretation of the différend. The only essay in the collection that deals with the issues I discuss in my chapter on Lyotard and Kant is Paul Crowther’s “Les Immatériaux and the Postmodern Sublime,” which comments on an exhibition organized by Lyotard at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985. However, Crowther’s understanding of the postmodern sublime deviates significantly from my own reading of Lyotard: Crowther defines the sublime not as a sensation of being/time, but as the aesthetic experience of infinite analyzability, an appreciation of the complexity lying underneath the surface of everyday reality. Because James Williams introduces Lyotard: towards a Postmodern Philosophy as a rethinking of the political in Lyotard’s philosophy, it is only natural that he examines the image only in terms of its relationship to the différend (which, in the case of Lyotard, is always approached through the sublime as the presentation of the unpresentable). Williams addresses the problem of the sublime by explicating the difference between presentation and situation or, in political terms, the difference between something that “demands our attention but which remains beyond representation and understanding” (1988: 88) and something that provokes a definite reaction. He does not approach the feeling of the sublime from the perspective of aesthetics but regards it exclusively as a symptom of, as well as a testimony to, the incommensurability of opposing discourses or phrase universes. Afterwords: Essays in Memory of Jean-Francois Lyotard, edited by Robert Harvey, includes one essay specifically devoted to the postmodern sublime—Serge Trottein’s “The Beauty of the Postmodern Sublime.” However, in opposition to Trottein’s claim that Lyotard succeeds in avoiding the reduction of the sublime to the ethical or the religious, that he defines the postmodern sublime as a beautiful sublime, I argue that, rather than saving the aesthetic of the beautiful, Lyotard’s rethinking of the Kantian sublime ends up sacrificing the beautiful to a higher, proto-ethical demand. In his book Jean-Francois Lyotard Stuart Sim provides the usual survey of Lyotard’s corpus, treating Lyotard as an exemplary figure representative of postmodernism’s “loss of faith in an entire cultural tradition” (1996: xiv). One of the chapters discusses the sublime but mostly with refer-

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ence to Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime rather than The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Like James Williams, Sim considers the sublime as a feeling continually bearing witness to différends and to the failure of any project of totalization. In “The Sublime, Ontologically Speaking” Rodolphe Gasché also defines the sublime—what he calls “a feeling of sublime stupor” (2001: 128)—in terms of the différend, assigning to it the task of ‘saving the honor of thinking’. None of the more recent books on Baudrillard focus specifically on the image in Baudrillard’s work; instead they discuss the more general effect the revolution of telecommunication has had on the idea of the real. Mike Gane’s Jean Baudrillard: in Radical Uncertainty provides a critical overview of concepts central to Baudrillard’s work: violence and war, art and photography, the technological revolution, the transformation of sex and gender, Baudrillard’s changing attitude toward simulation (initially conceived as a challenge to modern culture but later absorbed by it), the opposition between a higher order of symbolic exchange and the current precession of simulacra, the four orders of simulacra (mass production, hyperreality, the fractal and the viral). Gane is mostly concerned with explicating Baudrillard’s argument that postmodern reality has become inseparable from its own image, while I draw attention to an opposite movement, what I call the de-aesthetization of the image: even as the real has become indistinguishable from its image, the image as such has lost its traditional aesthetic value, the value of representation, and has acquired a new destiny, that of presenting, of making present i.e., its aesthetic value has been supplanted by its ontological value. The real and the image, I argue, have thus mutually devoured each other: the real has come to resemble its image (the real has lost its reality) and the image has come to denote the sheer presence of things (the image has lost its representational value). Rex Butler’s Jean Baudrillard: the Defense of the Real demonstrates that while Baudrillard’s earlier works were more empirical and scientific his later works have become increasingly pataphysical and self-referential. His philosophy has become its own commentary, a self-enclosed system with its own preferred metaphors, which no longer point to something in the real world because they have been transformed into meta-objects. The greater part of Gary Genosko’s McLuhan and Baudrillard: the Masters of Implosion is devoted to a discussion of McLuhan, but parts of the book deal with Baudrillard’s indebtedness to McLuhan and, conversely, with the significance of Baudrillard for

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what Genosko calls ‘the McLuhan Renaissance’. The most valuable aspect of Genosko’s project is his attempt to understand to what extent Baudrillard’s work resists consumer capitalism and to what extent it has been appropriated by it. As far as I know there have been no significant studies relating Deleuze’s writings on cinema to Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s work on the image. Although Deleuze’s two volumes of Cinema are important theoretical tools in Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Patricia Pisters, the major thrust of the essays in this collection is not so much the aesthetics or philosophy of the image but rather the question of the implications of Deleuze’s critique of representation for political cinema. The articles collected in Deleuze and Philosophy: the Difference Engineer, edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, cover already familiar ground: the monstrosity of thought, machinic thinking, Deleuze’s conceptual empiricism, the notion of deterritorialization, the connections between Kant and Deleuze, Spinoza and Deleuze, Nietzsche and Deleuze; however, Deleuze’s writings on cinema are left out. Alain Badiou’s controversial Deleuze: the Clamor of Being stands fairly close to my own reading of Deleuze as a metaphysician or an involuntary Platonist. However, while Badiou demonstrates this through an analysis of Deleuze’s idea of the multiplicity and univocity of being, I am more concerned with Deleuze’s work on cinema as an attempt to overcome subjectivity or, as he puts it, to ‘get rid of ourselves’. Organization The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter one examines Bergson’s image ontology, articulated in Matter and Memory, focusing on the notion of ‘the impersonal’, which occupies a central place in the metaphysics of immanence. Chapter two follows Sartre’s critique of Bergson, in Imagination and The Psychology of Imagination, with the intention of foregrounding Sartre’s ‘disgust’ with subjectivity and his (indirect) complicity with the revival of metaphysics as the study of impersonal forces such as ‘image-consciousness’. Chapter three examines the postmodern idea of the sublime in order to show how the image has been stripped of its aesthetic attributes and burdened with philosophical responsibility and significance. I draw attention to the ontologization of the image—the re-conceptualization of the image as an event—through an analysis of Lyotard’s critique of Kant in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Chapter four explores the postmodern transformations of the

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Bergsonian concepts of the virtual and the impersonal, especially with reference to, and from the point of view of, Baudrillard’s ideas of the fatal and the hyperreal. Chapter five draws attention to Deleuze’s conflation of aesthetics with ontology in his two books on cinema, both of which, I argue, are mostly concerned with what the film image can do for thinking rather than with the specifically filmic (aesthetic) qualities of the image. Finally, chapter six relates the notion of the impersonal to the phenomenon of imaginary time in contemporary cinema.

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Bergson’s Matter-Image: The Degradation of the Impersonal

Bergson and the problem of dualism In Matter and Memory the concept of the image fulfills a mediating function analogous to that of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in relation to the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason: Bergson uses the concept of the image to ‘solve’ the mind-body (and mind/reality) problem. Bergson’s ‘solution’, whose intricacies and pitfalls I will examine in the following pages, consists in taking the concept of the image out of its traditional philosophical framework (theories of representation) and using it as the basic building block of an ‘image ontology’ which conceives the material world as ‘an aggregate of images’ and posits a mental or spiritual realm (serendipitously) made up of the same ‘stuff’, that is, of images ‘dissociated’ from a vast, nebulous abstraction Bergson calls, with a touch of near-cosmic mysticism and not so hidden neo-Platonism—‘Pure Memory.’ Bergson’s thinking proceeds through a continuous fragmentation and multiplication of an initial set of dichotomies and distinctions (the usual suspects: mind, body, matter, reality etc.) into finer, increasingly nuanced and often confusing distinctions—between matter-images, perception-images and memory-images, between habit-memory and pure memory, between conscious perception and unconscious perception—with a view to rethinking ‘matter’ and ‘mind’ not as opposites external to each other but as continually sliding toward, or approximating, each other. Bergson’s eccentric rhetoric of ‘complexification’, ‘dissociation’, ‘dilation’ and ‘contraction’—meant to reduce the difference between mind and matter to one of rhythm or speed, for it is only memory i.e. time that separates the two, according to Bergson—is, surprisingly, complemented by another, more ‘orthodox’, dualistic rhetoric, which reduces the body to a sort of an ‘impurity’, distraction or obfuscation within the realm of Pure Memory (mind). As we shall see, and contrary to the dominant

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view of Bergson as a philosopher of embodiment, he often dismisses the body as too enmeshed in the immediate demands of the present, treating it as little more than an automat, an obstacle to the free propagation of Pure Memory, which towers above the body as some sort of a neotranscendental Ego, occasionally becoming embodied (or, as Bergson puts it, ‘degraded’). For Bergson, our richest experiences (déjà vu being an exemplary one) are those that seek to go beyond what he calls ‘the human turn’, dissolving us back into a primordial, impersonal state that ontologically precedes (and exceeds in ‘value’) our particular embodied existence. His repeated references to Pure Memory, to its frustration by the banal or vulgar demands of perception, or to its ‘degradation’ into memory-images, along with his privileging of phenomena like déjà vu, which take us out of our bodies and out of the immediate present, tapping instead into the impersonal, transcendental realm of Pure Memory, cannot but resurrect the very metaphysical ghosts Bergson was supposed to have set to rest. The significance of Bergson is taken almost at face value today: Eric Matthews goes as far as to argue that in terms of its emphasis on embodiment, its critique of rationality conceived within a scientific model, and its acknowledgement of time and becoming, twentieth-century French philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Bergson” (1996: 13). The present enthusiastic reception of Bergson is perhaps easy to understand given his bold claim that he had solved the fundamental problem philosophers at the turn of the twentieth century inherited from the grand philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel, the problem of the relationship between mind and matter, consciousness and reality. The upshot of Hegel’s metaphysics was the self-recognition Spirit attained through alienating itself in its ‘other’—Nature—and returning to itself as the Absolute resurrected from its self-negation in the material world. The privileged term in this claustrophobic system—reconciliation—presupposed the dialectical opposition between Spirit and Nature, subject and object, mind and matter. Since Hegel defined the material world as Spirit in its otherness, ‘a little death’ of the Spirit which, however, Spirit was bound to overcome, the material world could not but be reduced to a mere moment in the uncompromising dialectic of Spirit, a moment whose necessity lied merely in its annihilation. Kant’s attempt to distinguish clearly between the different faculties of the mind as well as to preserve the privileged status of Reason and of consciousness, along with Hegel’s insistence on maintaining the opposition between Spirit and

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Nature, were challenged by Nietzsche, whose critique of the mechanistic interpretation of the world and of the hypostases of metaphysics—substance, attribute, presence, truth, subject, object, action, quality, space, time, cause/effect—centered around two major prejudices: the concept of motion inherent in the linguistic habit of attributing a doer to every deed, and the concept of substance or unity derived from our psychical experience (Nietzsche 1967: 338). In Appearance and Reality: a Metaphysical Essay (1930) F.H. Bradley set out to show how appearance, which he found to be selfcontradictory, was related to absolute reality, whose distinguishing mark was self-consistency. Every kind of thinking about the world, Bradley observed, is relational and is therefore bound to grant us only appearances. He examined space, time, self, activity, things, and nature, declaring them all mere appearances because they contained indissoluble self-discrepancies. The contradictory character of space and time, for instance, lied in the irreconcilability of relation and quality: [S]pace is endless, while an end is essential to its being. Space cannot come to a final limit, either within itself or on the outside. And yet, so long as it remains something passing away, internally or beyond itself, it is not space at all. […] Space is a relation—which it cannot be; it is a quality or substance—which again it cannot be. (1930: 31)

Time posed the same problem of reconciling diversity and unity: If you take time as a relation between units without duration, then the whole time has no duration, and is not time at all. But, if you give duration to the whole time, then at once the units themselves are found to possess it, and they thus cease to be units. Time in fact is ‘before’ and ‘after’ in one; and without this diversity it is not time. But these differences cannot be asserted of the unity. …The relation is not a unity, and yet the terms are nonentities, if left apart. (33-34)

Finally, a similar inconsistency plagued things: A thing is a thing...by being what it was. And it does not appear how this relation of sameness can be real. It is a relation connecting the past with the present, and this connection is evidently vital to the thing. But, if so, the thing has become... the relation of passages in its own history. And if we assert that the thing is this inclusive relation, which transcends any given time, surely we have allowed that

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Rejecting the doctrine of the thing-in-itself, which rendered appearances and reality two absolutely separate realms, Bradley insisted that “[t]he bewildering mass of phenomenal diversity must...somehow be at unity and self-consistent; for it cannot be elsewhere than in reality, and reality excludes discord” (123). In opposition to Bradley’s ultra-rationalist equation of truth with consistency, William James argued that pure experience consists of different bits functioning as one another’s substitutes or supplements. Experience is neither spiritual nor material: [T]here is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and...we call that stuff ‘pure experience’. […] Experience…has no... inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of substraction, but by way of addition. […] Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience [whether perceptual or conceptual], taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ‘consciousness’; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective ‘content’. In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once. (James 1976: 4-7 my italics)

Since pure experience is “only virtually or potentially either object or subject [but is rather a] plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that” (13), the distinction between consciousness and matter, between subject and object, is not ontological; it is simply a quality (a quid) we attribute to the sheer quod of existence. While James was trying to rescue pure experience from the intellect, others condemned the philosophy of intuition as a form of aphasia, an “intellectual anaesthesia” (Benda 1929: 131). Philosophers of intuition, Benda claimed, refused “to discriminate between intelligence and dry, unimaginative reasoning, in order to bring the former into disrepute” (14). The ‘intellectual aphasiac’ Benda had in mind was Henri Bergson, whose philosophy of intuition had already achieved an alarming popularity. In her book The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism, Karin Stephen, a student of Bergson, attributed his

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popularity to the fact that his philosophy “[gave] expression to a feeling which is very widespread at the present time, a distrust of systems, theories, logical constructions, the assumption of premisses and then the acceptance of everything that follows logically from them” (1922: 10-11). However, Bergson’s ideas were not received by his contemporaries with admiration only: one need only look at Hugh Elliot’s book bearing the suggestive title Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson. In the first paragraph of the Preface, written by Sir Ray Lancaster, we read: [Bergson] has been introduced to us as a ‘great French philosopher.’ To those who in a thoroughgoing way occupy themselves in collecting and comparing and classifying all the absurdities which have been put forward as ‘metaphysics’ or ‘metaphysical speculation’ since the days of Aristotle, this latest effusion has, no doubt, a kind of interest such as a collector may take in a curious species of beetle. To the student of the aberrations and monstrosities of the mind of man, M. Bergson’s works will always be documents of value. But it is an injustice as well as inaccuracy to speak of their author as ‘great,’ or ‘French,’ or a ‘philosopher’. (Elliot 1912: vii-viii)

Sir Lancaster considers it “a matter of urgency that [Bergson’s] illusions and perversions…be exposed with uncompromising frankness,” warning his audience of the dangerous seductiveness of Bergson’s “admirable facility of diction”(1912: xvi). Throughout the book Elliot, too, warns the reader of the danger of Bergson’s stylistic perfection disguised as a series of unsound, “metaphysical curiosities” or “metaphysical verbiage,” of which no proof is ever given (5). Elliot’s critique is, more often than not, based on a rather obvious misinterpretation of Bergson’s fundamental ideas, including the controversial idea that matter consists of images. Elliot criticizes Bergson for starting his discussion “not from matter, as is always done in physical science, but from spiritual ‘images’” (38) despite the fact that for Bergson the image is not at all a “spiritual” representation. Elliot’s literal reading of Bergson, coupled with his naïve, pigheaded enthusiasm, makes for an entertaining read. For example, he questions the validity of many of Bergson’s metaphors, such as the famous one comparing duration to a snowball. Bergson fails to demonstrate, Elliot objects, how time is similar to snow, which renders his analogy false. This does not stop Elliot from trying to pass off an even more unjustifiable (though admit-

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tedly more amusing) analogy between man and a cabbage, both of which he regards as “artificial machines” (178). Similarly, he misinterprets Bergson’s idea of perception as originating in matter rather than being a subjective experience of the perceiver. He asserts that a perception may arise even without an object, as in the case of hallucination and, since he is always concerned with facts rather than with mere speculations, he supports his argument with rigorous scientific experiments, including the following one: “If we clout the subject over the head, the object (for him) promptly vanishes. If we fill the subject with whiskey, the object appears in duplicate” (95). Despite its viciousness, Elliot’s passionate critique of Bergson remains, at times, irresistibly droll as when, in response to Bergson’s argument for the infinity of time, Elliot, full of well-calculated pomp, proposes to solve the following problem: “Given the infinity of space, Required to prove that Bergson does not exist. […] Bergson cannot exist: because the present is a finite period in the midst of infinity: hence it is infinity to one against his present existence: therefore he does not exist” (95). In general, Elliot finds Bergson’s philosophy misguided, for instead of examining epistemological questions it throws itself in a futile ontological investigation that succeeds only in conjuring up “the demons of metaphysics”(149). In 1914 Bertrand Russell produced The Philosophy of Bergson in which he picked up the already familiar tune of warning the public against the dangerous seductiveness of Bergson’s poetic rather than properly philosophical style. Bergson, writes Russell, does not give reasons for his opinions, but relies on their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an excellent style. Like the advertisers of Oxo, he relies upon picturesque and varied statements, and an apparent explanation of many obscure facts. Analogies and similes, especially, form a very large part of the whole process by which he recommends his views to the reader. (1914: 11)1

Contemporary critics, however, often defend Bergson against such accusations of conceptual laziness by pointing out that a philosophy of change is bound to be ‘vague’ because philosophy itself is part of the constantly changing world it describes. Thus, Mullarkey considers Bergson’s philosophy as a metaphilosophy, according to which “in a creative universe with no static foundations, there will never be a first philosophy for anything or anyone to claim. In other words, if everything is changing, then this must be true for philosophy as well”

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(2000: 4). In order for a philosophy to stay vital “a certain inconsistency, perpetual contradiction, or, if you prefer, ‘casualness’” (7) might be actually required. If philosophy is the creation of new concepts (as Deleuze argues in What Is Philosophy?) then we should not to be critical of the vagueness and confusion surrounding most of Bergson’s concepts such as ‘duration’ or ‘pure memory’. It seems to me necessary, however, that we draw a distinction between the way in which concepts are used in philosophy (something we might call ‘philosophical style’) and the meaning of those concepts. Mullarkey’s remarks concern the former, without necessarily saying anything about the import of concepts such as Pure Memory, arguably one of the fuzziest terms in Matter and Memory. As will become increasingly clear in the following pages, I read Bergson’s terminology as evidence of the fact that his philosophy revives metaphysical thought rather than undermining it. Not surprisingly, Russell’s critique focuses on Bergson’s radical conception of matter as image, which, according to Russell, betrays Bergson’s strong visual bias: Bergson is a strong visualizer, whose thought is always conducted by means of visual images. Many things which he declares to be necessities of all thought are, I believe, characteristics of visualizers, and would not be true of those who think by means of auditory images. He always exalts the sense of sight at the expense of the other senses, and his views on space would seem to be largely determined by this fact. (1914: 9-10)

However, in Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1993) Mark Antliff argues that Bergson privileges hearing over the sense of sight: when searching for the best way to explain duration, for example, Bergson compares it to a melody and even establishes a hierarchy of the arts, in which music is privileged over the plastic arts. Bergson consistently associates vision with the Cartesian quantification of space and time, both of which he criticizes (Antliff 1993: 171). Russell’s critique is based on a number of rather crude misinterpretations of Bergson’s thought. For example, Russell seems confused by the relationship Bergson posits between the past and the present, according to which the past is only idea, the present is ideo-motor or, put differently, the past, in the form of memory-images, constantly tries to ‘insert’ itself in the present. Russell objects to Bergson’s idea of duration as the automatic preservation of the past in the present on the grounds that it

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is based on the naïve confusion between the past and its recollection, which always takes place in the present: [W]hen Bergson speaks of the past, he does not mean the past, but our present memory of the past. […] The whole of Bergson’s theory of duration and time rests throughout on the elementary confusion between the present occurrence of a recollection and the past occurrence which is recollected. […] As it is, what Bergson gives is an account of the difference between perception and recollection—both present facts—and what he believes himself to have given is an account of the difference between the present and the past. (Russell 1914: 21)

This confusion, Russell explains, is an example of a more general tendency in Bergson to confuse an act of knowing with that which is known: In memory, the act of knowing is in the present, whereas what is known is in the past; thus by confusing them the distinction between past and present is blurred. In perception, the act of knowing is mental, whereas what is known is (at least in one sense) physical or material; thus by confusing the two, the distinction between mind and matter is blurred. (21-22)

The idea of duration is also based on the confusion of the act of knowing and the object of knowledge, or the act of remembering and what is remembered: “[I]t becomes necessary for Bergson to identify remembering with what is remembered, and therefore to say that whatever is remembered still endures”(35). However, as we shall see, Bergson insists on distinguishing clearly between remembering (involuntary or spontaneous memory) and what is remembered (the memory-image).2 Further, Russell rejects Bergson’s disparaging idea of the intellect as responsible for the spatialization of time, on the grounds that Bergson’s argument is based, once again, on his personal visual bias: Hence all abstract ideas involve space; and therefore logic, which uses abstract ideas, is an offshoot of geometry, and the whole of the intellect depends upon a supposed habit of picturing things side by side in space. This conclusion, upon which Bergson’s whole condemnation of the intellect rests, is based...upon a personal idiosyncrasy mistaken for a necessity of thought, I mean the idiosyncrasy of visualizing successions as spread out on a line. (16)

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This claim is not completely ungrounded: indeed, Bergson’s critique of abstract thought proceeds from the assumption that all abstract ideas are necessarily spatial images. Although Bergson himself insisted that his theory of intuition was not meant to discredit the power of the intellect, Russell obviously felt that this was precisely what Bergson was doing. If Russell’s critique of Bergson is sarcastic and at times rather malignant, it is at least passionate enough to suggest that even though he does not agree with Bergson, at least he finds his ideas new and, hence, potentially threatening. On the other hand, after tracing Bergson’s supposedly radical ideas back to German romantic idealism and French spiritualism, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, the author of Roots of Bergson’s Philosophy insists that “despite the sudden glimmering in Bergson’s mind of the idea of duration [as well as his idea of intuition] one Auvergnian afternoon, it was no cataclysmic insight for French philosophy” (1943: 43). In the final chapter entitled “Is Bergson original?” Scharfstein ‘generously’ forgives Bergson for not having had a “great share in originating any of the points he considered focal, except perhaps in Matter and Memory” and concludes that Bergson’s ‘originality’ consisted in his gift for synthesizing other people’s theories, which is why “he stands out chiefly as a summary and a symbol”(138). A symbol of what? Not of the reconciliation of matter and mind, as we shall see. Bergson’s philosophy remains fundamentally dualistic or at least split between monism and dualism: it is “strongly monistic, if one thinks of its source in the elán vital. Yet it is also strongly dualistic, when one thinks of [the] conflict between matter and spirit” (Burwick and Douglas 1992: 4).3 As subtle as Bergson wants to make the material world, it always remains opposed to the lightness, absolute spontaneity and freedom of the elán vital. On the other hand, Deleuze argues that Bergson’s dualism is only apparent, and that in the final analysis differences in kind, which Bergson distinguishes from differences in degree, are brought together in a higher synthesis. Deleuze bases his argument on the complementarity of what he calls ‘the line of subjectivity’ and ‘the line of objectivity’ in Bergson’s philosophy. Bergsonian perception, he explains, is essentially impersonal: “We perceive things where they are, perception puts us at once into matter, is impersonal, and coincides with the perceived object” (1991: 25). What interests us, and hence what determines our perception, is exactly what fills up the interval between outside stimulation and our response to it. This interval is precisely the line of subjectivity, which includes affectivity, recollection-memory and

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contraction-memory. The line of subjectivity is that of memory, “which puts us at once into the mind,” whereas the line of objectivity is that of perception, “which puts us at once into matter” (26). At first Deleuze argues that these two ‘lines’ or ‘tendencies’ differ in kind; however, by the end of Bergsonism he shifts gears and suggests that all differences in kind fall on the side of the line of subjectivity or memory, while all differences in degree fall on the side of perception or matter. This allows him to explain how Bergson’s apparent dualism turns back on itself and becomes a monism. Since the difference between perception/matter and memory/mind is a difference in kind, it falls on the side of subjectivity: the line of objectivity (matter, perception) is part of the line of subjectivity, and extensity/matter is not simply exterior to duration but participates in it. Bergson discovers differences in kind only in the conditions of experience, in the virtual tendencies of pure perception and pure memory. By arguing that dualism is eventually overcome and returned to monism, Deleuze implies that Bergson brings back the differences in kind he has discovered in actuality to a common virtual point where these differences converge: First, [the expression ‘beyond the turn’] denotes the moment when the lines, setting out from an uncertain common point given in experience, diverge increasingly according to the differences in kind. Then, it denotes another moment when these lines converge again to give us this time the virtual image or the distinct reason of the common point. Turn and return. Dualism is therefore only a moment, which must lead to the re-formation of a monism. (1991: 29)

This opens up the question whether differences in kind are actual while those of degree virtual. Deleuze’s reading of Bergson suggests that differences in kind constitute a problem, whose solution lies precisely in showing how these differences are mediated into a virtual difference in degree. Bergson first states the problem of memory, which implies “a true difference in kind between soul and body, spirit and matter” but, Deleuze continues, we can only reach a solution to the problem by narrowing: When we attain the original point at which the two divergent directions converge again, the precise point at which recollection inserts itself into perception, the virtual point that is like the reflection and the reason of the departure point. (30)

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Deleuze implies that the true difference in kind between matter and spirit is—at some original, virtual point—a difference in degree (a convergence or an insertion of memory into matter). Conversely, he could be suggesting that at this original point differences in kind converge with differences in degree. However, such a reading seems unlikely since Deleuze himself points out that for Bergson there is a difference in kind between “duration, which ‘tends’ for its part to take on or bear all the differences in kind (because it is endowed with the power of qualitatively varying with itself) and “space, which never presents anything but differences of degree”(31). However, this still leaves us with the question whether a difference in kind between differences in kind, on one hand, and differences in degree, on the other hand, can be overcome i.e., whether duration and space can be reconciled. Ultimately, if Bergson’s philosophy overcomes dualism it is because Bergson declares the only true difference, difference in kind, virtual. He does not posit a clear distinction between matter and duration, because there is no pure space/matter and no pure duration: matter “is never expanded enough to be pure space, to stop having the minimum of contraction through which it participates in duration, through which it is part of duration” but, on the other hand, “duration is never contracted enough to be independent of the internal matter where it operates, and of the extension which it comes to contract (88). Thus, differences in kind between matter and mind or space and time/duration are preserved only on the level of pure memory vs pure matter i.e., only on the level of virtuality; difference in kind is virtual whereas actual difference is one of degree. Bergson’s strategy for overcoming dualism relies on the distinction between the actual and the virtual, or between actual differences (in degree) and virtual differences (in kind). Deleuze’s conclusion is based on the assumption that the virtual nature of difference in a way neutralizes it. However, before any conclusions are drawn it is important to keep in mind that in Bergson’s philosophy the virtual is always privileged over the actual. If virtual difference is indeed privileged over actual difference, then the dualistic tendency in Bergson’s philosophy outweighs the monistic one. Bergson creates the impression that he has overcome dualism by cleverly manipulating his terms. Thus, he replaces the old opposition of body and consciousness by placing consciousness on the side of the body and action (Bergson 1946: 63) and contrasting these two with memory i.e., he merely introduces a ‘new’ category (memory), to which

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he attributes the same qualities traditionally attributed to consciousness. Memory, like consciousness, is defined as “the indetermination of our will” (65). It is not that consciousness contains two kinds of memories (habit and recollection), but consciousness exists on several planes of memory, “from the ‘dream plane’, the most extensive of all, upon which it is spread out as on the base of a pyramid, up to the point comparable to the peak, where memory is no more than the perception of the actual with nascent actions which prolong it” (Deleuze 1991: 88-89). Just as consciousness ‘adopts’ the body, memory too ‘adopts’ consciousness, actualizing itself on two different planes. Matter: an aggregate of images In Matter and Memory the notion of the Impersonal (Pure Memory), the rhetoric of ‘incarnation’ (Bergson speaks of the mind as existing on two planes, the plane of action and the plane of dream, or memory, without ever explaining what motivates the mind to choose between these two planes i.e. how pure memory becomes ‘embodied’), and the denigration of the visual (spatial) nature of the image, demonstrate the essentially metaphysical, dualistic bent of Bergson’s philosophy. What makes this book so intriguing is Bergson’s unorthodox use of the concept of the image. Instead of placing the image on the side of representation or signification—on the side of subjectivity or mind—Bergson places it on the side of matter, defining matter itself as “an aggregate of images.” ‘Image’—or, as he also calls it, ‘pure perception’—refers to the instantaneous presence of things to one another, i.e. to pure presence deprived of memory. To the extent that images are outside one another, pure perception is always already outside us rather than something we project outside ourselves: “[P]ure perception, which is the lowest degree of mind—mind without memory—is really part of matter, as we understand matter”(Bergson 1991: 222). ‘Aggregate of images’ refers to the inhuman state of the world from which the human perspective has been excised, the mode of existence of things before the birth of consciousness, which relativizes the world by introducing the categories of space and time: “[B]y ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’”(9). Perception results from the difference between our duration and the durations of other things4: we are able to perceive a table as a solid object only because our memory condenses

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the vibrations that make up that table into a manageable, solid thing. Matter, and the perception of matter, depends on this difference between the duration of the perceiver and that of the perceived object. Bergson conceives perception in a somewhat mechanistic fashion: every object ‘radiates’ perception-images, which it sends towards the mind, while the mind ‘radiates’ memory-images, which go out to meet the perception-images and lie ‘over’ them. While he seems to believe that by using the same word—‘image’—to refer to both matter (perception-image) and mind (memory-image) he has bridged the gap between them, Bergson only manages to disguise it, and that rather poorly. To his credit, he does acknowledge that perception is never pure but always already filled with memory-images i.e. it is not merely the immediate response of sense-organs to external stimuli but a sort of interpretation of the present by the past: “Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories and, inversely, a memory…only becomes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips” (67). There is nothing instantaneous for us since even what seems to be a rapid perception has a certain duration or depth. This duration is what distinguishes our perception of matter from matter itself, “so that our successive perceptions are never the real moments of things, as we have hitherto supposed, but are moments of our consciousness” (69). However, despite the impossibility of instantaneous perceptions, memory’s work consists namely in making things appear to us immediately, instantaneously, by condensing the infinite number of vibrations constituting a thing into a duration that is more manageable for our perception: The qualitative heterogeneity of our successive perceptions of the universe results from the fact that each, in itself, extends over a certain depth of duration and that memory condenses in each an enormous multiplicity of vibrations which appear to us all at once, although they are successive. If we were only to divide, ideally, this undivided depth of time, to distinguish in it the necessary multiplicity of moments, in a word, to eliminate all memory, we should pass thereby from perception to matter, from the subject to the object. (70)

It seems that only habit-memory distinguishes mind from matter, rather than spontaneous recollection, which is the only true memory: after all, Bergson argues above that it would be enough to eliminate habitmemory, which serves perception, in order to pass from mind to matter. But habit-memory is defined exclusively in terms of action, whereas

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real memory is a representation (80-81). It makes no sense to claim that habit memory is what distinguishes mind from matter given that action is on the side of perception and perception is ‘in’ matter, not ‘in’ us; in fact, habit-memory is what brings us closest to matter. This is just one example of a prevalent tendency in Bergson’s work to dissolve the very differences he supposedly wants to keep, such as, for example, the difference between perception and memory. The idea of memory “contract[ing] into a single intuition many moments of duration” (73) rests upon the assumption that all matter has already been perceived and now memory just ‘steps in’ to condense the succession of infinite vibrations constituting pure perception. But if pure perception is identical with matter, as Bergson suggests on more than one occasion, memory cannot be viewed as something superadded to perception but as perception itself. What is the point of insisting that there is a difference in kind, not in degree, between our perception and our memory, if it has already been established that there is no pure perception (pure perception is identical with matter) and that our perception is always the work of memory? The argument that memory differs from perception in kind, not in degree, merely restates the obvious: mind (which is defined as perception interlaced with memory) differs from matter (which is defined as pure perception). Bergson ‘proves’ that mind differs from matter by showing that memory (mind) differs from perception (matter) i.e., he uses as ‘proof’ precisely that which he has set out to prove. Because he does not make explicit his secret division of perception into conscious perception (mind) on one hand, and pure perception (matter) on the other hand, Bergson is able to argue that there is a difference in kind, not in degree, between mind and matter, between conscious and unconscious perception, and that difference consists in the complication of conscious perception (whose ‘dissociation’ from pure perception he never explains) by memory. In this way, mind remains linked to matter through perception even as it keeps its freedom and autonomy through memory. Bergson has created for himself the convenient opportunity to argue that mind differs from matter in degree and in kind at the same time: in terms of perception, it differs from matter in degree, but in terms of memory it differs from matter in kind. But even the second difference is not always absolute and Bergson occasionally allows the possibility to think matter as a presentiment or a foreshadowing of memory:

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We may go further: memory does not intervene as a function of which matter has no presentiment and which it does not imitate in its own way. If matter does not remember the past, it is because it repeats the past unceasingly, because, subject to necessity, it unfolds a series of moments of which each is the equivalent of the preceding moment and may be deduced from it: thus its past is truly given in its present. […] Thus…it is necessary…that the past should be acted by matter, imagined by mind. (1991: 222-223 my italics)

As we shall see in chapter two, the illusion of immanence—the deduction of consciousness from matter—is precisely the target of Sartre’s critique of Bergson. Here we can note Bergson’s conflation of conscious perception with pure perception. Pure perception is “a perception which exists in theory rather than in fact and would be possessed by a being placed where I am, living as I live, but absorbed in the present and capable, by giving up every form of memory, of obtaining a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous” (1991: 34). On the other hand, conscious perception is an act of narrowing down or a selection, whereby a thing is selected (‘cut out’) from the network of things/images in which it is embedded. Conscious perception does not present a skewed view of the thing: we merely see only one side of the thing, which comes forth as a figure against the ground of the thing’s invisible connections to other things. Perception does not distort its object but it does not exhaust it either: there is a certain infinity remaining in the finite phenomenon, an infinity which can be accessed not through a more sophisticated perception but through involuntary memory, which releases the virtuality or potency in the phenomenon, the hidden interconnections holding together “the aggregate of images.” By defining matter as “an aggregate of images” Bergson essentially leaves himself a loophole, which allows him to avoid explaining the origin of consciousness, because once the “aggregate of images” has been assumed, consciousness has been posited as already inherent in matter: an image may be without being perceived, it may be present without being represented (35). That for Bergson ‘consciousness’ is identical with ‘conscious perception’ (which, once again, takes place ‘in’ matter, rather than being projected by the mind onto matter) becomes clear from his identification of visual impotence—the lack of visual perception—with unconsciousness (44). Conscious perception—i.e. consciousness—differs from matter as the part differs from the whole: consciousness is produced by a process of diminution or dissociation from a larger whole

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(matter), which it already ‘inhabits’. In other words, representation is not conceived in terms of projection (i.e. addition) but in terms of immanence or virtuality (i.e. detraction). Despite Bergson’s ‘imagistic’ redefinition of matter, matter remains thing-like: it is no accident that he talks of the dissociation of conscious perception from matter as the transformation of a thing into a picture. In spite of everything he says, he continues to distinguish, if only implicitly, ‘thing’ from ‘image’: “Above all, how are we to imagine a relation between a thing and its image, between matter and thought?” (38 my italics). Occasionally he even uses different terms to designate each, referring to perception as an image and to matter as “a mere image” (38). His definition of matter eventually betrays its tautological nature: matter consists of mere images, while consciousness (or conscious perception) ‘consists’ of images dissociated from these mere images. Some of the ambiguities and inconsistencies in Bergson’s account of the relationship between matter and mind could, perhaps, be attributed to his curious interpretation of what, at the end of Mind-Energy (1920), he calls the two ‘notation systems’ i.e. idealism and realism: For the idealist, there is nothing in reality over and above what appears to his consciousness or to consciousness in general. It would be absurd to speak of a property of matter which could not be represented in idea. There is no virtuality or, at least, nothing definitely virtual; whatever exists is actual or could become so. Idealism is, then, a notation-system which implies that everything essential in matter is displayed or displayable in the idea which we have of it, and that the real world is articulated in the very same way as it is presented in idea. […] When realism affirms that matter exists independently of the idea, the meaning is that beneath our idea of matter there is an inaccessible cause of that idea, that behind perception, which is actual, there are hidden powers and virtualities; in short, realism assumes that the divisions and articulations visible in our perception are purely relative to our manner of perceiving. (1920: 235)

Bergson’s version of realism appears more like a disguised form of idealism: for the realist, he says, the material world does not coincide with our idea of it since reality is virtual i.e. relative to the subject’s perception of it. On the other hand, according to his understanding of idealism, the fact that there is nothing virtual about matter means that matter is equivalent to our idea of it. This notion of idealism is quite different from the more common view of idealism as a philosophy that

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regards the world as merely a subjective idea. Bergson’s version of idealism asserts, in the manner we usually associate with realism, the world’s objective reality independent of consciousness: reality coincides perfectly with our idea (image) of it. Whereas for the typical idealist the identification of a thing with its idea (image) makes the material reality of the thing doubtful, for Bergson it actually guarantees it, because to identify a thing with its idea is to identify it with its articulation in space (1920: 236). He elaborates on this distinction between idealism and realism by defending Berkeley’s definition of things as ideas and thus, indirectly, trying to justify his own definition of things as images: The word ‘idea’ ordinarily indicates an existence of this kind, I mean to say a completely realized existence, whose being is indistinguishable from its seeming, while the word ‘thing’ makes us think of a reality which would be at the same time a reservoir; that is why Berkeley prefers to call bodies ideas rather than things. (137)

For Bergson, to say that the world is made of ideas—or images, for that matter—is to say that it is absolutely knowable, that it corresponds exactly to our idea of it. In accordance with his belief that the mind exists simultaneously on two planes—the plane of action and the plane of dream/memory— Bergson switches back and forth between two different notions of the image: on one hand, the image is equivalent to matter (we perceive images, and our perception is itself an image among images) and, on the other hand, the image offers us a better way (compared to concepts) of restoring some lost original intuition. Our mental life is spread out between the two extremes of action (images that are enacted, turned into movements) and pure knowledge (images that remain in consciousness instead of being externalized). The tone of our mental life depends on our attention to life, on the degree to which these nascent images are externalized: the less they are externalized (inserted into the perceptual apparatus and prolonged into movements and actions) i.e. the less attentive we are to the demands of the present (of our individual bodies), the richer our mental life. The top place in Bergson’s hierarchy of “the divers tones of mental life” is occupied not by images (which are no more than a kind of ‘shorthand’ of the body) but by an impersonal, disembodied Pure Memory.

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Bergson and associationism One of the somewhat surprising features of Matter and Memory is that although the book is structured around the concept of the image, there is virtually no discussion of the imagination as a creative power; instead, images are treated almost exclusively as elements of the empirical understanding. Like the associationists Bergson seems concerned mostly with explaining the links between our impressions; therefore, the main question informing his investigation is whether the links between our impressions are posterior, and thus external to, the impressions themselves, or the links are already included in the impressions (impressions never exist on their own but always appear already imbued with meaning and linked to other impressions). Bergson attributes to the imagination the unpraiseworthy task of dissociation, of cutting the continuity of the real into images. Thus, in the analysis of the perception of movement as an indivisible whole, the imagination is blamed for dividing movement into points, which it then tries in vain to connect back together: “The division is the work of our imagination, of which indeed the office is to fix the moving images of our ordinary experience” (1991: 189). He again fails to distinguish perception from imagination: after all, perception was defined in exactly the same way, as the isolation of images from the “aggregate of images.” Although he never explains in what sense he uses the word “imagination” here (and elsewhere), we can assume that he uses ‘perception’ and ‘imagination’ synonymously because he has defined both matter and perception as images.5 Those who regard Bergson’s philosophy as essentially anti-associationist claim that what distinguishes him from the associationists is his refusal to see only a difference in degree between perception and memory, between perception-images and memory-images. According to Hume, on the other hand, sensual impressions differ from ideas or images in vivacity or intensity but not in nature, which is why we often confuse our impressions with ideas: Thus if, as Hume would have us do, we accept the view that imagination almost always accompanies perception of objects, what accompanies perception is a number of weak or faint copies of the same kinds of things as we are actually perceiving at a given time. I have a strong experience of the visual appearance of the tree before me, and a weak experience of the back of the tree which I cannot see. (Warnock 1976: 133)

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Both Hume and Bergson consider the relationship between perceptions, ideas and sensations in terms of ‘reflection’ or ‘doubling’. Hume argues that our ideas are weaker reflections of our sensations, which suggests that our ideas have a bodily nature like our sensations, an idea not at all foreign to Bergson, who, on the other hand, asserts that each perception is accompanied by its reflection or its double image, by its own virtual memory, which is preserved to be combined with other virtual images. According to Hume, even though we do not see the back part of the tree before us, we still have an experience of it, an idea or an image, but these are weaker because they are not immediate. Similarly, Bergson claims that each perception is doubled back on itself, and underlying it is a corresponding memory image. It becomes difficult to distinguish Hume’s theory of images or ideas as weaker copies of perceptions and Bergson’s notion of duration as the virtual doubling of each perception. Finally, if Hume cannot explain why an actual perception would be accompanied by its fainter copies, Bergson is equally at a loss when it comes to explaining what motivates memory-images to return to the present. Bergson rightfully opposes the associationists’ futile attempt to explain the unity of mind as an assemblage of images external to one another. It is impossible to start from disparate elements and, through some mysterious act of synthesis, arrive at the unity of mind. This far at least Bergson’s intuition is correct. However, he does not offer a different solution to the problem of reconciling unity and multiplicity but merely chooses a different starting point for his analysis: instead of starting from images he postulates an originary duration, from which images are produced through a process of dissociation or analysis, i.e. through the work of the intellect. The intellect is modeled upon matter; thus images are, by nature, material and spatial. Everything spatial, material, and extended unrolls in an artificial succession of images, which are but the distorted manifestations of an original spontaneity (duration) unable to present itself except through this distorted view. Bergson describes all material systems—in opposition to consciousness—in terms of images. Apart from consciousness, there are material systems which time merely glides over. Of the phenomena which follow from them one can really say that they are the unfurling of a fan, or better still, the unrolling of a cinematographic film. Calculable ahead of time, they existed prior to their realization in the form of possibles. (1946: 20)

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The image represents the possible6 rather than the virtual since the possible is foreseeable, calculable. Visual images and ideas belong in the same category insofar as with visual images and ideas “you can no more reconstitute thinking than with positions you can make movement. The idea [as well as the image] is a halt of thought; it arises when thinking, instead of continuing its own train, makes a pause or is reflected back on itself” (Bergson 1920: 55 my italics). One descends from intuition to images and, finally, to concepts, but one cannot go back this slope and, by assembling concepts or images, reconstruct the original intuition from which they were dissociated. Images are merely the motor articulations of an idea. Because images are linked to perception, which is always among images, rather than to representation or recollection, the mind’s independence from matter lies not in its ability to produce images but in its ability to recollect. Since images are spatial in nature, they are the product of thought (for Bergson ‘thinking’ consists of the body’s responses to external stimuli) and thus intimately linked to the body instead of liberating us from it. Insofar as motor responses are unconscious, mindless, determined and acted by inertia, thought itself, Bergson claims, is unconscious, mindless, spatial, calculable, and reversible. Jacques Chevalier captures Bergson’s opposition of image and memory when he writes that “under normal conditions there is no consciousness present in us severed from matter, no conception apart from images, no memory not linked with motor articulation, nor tension without extension”(1928: 164). The parallel structure of this sentence brings together, on one hand, consciousness, thought, memory and tension and, on the other hand, matter, images, motor articulation and extension, pointing up Bergson’s conviction that images belong to the realm of matter, that they are multiple, distinct elements dissociated from the original unity of consciousness/memory. Bergson’s argument about the autonomy of mental states from brain states, which are merely the prolongation of mental states into movements, suggests that he thinks of consciousness as an impersonal, vaguely spiritual ‘entity’ occasionally materialized in individual bodies. A mental state, or thought as such, is accompanied by images which “are not pictured in consciousness without some foreshadowing, in the form of a sketch or a tendency, of the movements by which these images would be acted or played in space—would…impress particular attitudes upon the body, and set free all that they implicitly contain of spatial movement” (Bergson 1991: 13-14). Images translate thought

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into movements i.e., they are merely the spatialization or materialization of thought with a view to action. The translation of mental states into movements of locomotion is the acting out of images in consciousness. As we shall see, Sartre objects precisely to this idea of consciousness as full of nascent images, some of which remain images while others are translated into movements. One thing Bergson’s account of the spatial nature of images does not acknowledge (and for which Sartre, as well as Bachelard, will criticize it) is that there are different kinds of space. Sartre makes a distinction between ordinary space and the space of a work of art (e.g. space in Giacommetti’s works) or the space of a mental image: those spaces are not real but imaginary, not extensive but intensive. Bergson, however, conceives of only one space—quantifiable, measurable, and rational— and has no concept of imaginary space. This view has been somewhat challenged as scholars have begun to point to exceptions to Bergson’s predominantly disparaging view of space. For instance, Bergson’s role in the formal innovation of Cubism, Fauvism and Futurism, especially his challenging of rational notions of space and time (e.g., the Bergsonian nature of the cubists’ attempt to reconstitute the object in time by seizing it simultaneously in a series of what are usually successive views of the object), his distinction between intellect and intuition, quantity and quality, organic versus geometric order, and his idea of temporal continuity, has gone largely unrecognized (Antliff 1993: 40). In contrast to Chevalier and Antliff, Karin Stephen takes to an extreme Bergson’s presumed identification of ‘matter’ with ‘space’: Actual reality, according to [Bergson] is never purely material, the only purely material things are abstractions, and these are not real at all but simply fictions. Bergson really means the same thing by ‘matter’ as by ‘space’ and that is simply mutual distinctness of parts and externality of relations, in a word logical complexity. (1922: 78)

Stephen creates the impression that ‘matter’ does not really signify external reality but is only a sort of a metaphor for ‘logical’ (just as ‘space’ is merely a synonym for ‘logical’). Whatever the faults of her analysis, she draws attention to a radical inconsistency in Bergson’s thought: although Bergson uses the concept of the image to overcome dualism, he separates body from spirit by claiming that only duration expresses spirit whereas space (and thinking) is purely material i.e., he turns space

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into a subcategory of time. Before the appearance of the special image that is the human body, space does not exist: images cannot be said to exist outside one another, but rather there is only light (time), which propagates itself freely. The human body is the obscuring of this light, the slowing down of time, the origin of spatiality or exteriority. Generally speaking, Bergson grants images a merely intermediary function: it is closer to intuition than to the concept, but it is not that intuition itself. When he turns to a discussion of the expansion of perception by art, he presents the image in a slightly more positive light. Oddly enough, in praising artists for extending our perception, Bergson evokes the same comparison he used earlier to devalue images. While he used cinematographic images as an example of the spatialization of time, he now refers to photography to illustrate the richness of images: “As [artists] speak, shades of emotion and thought appear to us which might long since have been brought out in us but which remained invisible; just like the photographic image which has not yet been plunged into the bath where it will be revealed. The poet is this revealing agent” (1920: 159). The film image (the image in motion) symbolizes the division of duration into external moments or frames, while the photographic image (the still image) possesses the revealing potential of the virtual. Memory and memory-images Although Bergson and Sartre distinguish consciousness from matter by virtue of the ability of consciousness to differ from itself (the virtuality of memory; the freedom or temporalization of the for-itself), they both conceive difference in terms of that which is most pure, self-transparent, disembodied and impersonal: Pure Memory and Image-consciousness. Bergson shares with Sartre an intolerance for anything inert, spatial, material, and a complementary desire for an absolutely transparent, impersonal, pure expression. In Being and Nothingness Sartre describes consciousness in terms of being rather than in terms of reflection or knowledge: we do not ‘have’ consciousness; consciousness is. Similarly, Bergson argues that we do not ‘have’ memory, and that because of this “there is no exact moment when the present becomes the past, nor consequently when perception becomes recollection” (1920: 69). To suggest that perception and memory are simultaneous is problematic, given that Bergson wants to establish a qualitative difference between them. He admits, however, that there are two kinds of memory: habit memory, which serves perception, and spontaneous memory. Perception

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then becomes split into an actual and a virtual aspect, only the latter of which is, strictly speaking, memory. However, since he wants to challenge exactly the view that memory is just an aspect of perception, or a weakened version of it, he asserts that perception has nothing to do with the preservation of images: perception only translates external stimulations into movements, whereas memory deals in the preservation and recognition of images. By positing perception as always already recollection, Bergson sets himself a far more difficult task than that of accounting for memory: now he has to explain why we are not recollecting non-stop, why we perceive at all, and what prevents memory-images from supplanting perception.7 By analogy with his earlier argument that perception-images are dissociated from matter, Bergson draws a similar distinction between memory-images and pure memory. Pure memory is absolutely selfsufficient, but once it becomes incarnated in a memory image, which generally serves a utilitarian function, pure memory is debased i.e. subjected to the demands of the present. Whereas spontaneous recollection has the character of a dream, most memory is habit-memory, crystalized/debased in memory-images and thus serving the needs of perception. The memory-image oscillates between a thing and an act, a consciousness. On one hand, Bergson thinks of it as having a certain place in the past, even a certain date corresponding to it i.e., the memory-image has a quasi-substantial existence. On the other hand, however, he suggests that it is more than a thing, an act “embraced in an intuition of the mind which I may lengthen or shorten at will; I assign to it any duration I please; there is nothing to prevent my grasping the whole of it instantaneously, as in one picture”(1991: 80-81). Spontaneous memory-images, like Sartre’s image, can teach us nothing: if we want to know something, we turn to motor or habit-memory (85). Although image-memory is a sign of a weakened attention to life and of a tendency to dream, Bergson believes that this kind of memory precedes habit-memory, that a memory-image lies at the heart of habit-memory, even in cases when we are trying to learn something completely new. In other words, he revives the Platonic idea that all knowledge is a form of recollection: When we strive to learn a lesson, for instance, is not the visual or auditory image which we endeavor to reconstitute by movements already in our mind, invisible

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Bergson uses the words (and the corresponding concepts) ‘memory’ and ‘imagination’ synonymously as when, for example, he admits that often “it is impossible for me to say whether what I feel is a slight sensation, which I experience, or a slight sensation, which I imagine (and this is natural, because the memory-image is already partly sensation)”(1991: 136 my italics). On other occasions, he confuses perception (rather than memory) with imagination: “But…what can be a nonperceived material object, an image not imagined, unless it is a kind of unconscious mental state?”(142 my italics). Here he very clearly defines matter (“an unperceived material object) as an unconscious mental state: perception is the difference between the unconscious (matter) and consciousness (mind). It is not memory-images as such that separate consciousness from matter. Even though memory-images preserve the past in the present, this preservation facilitates perception, but perception is precisely the point at which mind and matter meet, rather than the distinguishing feature of the mind. The real difference between mind and matter is, therefore, pure memory itself, memory before it is materialized into distinct memoryimages. To the extent that pure memory does not exist as such, since its existence or materialization in memory-images signals its simultaneous self-destruction, the difference between mind and matter must also be merely hypothetical. The moment we start recollecting—even in the case of spontaneous recollection—our memory is incarnated in a particular image, which in turn becomes potentially useful to perception. The only way to prevent this automatic subordination of memory-images to the present perception would be not to form images or to form images without becoming conscious of them i.e. to dream, which would be a kind of unconscious recollection. It seems odd to argue that what distinguishes mind from matter is the mind’s capacity to be unconscious, to dream, since we assume that consciousness is precisely what matter lacks. However, on more than one occasion Bergson contends that consciousness is on the side of perception, action, and utility. The problem is that sometimes he identi-

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fies consciousness with memory, but he also opposes consciousness to memory and associates it (consciousness) with perception. However, if consciousness is on the side of perception, and memory is opposed to consciousness, memory has to be associated with the unconscious. The confusion stems from the fact that we would normally define matter as unconscious, which would then mean that nothing separates mind from matter since both are unconscious. However, to repeat again, Bergson places consciousness not opposite matter but on the side of matter: consciousness has the role of facilitating perception, which in turn takes place ‘in’ matter. Then matter is not the absence of consciousness and the unconscious is not matter. The unconscious is memory in the form of a dream, which liberates us from the present, from consciousness. The object of consciousness is always a present object since it is the object of perception, but the object of memory is absent. In other words, Bergson defines unconscious or spontaneous recollection, whose object is absent, in the same way Sartre defines image-consciousness. It is true that Sartre, too, conceives the image as a negation of the present, but he would never call this negation unconscious. This is in fact why dream-images occupy one of the lower positions in Sartre’s hierarchy of images, whereas Bergson considers the dream the epitome of pure memory. Since Bergson wants to argue that memory distinguishes mind from matter but, on the other hand, he contrasts spontaneous recollection, which requires the suppression of the body, with habit memory, which is rooted in the body, his distinction between the two types of memory becomes redundant or merely hypothetical: after all, if memory is supposed to free us from the body, habit memory should not really qualify as memory. He denies the existence of the present (except as an idea), contending that the present consists, in large measure, in the immediate past. In the fraction of a second which covers the briefest possible perception of light, billions of vibrations have taken place, of which the first is separated from the last by an interval which is enormously divided. Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable number of remembered elements; in truth, every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past. (1991: 150) By ‘memory’ Bergson here means specifically habit-memory, not spontaneous memory. Perception is already memory insofar as it is the automatic preservation and condensation of successive vibrations: perception is precisely habit. But, as Bergson himself has acknowledged

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that habit-memory is not really memory, it is confusing to continue using the same word without specifying its meaning. It may sound original to say that “perception is already memory” but he should have clarified that this is not really memory. There is an essential difference between the automatic preservation of vibrations and the spontaneous, chance recollections of past experiences. Bergson conflates past experiences (the object of spontaneous recollection) with the vibrations of light constitutive of a perception-image as such (the object of habit-memory). The difference between habit-memory, which is not really memory, and spontaneous memory is that habit “acts our past experience but does not call up its image” (151), whereas spontaneous recollection does call up an image from the past. Habit-memory functions by condensing vibrations whereas spontaneous memory is more correctly described as a movement of expansion. Bergson’s distinction between the two types of memory does not hold because habit-memory is not memory in the true sense of the word. The superfluity of this distinction becomes evident when he insists on dissociating “memory-image” from “movement,” the former referring to spontaneous memory and the latter to motor memory. Motor memory is made up exclusively of movements and thus differs from perception in degree only. There are no images in motor memory: there is not enough time for an image to form since the stimulus is automatically translated into a movement. Since perception is the primary force, as Bergson himself admits, motor memory is the rule and spontaneous memory the exception. In a sense, an image is what is left over after the translation of stimulations into movements. The questionable opposition between the two types of memory, given that there is only one true memory, suggests that Bergson considers true memory (involuntary or spontaneous recollection) indistinguishable from consciousness. If, as he argues, consciousness is the ecart or gap between a stimulus and the response to it, and if spontaneous memory is nothing other than what is left over from this prolongation of a stimulus into a response, then memory itself is a delay, a gap, a surfeit, a source of indetermination i.e., consciousness is memory or, to the extent that consciousness is freedom from matter and from its laws of necessity, memory is the highest level of consciousness at which we are most free. The conflation of conscious perception with memory forces us to imagine memory as a sort of delay superimposed on conscious perception

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since Bergson defines both in the same way, as the delay between a stimulus and response: Always inhibited by the practical and useful consciousness of the present moment, that is to say, by the sensory-motor equilibrium of a nervous system connecting perception with action, this memory merely awaits the occurrence of a rift between the actual impression and its corresponding movement to slip in its images. (95 my italics)

The closer he draws to the end of Matter and Memory, the more difficult it becomes to sustain the distinction between the two types of memory. Having argued throughout the book that perception measures our virtual action on things whereas memory is our freedom from the necessity of action, towards the end he writes: “The more of these moments memory can contract into one, the firmer is the hold it gives us on matter: so the memory of a living being appears indeed to measure, above all, its powers of action upon things and to be only the intellectual reverberation of this power” (228). It turns out that memory is merely the intellectual manifestation of the primary power, perception. The only possible explanation for this unexpected reduction of memory to action is that Bergson is speaking here only of habit-memory, not of spontaneous recollection. But why not make this clearer, then? An even stranger statement follows: We note that its [memory’s] primary function is to evoke all those past perceptions which are analogous to the present perception, to recall to us what preceded and followed them, and to suggest to us that decision which is the most useful. …By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition multiple moments of duration, it frees us from the movement of the flow of things, that is to say, from the rhythm of necessity. (228)

If he is really speaking of habit-memory only, it is not clear how habitmemory is a manifestation of our freedom rather than precisely our strongest connection to the world of matter. We must assume then that Bergson is actually referring to spontaneous memory, which still leaves us unable to explain its reduction to the practical demands of action. This unexpected conclusion of Matter and Memory dramatizes a certain ambiguity that permeates the whole text, especially the theory of the virtual. Sometimes Bergson argues that there is nothing virtual in mat-

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ter, identifying the virtual exclusively with memory, but at other times he defines perception as our virtual action on things. Since conscious perception is our virtual, not actual, action upon other bodies, perception does not involve movement, and is defined in exactly the same way as spontaneous memory. At other times, however, Bergson includes movements in perception, which is no longer a virtual but an actual action on other images. On those occasions, the difference between perception and memory is that between movement and image: For, while external perception provokes on our part movements which retrace its main lines, our memory directs upon the perception received the memory-images which resemble it and which are already sketched out by the movements themselves. Memory thus creates anew the present perception, or rather it doubles this perception by reflecting upon it its own image or some other memory-image of the same kind. (101)

However, it is not clear how, by matching the present perception with a past one similar to it, memory creates anew the present perception i.e., how this work of memory, which is supposed to be invention, differs from simple recognition. Bergson goes as far as to suggest that unless memory projects already perceived images onto the present perception, we are unable to perceive at all: If the retained or remembered images will not cover all the details of the image that is being perceived, an appeal is made to the deeper and more distant regions of memory, until other details that are already known come to project themselves upon those details that remain unperceived. (101 my italics)

It is impossible to perceive anything new unless it is first reduced to something familiar, unless a memory-image is projected upon the present perception. Perception is never pure but always subordinated to, or even derived from, memory or, as Bergson puts it, a perception is always continued by “the movement of imitation”(102). In the passage above Bergson repeats the same gesture I pointed out with respect to his made-up distinction between two types of memories: he invents two categories, establishes a distinction between them, and then admits that one of the categories is merely hypothetical. In the case of memory, habit-memory is the hypothetical category that is needed to define real memory (by showing what real memory is not) while in the

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case of perception, Bergson conjures up the category of ‘pure perception’ and contrasts it with ‘attentive perception’, which is the only true perception: Perception does not consist merely in impressions gathered, or even elaborated, by the mind. […] But every attentive perception truly involves a reflection…that is to say the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mold itself. (102)

To recapitulate, Bergson develops two parallel notions of the image: perception-images divide the indivisible continuity of the “aggregate of images” (the material world) into distinct, solid bodies, while memory-images are the result of the disintegration of pure memory. In both cases images are the product of dissociation, division or analysis (perception-images are dissociated from matter; memory-images are dissociated from pure memory), and that distinguishes them sharply from Sartre’s notion of the image as consciousness, which is always a synthesis. This is why, as we shall see, Sartre criticizes Bergson for remaining bound to the associationist idea of the image as a thing. The only difference between Bergson and the associationists, Sartre will argue, is that while they start with images as things, which can only be connected externally—they start with the elements of analysis and try, in vain, to produce a synthesis out of them—Bergson starts with synthesis (pure memory or the virtual) and then analyzes it into its constitutive elements, perception-images and memory-images. Pure memory and déjà vu As long as he is dealing with perception and perception-images, Bergson creates the illusion that he has overcome dualism with its artificial dichotomies: interiority vs exteriority, perception vs reality, mind vs matter. Our body is just an image among images, he argues, but there are no images within us; rather, “every image is within certain images and without others; but of the aggregate of images we cannot say that it is within or without us, since interiority and exteriority are only relations among images”(1991: 25). Images are not stored in the brain since our brain is itself an image; thus, perception is always already outside, among images. However, when he turns to memory, Bergson modifies his argument. Our mental states, he now says, far surpass our brain states. If a brain state is an image among images, then a mental

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state, insofar as it is ‘larger’ than the brain state, must be larger than the image that is our body i.e., it is possible for us to be outside our body as image, which means outside the whole aggregate of images (insofar as one image implies the whole aggregate of images). In this way Bergson reintroduces the notions of interiority and exteriority that he supposedly banished. It now appears as though there is something larger than this aggregate of images: Bergson calls it pure memory. According to Bergson, any philosophical investigation should always start from pure memory, go through memory-images, and finally ‘descend’ to perception (rather than the other way around). Interestingly, he conceives this as a movement from the personal to the impersonal: pure memory is the level at which our memory is most individualized, but as it descends down toward the body (i.e. toward perception) it becomes more and more impersonal, because the closer a memory-image is to the present perception the more automatic it is. The body represents the most impersonal aspect of a human being since it obeys the law of automatic reaction to a stimulus, the law of habit-memory. To demonstrate the existence of “two distinct degrees of tension of the memory” (1991: 169) he gives the example of hearing someone speak in a foreign language. Upon hearing a word in that language, Bergson explains, I will either think of the language in general or recall a particular voice that pronounced that word in a particular way. We are closer to the pure image in the second case, while the first case prepares us for immediate action. Thus, the more particular the memory-image, the closer we are to pure memory, whereas the more general and anonymous the response, the more useful it is, the closer we are to perception and action. Contrary to common sense, then, pure images (pure memory) individualize us, while our own body is the extreme limit of anonymity and universality. One could hypothesize, on the basis of this, that certain pure (personal) images can adopt a different body since the body, by itself, is not individualized but is, conceivably, replaceable. Bergson never explains the specific relationship of pure memory to consciousness. If consciousness is always already there, in the heart of things, and merely has to be dissociated from matter, when does memory appear? Is memory added to consciousness or does the birth of conscious perception coincide with the birth of memory? And if conscious perception is already a representation, what is memory? Is it a representation of a representation? This confusion can be attributed to the fact that Bergson reverses the accepted meaning of several basic philosophical

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terms without however admitting that he has done so: e.g. what is traditionally referred to as “body” he designates as “consciousness” and what is usually understood as “consciousness” he calls “pure memory.” But if consciousness is on the side of matter and perception—“Conscious perception signifies choice, and consciousness mainly consists in this practical discernment” (1991: 49 my italics)—it is difficult to say where memory begins or ends: it is ‘bigger’ than consciousness, which in turn is ‘smaller’ than material reality (since conscious perception is a selection within the aggregate of images. However, it would be inaccurate to say that memory, by surpassing consciousness, overlaps with matter, since matter is precisely that which has no memory—therefore, memory cannot surpass, and thus include, matter. Paradoxically, memory must be ‘larger’ than consciousness but ‘smaller’ than matter. Instead of asking how Pure Memory ‘inserts’ itself in consciousness i.e., how exactly consciousness particularizes itself, Bergson proposes to think the relationship between consciousness and matter on the model of complexification, where the virtual and the actual represent the two extreme ends on a single continuum.8 The virtual is that aspect of a thing or event that is not usable or practical (as opposed to the actual aspect, which propels the thing forward, making it part of a project) or, alternatively, it is the memory of the object, the object’s significance for the subject. Only memory is capable of producing the virtual (matter as such is devoid of virtuality) and the privileged expression of the virtual is, in Bergson’s view, the experience of déjà vu. Only a small part of Pure Memory ever infiltrates our consciousness: we recognize as ours only a small portion of it through voluntary memory (which has a pragmatic value) and involuntary recollection (which has an affective value). That we recognize only that which has an affective or pragmatic value for us suggests that the very act of recollecting (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) is an act of attributing value: it is because we attribute value to an event that we recognize it as part of our personal past. By making déjà vu a privileged experience revealing the nature of our mental life, Bergson implies that impersonal recollection ontologically precedes voluntary or involuntary memory i.e. that the only way philosophy can explain memory is through, or from the point of view of, “false” memory (more on this below). (Similarly, Sartre suggests that to understand consciousness it is necessary first to understand how bad faith is possible.) This suggests that there are actually no reliable criteria for distinguishing involuntary recollection from déjà vu. If

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memory is first impersonal and only then individualizes itself, who can say that our involuntary recollections really belong to our personal past? Bergson must now explain on the basis of what criterion we ‘recognize’ certain memories as belonging to our individual past rather than to an impersonal pure memory. By making déjà vu the ground of the life of consciousness Bergson seems to introduce within its transparency the necessity to evaluate itself and to recognize itself as itself rather than as another consciousness. What we usually assume belongs naturally to us—our past, our involuntary recollections, which we believe we do not have to prove to be really ours namely because they are involuntary—we now must prove to be ours. Given the ontological and psychological priority with which Bergson credits déjà vu, involuntary impersonal recollection appears to precede and ground involuntary personal recollection, as well as simple voluntary memory. Now he has to explain not the exception (déjà vu) but the rule (the majority of our mental life, which does not take the form of déjà vu). This changes radically the idea of natural, spontaneous, or pre-reflective consciousness, which we tend to associate with involuntary memory. Bergson makes it impossible to continue to believe that there is a pre-reflective consciousness that does not construct itself but simply is. Involuntary memory is supposed to reveal what is most essentially ours, what is most spontaneous, original, unreflective and uncorrupted by crude practical values and demands. After all, as Sartre points out, pre-reflective consciousness does not need to be reflected in order to be. For Bergson, however, the pre-reflective or the involuntary is no longer pure: even involuntary recollection is never given as already mine, as part of my individual past, but has to be recognized as such. The ontological precedence of impersonal memory makes the personal past a matter of (re)construction: consciousness is always reflected consciousness, selecting (but on the basis of what standard?) which memories it will consider its own. In this way Bergson appears to spin his philosophy into a direction he tried to avoid from the very beginning: he starts out with the intention of emphasizing the value of experiences that absent us from ourselves—specifically, and significantly, from our bodies (hence the importance of involuntary recollection as an access to pure memory and an expansion of consciousness)—but because he declares déjà vu the foundation of his philosophy, he seems to fictionalize our entire mental life, introducing the objectifying stance of reflective consciousness even

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at the most pure levels of consciousness, such as the level of involuntary recollection. However, we need to reconsider Bergson’s use of the terms “true’ and ‘false.’ Although déjà vu is usually explained as a case of false memory or false recognition, Bergson considers it an exemplary experience directly illustrating the nature of duration as the automatic preservation of the past in the present. He suggests that it is necessary to reevaluate our notions of “true” and “false.” We call déjà vu a ‘false’ memory because we fail to connect this experience to our personal past: in déjà vu we remember with great clarity something that, we believe, has never happened to us in reality. Bergson’s distinction between impersonal pure memory and particular memory-images might prove helpful in trying to understand the nature of déjà vu. If it is really true that memory does not belong to us but we are ‘surrounded’ on all sides by an impersonal memory, of which our individual pasts are particular manifestations, it becomes possible to think of déjà vu as a sort of access to that impersonal past. In that case, we would have to replace “true” and “false” with “personal” and “impersonal.” Déjà vu reveals that memory is always greater than the present, that what we don’t recognize and therefore call “false” is just the impersonal. Our mental life constantly swells and pushes this boundary between the personal (the present) and the impersonal (the past). The relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘falseness’, Bergson suggests, ought to be understood in terms of temporalization insofar as the transition from impersonal (‘false’) to personal (‘true’) is nothing other than the tension and distension of consciousness i.e. duration. The more consciousness is distended—the more impersonal it becomes, the more it surpasses the body (Bergson considers the body as the individualization or particularization of the impersonal)—the more likely it is that one will experience déjà vu and ‘tap into’ the infinite resources of Pure Memory. Déjà vu does not concern two separate experiences, one in the present and one in the past, which the present recollects, but only one experience, in the present, which, however, is split and somehow doubled. It is the experience of the present as past, or of the present in its passing. There is a difference between these two descriptions. Bergson’s interpretation tends more toward the first description. That déjà vu reveals duration—the preservation of the past in the present—means that the illusory feeling of repetition we have in déjà vu is due to the fact that this present moment is not isolated, but contains within itself the entire

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past (hence the analogy with a rolling snow ball). Thus, the uncanny feeling that we have experienced something before but we cannot remember it must result from the infiltration of the present moment by the impersonal past. Bergson, however, does not explain what motivates the impersonal past to individualize itself in a particular present moment. The other interpretation of déjà vu as the experience of the present in its passing has completely different implications, however. To experience a moment in its passing is not the same as to experience a moment as impregnated with a past. Whereas the latter stresses the place of the present moment within a larger context, the former isolates the moment and considers it as something possessing its own margins: to experience a moment in its passing is to experience it from the point of view of its end, to isolate it from the flow of experience and become conscious of it. This intensification of consciousness produces the illusion of repetition. From this point of view, then, déjà vu is not so much the experience of the past pressing upon the present, but rather a self-conscious experience of the present (the assumption being that the present is, by definition, experienced spontaneously, unreflectively). Insofar as Bergson stresses the co-existence of the past and the present, déjà vu reveals the existence of the past within the present rather than the doubling of present consciousness into self-consciousness. What Bergson ultimately suggests through the notion of déjà vu is that what we remember in déjà vu is not an invention but something that really happened, though not something we experienced as this particular subject i.e., déjà vu reveals the limits of subjectivity as it situates the subject in time, in Pure Memory. The subject does not remember only that which has happened to him—or, rather, he remembers not only his conscious experiences. Images and events, of which he was not conscious at the time, are preserved and at some point infiltrate the present. The subject fails to recognize them and at the same time experiences them as memories precisely because they both belong and do not belong to him. In this sense, one might say that déjà vu renders visible the existence of a pre-reflective or non-reflective consciousness. The experiences we remember in déjà vu have been the object of an unreflective consciousness and they now appear to us as repetition precisely because they are consciously experienced. A Sartrean reading of Bergson would suggest that Bergsonian déjà vu is the birth of self-consciousness, which reflects (on) past unreflected, pure consciousnesses. For Bergson, the past is a pre-reflective consciousness: while Sartre

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insists that unreflected consciousness does not need to be reflected in order to exist, Bergson shows, through the notion of déjà vu, that the past does not need to be preserved in reflective consciousness because it preserves itself automatically, unreflectively, and that it does not need to be purposefully summoned, because sooner or later it manifests itself in such experiences as déjà vu. It is namely on the basis of Bergson’s idea of déjà vu that Deleuze develops his idea of time as falsification, where ‘falseness’ is not the opposite of ‘truth’ but designates the compossibility of impossible pasts and presents, their impersonal nature. ‘Falseness’, ‘past’, ‘impossible pasts and presents’, ‘the impersonal’, ‘the non-reflective’: these terms are used synonymously in Bergson’s analysis, which privileges the impersonal as ontologically anterior to subjectivity and, in fact, as identical with the real. The real should be sought beyond matter, habit, and perception. We can access the real only by eliminating the human perspective, by seeking experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience. […] By unmaking that which [the needs of our bodies] have made, we may restore to intuition its original purity and so recover contact with the real. (1991: 184-185)

The real is at the turn beyond the human, where the ‘human’ is understood as ‘the human body.’ Bergson describes the universe as “an aggregate of images,” which remain neutral to one another before the birth of conscious perception as a privileged image or point of view around which the other images arrange themselves. At first, this seems like a phenomenological account of the birth of perception: the material world is flat, two-dimensional but the springing forth of the human body in the midst of the neutral images making up the world creates a sort of curvature and makes vision possible. However, he goes on to argue that our mental life can be enriched through intuition or what he also calls “the education of the senses” (49), which must reconstruct the continuity of images interrupted by conscious perception. The ‘education of the senses’ aims must overcome the gaps in the needs of the body (it is precisely these needs that produce particular perceptions) and thus synthesize the gaps in our representation of the world; it must “harmonize my senses with each other…restore between their data a continuity which has been broken by the discontinuity of the needs of my body, in short…reconstruct...the whole of the material object” (49).

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The continuity of objects of perception is broken by the discontinuity of our needs i.e. by the selectivity of conscious perception. Therefore, conscious perception has to be ‘corrected’ or overcome. Since for Bergson conscious perception is the difference that tears apart the original neutrality of matter, the ‘education of the senses’ he advocates is supposed to help us approximate the mode of existence of a bare material point. We must reconstruct the totality of external images, which our perception (and our consciousness, which is born in the delay of perception) has torn apart. We must annihilate the very discernment through which difference enters the material world and reconstitute the very continuity whose break we ourselves are. The multiplicity and discontinuity of our needs must be dissolved back into the uniformity and continuity of the aggregate of images (matter). The end of consciousness, then, is to approximate ever so closely matter without, however, collapsing back into it. We would thus be restored to the material universe itself, defined as the totality of images...a kind of consciousness...in which everything compensates and neutralizes everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each other from standing out. (235)

To educate our senses is to try to compensate for the limits of perception as a selection and organization of only a small part of the actual. However, given that our perception is a narrowing down of “universal consciousness” or matter, the enlarging of perception would result in our gradual approximation of the conditions of existence of matter itself, insofar as “[t]o perceive all the influences from all the points of all bodies would be to descend to the condition of a material object” (49). The human as just another sign in the totality of signs, arbitrary and insignificant as all other signs, just another hole in the block of Swiss cheese (Readings 1991: 10): this is the ultimate Bergsonian fantasy.

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Endnotes 1



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It was perhaps because Bergson deviated in such a blatant manner from the commonly accepted idea of a philosophical argument (one demanding unassailable logical proof) that his ideas tended to be grossly misinterpreted. His commentators, including Russell, failed to understand, for example, that when Bergson defined matter as image, he was by no means conceiving the image as a kind of representation, or that what Bergson understood by ‘intuition’ was not at all a subjective, irrational instinct but rather a mode of thought privileged over conceptual thought. Despite their tendency to misinterpretation, however, Bergson’s commentators were right in drawing attention to the poetic nature of Bergsonism, for certainly many of Bergson’s ideas were clothed as metaphors or comparisons and it was tempting to see them as just that, beautiful metaphors. While Elliot and Russell dismissed Bergson’s work as so much “metaphysical verbiage,” Jacques Chevalier praised his talent “to liberate philosophy from servitude to a vocabulary” and argued that it is precisely new expressions that give birth to new ideas (1928: 61-62). In response to Russell’s arguments, H. Wildon Carr insists that even though “Mr. Russell is perfectly entitled to question or deny that we can have knowledge by intuition…if there is such knowledge it is characterized by just this fact that...the act of knowing and that which is known [are one and the same]” (Russell 1914: 32). See John Mullarkey’s Bergson and Philosophy, where Mullarkey makes a similar argument i.e., that despite the pure monism that the definition of matter as image is supposed to affirm, the special status of the human body as an image restores the dualism Bergson is trying to avoid. Mullarkey points out that Bergson’s analyses of time, consciousness, duration, relativity physics and evolution is essentially ethical in nature. For example, the essential significance of Bergson’s idea of duration lies in acknowledging the duration of the Other. If we want to find out how Bergson conceives the imagination, in Matter and Memory, we have to look at his notion of memory, not at perception. But even then we cannot be sure that, for example, when he calls memory ‘imaginative’, he means that memory is a mixture of memory and imagination or he is again playing with words insofar as memory, just like perception, consists of images. In that case, ‘imaginative memory’ would merely stand for ‘memory actualized in images’ rather than memory that is imaginative in character. For an examination of the link between the imaginable and the possible, see the chapter by the same title in Alan White’s The Language of Imagination. White argues that the imaginable “is in principle, if not in practice, a necessary condition of possibility” (1990: 179). While Sartre expels everything from consciousness, Bergson is possessed by the opposite drive to include everything, to prove that nothing is lost but all is preserved in consciousness automatically. Lyotard’s discussion, in The Inhuman, of different types of complexifiers, whose degree of sophistication depends on the degree of delay interposed between stimulus and response, repeats almost word for word Bergson’s argument in Matter and Memory.

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Sartre’s Image-Consciousness: The Allergic Reaction to Matter

Sartre and the impersonal In the present pro-Bergsonian and pro-Deleuzian intellectual climate, little attention is paid to critiques of Bergson, including the one that is of particular interest to us. It is not surprising that although a great deal has been written about Sartre, his critique of Bergson has not received the critical attention it deserves. Part of this neglect has to do with the fact that Sartre’s own work has not really been a hot topic lately, though he may be due for a revival.1 While Bergson posits ‘Pure Memory’ as an impersonal pure realm ontologically anterior to conscious perception, Sartre, as we shall see, attributes ontological anteriority to ‘image-consciousness’, whose absolute emptiness and impersonality render it indistinguishable from consciousness as such. Bergson’s and Sartre’s ontologies appear to have nothing in common, especially considering that negation and absence—both key terms in Sartre’s phenomenology of consciousness—have no place in the philosophy of Bergson, for whom the absence of one thing always implies the presence of another. Even the way in which Bergson envisions the material world—as an ‘aggregate of images’—suggests a certain busyness, over-crowdedness, a plenitude in which there is no room for a void. On the contrary, Sartre’s thought seems to suffer from an almost allergic reaction to any content, let alone plenitude. Indeed, one could say that Sartre’s thought seems to blossom in the void, which in turn accounts for his reluctance to allow anything inert i.e. material, ‘inside’ consciousness. For Bergson, negation is merely a logical judgment: absence is nothing more than a certain ‘preference’ for focusing on what we were looking for but did not find (i.e. on the absence of what we were looking for) rather th an on what we find in the place of the absent thing (inasmuch as the absence of one thing necessarily—for Bergson—implies

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the presence of something else in its place). Absence is determined by our expectations, desires and preferences and is, therefore, a matter of judgment (even if an unconscious one), the result of a shift in focus. Bergson’s neutralization of negation and absence is very much in line with his signature rhetoric of dilation and contraction (of consciousness), insertion (of memory images into the sensory-motor apparatus, of the past into the present), foregrounding and framing (perception as an act of selecting or framing images from the aggregate of images) i.e. with a vitalistic rhetoric of living processes and phenomena, which overflow into one another, penetrate, or grow out of one another, a rhetoric in which nothing less than the very unity of Being hinges on the concept of the image. Opposing Bergson’s reduction of negation to a logical judgment, Sartre insists on the ontological anteriority of negation: the image is not simply a selection within the material world (as Bergson’s framing analogy suggests); instead, the image nihilates the world. Material reality does not consist of images, which are perceived or not depending on whether we are focusing on perception or recollection (as Bergson would have it); rather, the image is a consciousness and thus always already nihilating reality. Sartre’s deployment of the concept of the image could not be farther removed from Bergson’s. As we shall see, one of the major points of his critique of Bergson in Imagination is Bergson’s failure to produce an account of individual consciousness, a failure Sartre attributes to Bergson’s conflation of consciousness with the material world, of image with matter. However, Sartre’s theory of the image, which he develops into an ontology (the phenomenology of the image serves as the basis of Sartre’s phenomenology of consciousness i.e., he examines the essential structures of consciousness through an analysis of the image) also fails to explain the process by which consciousness becomes individualized. Sartre uses the concept of the image not to link mind and matter (as Bergson does) but precisely to separate them, to underscore even further the active transcendence of material reality by consciousness. Nevertheless, there are more similarities between Sartre’s and Bergson’s concepts of the image than Sartre seems to think. Even as he blames Bergson for dismissing images as material, artificial, spatialized and degraded manifestations of an impersonal consciousness (Pure Memory), Sartre himself construes the image (what he calls ‘image-conscious-

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ness’) as a pre-reflective, spontaneous, de-subjectivized and seemingly disembodied consciousness. Although in his two books on the image—Imagination and The Psychology of Imagination—Sartre criticizes Bergson’s image ontology, in the final analysis he also subsumes the image (and the imagination) under a metaphysical rather than aesthetic discourse. Unlike Bergson, he does not attribute to the image the function of mediating between mind and matter—in fact, the opposite is the case since Sartre defines the image as a particular kind of consciousness and, therefore, uses the concept of the image to distinguish, rather than conflate, mind and matter. Nevertheless, like Bergson, he ontologizes the image insofar as he fails to differentiate it from consciousness as such (a pre-reflective, transparent consciousness without an object, a pure, transcendental, impersonal ‘entity’ ontologically anterior to subjectivity) which, by virtue of its constitutive emptiness, he then conflates with the being of consciousness (insofar as emptiness or a lack of distance from itself are the distinguishing characteristics of being). Like Bergson, whose confusing distinctions between images and perceptions, perceptions and memories, mind and matter he sets out to expose and ‘correct’, Sartre gets bogged down in increasingly awkward and self-contradictory analyses of the differences between perception and imagination, pre-reflective and reflective consciousness, consciousness and image-consciousness. His attempt to demonstrate the absolute autonomy and freedom of consciousness from material reality leads him to forego any meaningful distinction between consciousness as such and image-consciousness, and to reduce imageconsciousness to a condition of possibility for consciousness even as, paradoxically, he construes it in the very same terms he uses to define its alleged opposite, the ‘in-itself’ (matter). Lacking an object, image-consciousness is locked up in itself: it is absolutely identical with itself, just as the in-itself is identical with, or ‘glued to’, itself. I will come back to this sliding of the pre-reflective into matter or sheer presence in chapter three, when I discuss the postmodern sublime and the ontologization of aesthetic experience. Sartre’s dualism The extent to which Bergson and Sartre fail to purge philosophy of the Cartesian idea of a disembodied, a-historical, self-transparent, universal consciousness or Reason can be gauged by evaluating the comparative importance of matter and consciousness in their respective ontolo-

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gies. Both relegate matter to a secondary position, focusing instead on the for-itself (Sartre) and memory (Bergson). Just as in Being and Nothingness Sartre promises to deliver an account of the two realms of being—consciousness and matter—and yet devotes the bulk of the book to consciousness, so the greater part of Matter and Memory focuses on the different tones of mental life while saying very little about matter as such (except in the chapter explaining the material origin of perception). Matter is not considered worthy of consideration because it is merely that which is identical with itself (Sartre) or that which repeats itself indefinitely (Bergson). Sartre’s view of the body as an object, though one that is ‘closer to me’ than other objects, creates problems for him in the books on imagination where he fails to account for the role of the body in conscious life. He finds it difficult to reconcile the claim that consciousness is always embodied (therefore, image-consciousness ought to be embodied too) with the claim that the image differs from perception, which implies that there is no contact between image-consciousness and the world of objects: consciousness does not act upon them and neither do they act upon it, since the object of the image is by definition absent or non-existent. Sartre creates the impression that only in perception is consciousness embodied, in contact with the material world, and that once engaged in imagining consciousness loses all contact with the world, including with its own body, which then appears as just another object in the world. Having defined perceptual consciousness as consciousness of the body, and thus of the world as well, Sartre fails to explain how image-consciousness can still be consciousness of the body even in the absence of perception. Sartre’s denial of any sort of relationship between the in-itself (matter) and time is one reason Being and Nothingness has been criticized for offering only a dualistic ontology. While Sartre promises to give us two senses of being, one of things and another of man, he gives us, on one hand, being and, on the other hand, the somewhat artificially invented concept of ‘nihilation’ or ‘nothingness’2 which is supposed to distinguish man’s being from the being of things: “Although things need only to be in order to be, it is indispensable for man not to be in order to be (note that ‘to be’=‘to be something’ throughout)” (Descombes 1980: 49). However, to be is not necessarily equivalent to to be something or to to be identical with oneself. Along similar lines, Jean Wahl questions

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the validity of Sartre’s definition of the in-itself as absolutely identical with itself: No doubt, Sartre’s affirmation of the ‘in-itself’ responds to an epistemological concern on his part, and answered the need to affirm a reality independent of thought; but has one the right to pass from this assertion to the notion that this reality is what it is, and is uniquely so—is, in fact, something massive and stable?” (Wahl 1965: 24)

The essentially dualistic nature of Sartre’s philosophy is evident in his unwarranted attribution of ontological value to the opposition inside/outside: [Sartre] is obsessed by what might be called the containment of the strange—or the foreign. Who contains whom? A vase will always be betrayed by its contents. From which it follows that to be in shape is to be empty. […] The exterior (the inert) should rest outside. If it infiltrates consciousness, it must be expelled. But nothing must replace it inside consciousness, which is but an absolute evacuation, an allergic rejection of all content. (Hollier 1986: 14-16)3

Sartre’s failure to provide a sustained, precise and consistent account of what he calls “the in-itself” also feeds into this dualism. The ambiguity underlying the concept of the in-itself can be attributed to the fact that Sartre’s thought keeps fluctuating between a phenomenological ontology, according to which there cannot be a pure in-itself (the in-itself can be conceived only in terms of the intentionality of consciousness) and a speculative metaphysics, according to which the two realms of being—consciousness and matter—are absolutely separate (Busch 1990: 23). What Sartre designates as an in-itself is not limited to matter as such but includes anything that appears to consciousness: What these various phenomena referred to as the in-itself share as a core meaning is identity, reified presence, externality to the self, givenness—in short, a mode of objectified being whose sense is constituted in contrast with the temporal selfsurpassing of the for-itself. The in-itself is not a particular object, but the modality of object-being. (24)4

It is true, nevertheless, that Sartre is more concerned than Bergson with keeping the two regions of being separate.5 In fact, although he argues

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that both regions participate in being, Sartre defines consciousness as a lack of being, and attributes being only to the in-itself. He fails to explain the origin of consciousness and instead limits himself to arguing that it could not have emerged from the in-itself. Bergson, on the other hand, tries to bring together the two regions of being through the idea of duration and the idea of the virtual: everything, not only consciousness but matter as well, has its own duration but through the method of intuition consciousness can participate in durations different from its own. However, Bergson credits only consciousness with virtuality. By denying matter any virtuality he implicitly denies it being, insofar as ‘being’ implies ‘virtuality’. Thus, while Sartre identifies matter (the in-itself) with being, defining consciousness as the vain pursuit of being, Bergson reverses the terms and posits matter, rather than consciousness, as lacking being, which he defines as the capacity for self-differentiation, memory, virtuality. Sartre and the phenomenology of the image All theories of the image, Sartre argues, have failed to overcome “the naive metaphysics of the image” (1962: 4)—the habit of thinking of existence as necessarily physical. The reason the image has been conceived as a mere copy of a thing, as having the physical existence of a thing, is that as soon as one starts “thinking about images without forming them”(3) one easily identifies the image with an object since the image, in this case, is really the object of thought. The implication is that the true nature of imagination can be discovered not through thinking about images, but only through actually forming them i.e., the phenomenology of imagination must necessarily be imaginative. The phenomenologist cannot hope to understand the nature of images unless he is actually imagining i.e., he must become a fictioneer: Hence, if anyone loves a paradox, he can really say, and say with strict truth if he allows for the ambiguity, that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology as of all eidetical science is ‘fiction’, that fiction is the source whence the knowledge of ‘eternal truths’ draws its sustenance. (Husserl 1962: 184)

Because it begins from the assumption that imagination reveals the essence of the objects of consciousness, phenomenology often slips into circular logic. Richard Kearney’s Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Postmodern is symptomatic of such slippages:

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If we try to imagine a material thing without extension, or a melody without time, for example, we no longer have a material thing or a melody. Extension and temporality are thus shown ‘negatively’ to be of the essence of thinghood and music respectively. […] From perception alone we could never conclude that extension is integral to thinghood as an eidetic necessity. For if we were confined to our immediate perception we could not imagine instances where this might not be so, and thereby (by a process of negation) discover that it must be so. In perception, we could not present the test variations that turn out to be impossible and so mark the essential limits of an object. (1998: 24)

The assumption is made that since we cannot imagine a material thing without extension, the reality or essence of a material thing must include extension i.e., the standard has always already been given: a material thing without extension is no longer a material thing but something else. The limits of the object of investigation have already been established implicitly: after all, how do we know that a certain attribute does not really belong to an eidos we are trying to identify if we do not already possess the eidos implicitly? Then it’s not a question of adding or removing attributes to decide where the essential limits of the object lie, but merely of removing what we add to an already assumed essence: the inessential appears only retrospectively, only in excess of an essence already established. The phenomenological pursuit of the essential structures of consciousness is essentially retrospective: since there are no a priori criteria for establishing what qualifies as an essential structure of consciousness and what does not, whatever is revealed by intuition is always already an essence, because if it were not, it would not have been revealed by intuition in the first place: “Should the ‘exemplifying’ datum be pure fiction, the very fact that it was imaginable means that it embodied the soughtfor essence, for the essence is the very condition of its possibility”(Sartre 1962: 128).6 There is a perfect adequation between the method of phenomenology and its object of investigation inasmuch as phenomenology is a kind of “natural signification,” which reveals pre-reflectively the very essence of natural signification (the nature of the pre-reflective). As Lyotard puts it, central to phenomenology is its “tracing [of] knowledge back to a radical non-knowledge” (1991: 32).

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Sartre’s fantasy of ‘natural signification’ Sartre’s critique of the naïve metaphysics of the image (the idea that the image is just a copy of something existing in the material world and that it is, therefore, also material in nature) and of what he calls, in reference to Bergson’s image ontology, ‘the illusion of immanence’ (the idea that consciousness is immanent in matter and only needs to be ‘dissociated’ from it) conceals its own debt to metaphysics i.e. its implicit privileging of identity over difference. Bergson evacuates difference from his ontology by conceiving mind and matter as two complementary realities, as mirror-images of one another: hence the mediating role of the concept of the image and the denial of negation and absence, which threaten to introduce difference within the unity of being. The fantasy of self-identity or natural signification is not at all foreign to Sartre’s own thought: he argues that insofar as image-consciousness has no object other than itself, it is absolutely self-sufficient and thus contemporaneous with itself. We can follow Sartre’s pursuit of identity ‘beyond’ or ‘before’ its bastardization into difference by briefly considering his discussion of signification in art. In What Is Literature? Sartre’s prioritization of the absolute, the self-identical, the impersonal, and the pre-reflective comes through in his juxtaposition of ‘natural signification’ with ‘signification’. Opposing the idea of a parallelism of the arts, Sartre insists that unlike prose, which deals with signs, painting, sculpture, music and poetry remain mute (1988: 27) for they create things rather than signifying them. Although he admits, agreeing with Merleau-Ponty, that “there is no quality of sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with significance,” he nevertheless holds that the dim little meaning which dwells within it…remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist; it is colour or sound. Who can distinguish the green apple from its tart gaiety? And aren’t we already saying too much in naming ‘the tart gaiety of the green apple’? There is green, there is red, and that is all. They are things, they exist by themselves. […] Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing […] it is no longer readable. (1988: 25-27)

This dream of ‘natural’ signification permeates Sartre’s idea of poetry, inasmuch as in poetry words become “natural things which sprout

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naturally upon the earth like grass and trees” (29). The prose writer remains immersed in language whereas the poet “has withdrawn from language-instrument,” considering “words as things and not as signs” (29). Similarly, perception always remains immersed in the world but the image takes a perspective upon the world as a synthetic totality. Just as the poet is outside language, an image, too, is outside the world as a totality. Sartre considers signification a process that starts ‘inside’ and moves out, whereas natural signification (poetry) starts outside—the poet is outside language—and moves inside: “As he [the poet] is already on the outside, he considers words as a trap to catch an already fleeting reality rather than as indicators which throw him out of himself into the midst of things” (30). The relationship between the image and its object is like that between words and things in poetry, “a double reciprocal relation of magical resemblance and meaning” (31). Surprisingly, Sartre associates signification with non-reflexivity, and reflexivity with natural signification. Thus, he compares the prose writer’s relationship to language to a man’s relationship to his body: language is “a prolongation of [his] senses, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. […] [H]e is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly conscious of and through which he extends his action upon the world” (30). Although he uses language as an instrument of signification, he does so unreflectively—hence the comparison of language to the body, which we also use unreflectively. In this sense, language is the realm of action just as our body is the means by which we act upon the world and are ourselves acted upon. This odd conception of signification is based on an implicit reversal of terms: contrary to common sense, which considers signification and reflection synonymous, signification (the common use of language) is, in Sartre’s view, unreflective. The main use of language is to signify but even though this is the natural, original use of language, it is not what Sartre calls ‘natural signification’. Only the poet, who bypasses signification, creating “words-things” and “phraseobject[s]” (32) signifies naturally since he is outside language. The paradox becomes even more conspicuous when translated in terms of perception and image. Perception is signifying and unreflective, whereas the image is non-signifying and reflective. Yet, here reflection is not understood negatively (as objectification); on the contrary, reflection marks a return to the pre-reflective level of consciousness, from which the distinction between consciousness and its object is still missing. To attain (or return to) the privileged pre-reflective level of consciousness,

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one has to apprehend the world as a totality, surpass the real and posit the imaginary. Perception, like speech, corrupts the innocence of the prereflective: “To speak is to act; anything which one names is already no longer quite the same; it has lost its innocence” (36). Like Deleuze (see chapter five) Sartre thinks that in order to go back to pure perception, one must go beyond signification, which does not mean to go back to the body but, rather, to transcend the body and assume the most reflective attitude possible such as that of the poet who treats words as things, not as signs. Paradoxically, the more self-reflectively one uses language, the more natural or pure the signification. Note that the criterion for this ‘natural signification’ is always already on the other side of subjectivity i.e., the naturalness of signification is measured from the ‘point of view’ of signification itself, not from the subject’s point of view. In “The Quest for the Absolute” Sartre claims that not only is language an extension of our body, but the body itself is always already signifying, Just as one cannot dismember the body and consider one part of it in isolation from the rest, so one cannot consider signification as something man ‘learns’ to do rather than as constitutive of him: I can separate a bent branch from a tree but never an upraised arm or a clinched fist from a man. The man raises his arm, the man clinches his fist, the man is the indissoluble unit and the absolute source of his movements. Furthermore, he is an enchanter of signs; they cling to his hair, shine in his eyes, dance between his lips, perch on his fingertips. He speaks with his whole body; when he runs he speaks, when he talks he speaks, and when he falls asleep his sleep is speech. (1963a: 82-83)

And yet, the mere existence of the body, its involuntary acts and movements, does not refer to ‘natural signification’ as Sartre understands it. ‘Natural signification’, which starts on the outside and moves inside, bypassing subjectivity and representation, becomes possible only when the signification of the body breaks down, which is what happens to Roquentin in Nausea. (Here Sartre already anticipates Deleuze’s theory of the time-image as a response to the breaking down of the sensorymotor apparatus: see chapter five.) Roquentin’s bouts of nausea are accompanied by a change in his perception, whereby he begins to see certain parts of other people’s bodies as detachable from them.

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Husserl and Sartre Sartre was originally attracted to Husserl’s phenomenology on account of its realism, “its rejection of the model of consciousness as a selfcontained immanence ‘closeted off all warm and cosy.’ In its favor, phenomenology offered a consciousness that was outside of itself, always in touch with things, but never itself reduced to a thing”(Busch 1990: 4).7 The question whether or not Sartre was really a phenomenologist has been a matter of some debate. Maurice Natanson, for instance, contends that Sartre’s deviation from Husserl’s phenomenological method into his own method of ontological revelation prevented him from developing a satisfactory ontology (1972: 113). In Natanson’s view, Sartre’s method should not be called phenomenological since Sartre does not start with a Husserlian reduction. However, Sartre does not perform a phenomenological reduction simply because he deems it unnecessary in the case of consciousness which is already empty of any content.8 In “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology” Sartre criticizes the concept of intentionality and Husserl’s demand for a transcendental deduction via which we set aside any assumptions about the external world (such as the question of whether things really exist) and focus instead on the essential structures of consciousness. According to Sartre, since Husserl posited the ‘intentional objects’ of consciousness not as things existing outside consciousness but as identical with the contents of consciousness itself, he never passed beyond Kantian idealism and and ought to be considered a phenomenalist, not a phenomenologist: If, as Husserl says, everything is thus within consciousness, then the consciousness in question cannot be my consciousness or yours: for ‘I’ and ‘you’ are particular human beings, and so are themselves phenomena, items given to consciousness. The consciousness to which phenomena are presented must therefore be an impersonal consciousness, or […] a ‘transcendental ego’. (Matthews 1996: 62).

If intentionality means that all objects are outside consciousness, then this holds true of the self as well: the ego does not inhabit consciousness but is outside, in the world. Sartre challenges Husserl’s idea of a transcendental ego because it suggests that “the transcendental, like the vecu, is impersonal (or pre-personal), without an I; the I will emerge only ‘at the level of humanity’” (Sartre 1957: 36). Indeed, his rejection

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of the identification of consciousness with self recalls Bergson’s idea of impersonal pure memory as the originary consciousness from which individual consciousnesses are dissociated: Now we might wish to grant that consciousness, when it first comes to awareness of itself, does not yet know whose consciousness it is, without wishing to draw conclusion that it is not yet anybody’s consciousness; and we might wish to maintain that even if, at first, this unreflective consciousness is not the consciousness of self, it might subsequently become so. If this should come about, the self might be as fully an object of its own awareness as any other object could be, and yet not come thereby to be located in the world like those other objects, maintaining rather its status as a necessary condition of the world…and thus as transcendental. (Caws 1979: 55)

However, Sartre’s rejection of inner life—his belief that our entire mental life exists outside us—leads to the very same de-individuation of consciousness for which he criticizes Husserl: For if a consciousness is a ‘nothingness’—if it has no determinate content of its own—then there is literally nothing to distinguish one consciousness from another. A consciousness cannot be individuated by being connected to a particular body, or by existing in a particular historical situation, since consciousness exists only by negating its body or its historical situation. […] Indeed, paradoxically, there is nothing to make it this consciousness rather than that. (Matthews 1996: 79)

By denying that any trace of subjectivity remains after the epoché, Sartre leaves open the question: who performs the phenomenological study of consciousness after the epoché has been carried out? Clearly it could not be an impersonal, pure consciousness, and yet “the inquiry proceeds, not in the confused and bewildered way that ought presumably to be characteristic of a new-born consciousness without presuppositions, but making use of the full arsenal of logic and language (Caws 1979: 56). While apparently accepting the phenomenological method as his starting point, Sartre nevertheless challenges Husserl’s treatment of perception and image as analogues. Within the object of perception Husserl distinguishes between the real thing and the subjective impressions—the ‘hyle’—that the thing produces in consciousness. The ‘hyle’ or the matter of perception, according to Husserl, does not coincide with the real object of perception, but through the hyle consciousness aims at that real

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object. Thus, in the case of the perception of a red object, the red which we perceive is not the red of the object, but a subjective impression, through which we intend the red as the quality of the real object: The red is a quality of the thing, a transcendent quality. This subjective impression which is no doubt an ‘analogue’ of the red of the thing, is only a ‘quasi-red.’ That is to say, it is the subjective matter, the ‘hyle,’ on which operates an intention transcending itself and trying to snare the red out there. (Sartre 1962: 132)

Perception is not a psychic content, and neither is the image. Image and perception are analogues because their objects are both outside consciousness; what remains in consciousness is just the hyle of the object animated by the intentional structure of consciousness: “Rather, in the consciousness of a thing in image. […] Husserl distinguished, as in perception, an imaging intention and a hyle enlivened by the intention. The hyle naturally remains subjective, but by the same token the object of the image, unattached to the pure ‘content,’ resides outside consciousness as something radically different” (1962: 133). Husserl gives the example of the image of a flute-playing centaur, whose quasi-existence is analogous to the quasi-red of an object of perception. It is important to note that Husserl defines image-consciousness very generally as the consciousness of invention rather than as a particular invention, such as the flute-playing centaur. Image-consciousness does not descend to a particular image but remains only an indeterminate consciousness of invention in general, or invention as such. Bergson argues, along similar lines, that pure recollection is different from memory-images, which are merely a bastardized or degenerated version of it. It is as if Husserl does not quite know what to do with “the invented as such,” with the centaur which does not exist, and instead emphasizes the consciousness of invention which, insofar as it is part of Erlebnis, is at least real. Image and perception appear to be analogues because of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, whose necessity Sartre denies precisely on account of the fact that if such a reduction is performed it would be impossible to distinguish images from perceptions. What would be the difference then, Sartre asks, between the centaur, which does not exist, and the red object of perception, whose existence has been bracketed out? All that would remain would be the subjective ‘hyle’ of the red object and of the centaur, but between these two there is no difference. Husserl fails to realize that the image is always already ‘reduced,’ since

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image-consciousness does not intend an existing object i.e., there is no real object behind the quasi-existence of its analogue.9 There is no need for a phenomenological reduction because once the existence of the objects of perception is bracketed off, there would be no way of distinguishing perceptions from images. However, precisely the opposite is the case: To the extent that perception is not a thing, the existence of the objects of perception is always already outside consciousness so that even in the case of perception, we don’t have to reduce the natural attitude since we never even attain it. While essences are disclosed through the various kinds of modification or neutralization the phenomenological epoché makes possible i.e., through imagination or fancy, essences as such are not fictions, argues Husserl. It is difficult, however, to distinguish the phenomenological epoché from the neutralization of reality demanded by aesthetic observation. As a method for revealing essences,10 the epoché consists in the bracketing out of any theses pertaining to the reality of the things whose essence is to be disclosed. On the other hand, an imaginative consciousness, whose objects do not exist in the real world, is just as real as a consciousness of things existing in reality. Once the epoché has been carried out, there is no criterion for distinguishing empirical from imaginative consciousness. This is precisely the point of Sartre’s critique of Husserl. The only way Husserl can claim that the essences revealed by fancy are not themselves fictions is by redefining the distinction real/ unreal: although the objects of imaginative consciousness are not things actually existing in the real world, the consciousness of these unreal objects is itself real. This argument is, in turn, based on a distinction between the hyletic (sensile or material) and the intentional aspect of the object of consciousness (where the intentional aspect is the form-giving intention which animates the hyletic material). According to Sartre, Husserl’s most significant contribution to the psychology of imagination is that he challenged the disparaging view of the image as a support for pure thought or a perceptual trace: The image of my friend Peter is not a dim phosphorescence, a furrow left in consciousness by a perception of Peter. […] Thus, in the act of imagination consciousness refers to Peter directly, not by means of a simulacrum in consciousness. […] That ‘Peter in reduced format,’ that homunculus carted about by consciousness, was never of consciousness. It was an object in the physical world that had strayed among psychic realities. [Husserl expelled]...it from consciousness...asserting that

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there is but one Peter, the object of perception and images. (Sartre 1962: 134-135 my italics)

To say that the image is a simulacrum of the object of perception is to assume that the latter precedes the former and constitutes the standard by which reality is measured. But while perception is indeed an original reality, not determined by judgments but actually itself molding judgments, the image, too, is not the mere result of a judgment following perception, but rather gives rise to judgments. Since both image and perception are not determined by judgments but give rise to judgments, the difference between them may be sought in the different kinds of judgments they give rise to. If the existence or nonexistence of an object does not determine or influence an image, this suggests that existence in general is a matter of judgment and as such it does not determine perception either. Perception aims at the object’s existence, which is never assumed but must be established or rather constructed. If the existence of the object of image-consciousness and of the object of perceptual consciousness is equally outside consciousness, it cannot serve as a criterion for differentiating image from perception. There are no criteria to establish the difference between existence and nonexistence provided they are equally transcendent. The intentional structure of images and perceptions is not an appropriate criterion for differentiating between them either. Here Sartre refers to Husserl’s analysis of an engraving by Dürer: We distinguish here in the first place the normal perception of which the correlate is the ‘engraved print’ as a thing, this print in the portfolio. We distinguish in the second place the perceptive consciousness within which in the black lines in the picture there appear to us the small colourless figures, ‘knight on horseback’, ‘death’, and ‘devil’. In aesthetic observation we do not consider these as the objects; we have our attention fixed on what is portrayed ‘in the picture’, more precisely, on the ‘depicted’ realities, the knight of flesh and blood. […] That which makes the depicting possible and mediates it, namely, the consciousness of the ‘picture’…is now an example for the neutrality-modification of the perception. This depicting picture-object stands before us neither as being nor as non-being, nor in any other positional modality. (Husserl 1962: 287)

Husserl distinguishes between image and perception on the basis of their intentional structure such that in the case of an image “the ‘thesis’

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or positing of existence undergoes a neutralizing modification” (Sartre 1962: 136). The assumption behind this is that the hyle we grasp in the perception of an object and in the aesthetic contemplation of it in an image is one and the same. In order to show this, Husserl refers to an intermediate class of intentional objects, the class of physical images (portraits, photographs, drawings etc.) claiming that the apprehension of these external images does not differ from the apprehension of mental images. In Husserl’s view ‘external-image consciousness’ and its corresponding perceptual consciousness, though different in intention, “have an identical impressional matter or ‘stuff.’ Black lines serve as well for constituting the image ‘Knight’ as for the perception ‘Black marks on a white page’”(Husserl 1962: 137). But is this really so? Yes, black lines serve to constitute the external image of the Knight, but they do not constitute the Knight as the object of perception. The object of perception here is not the same as the object of the external image, because the object of perception is not the lines themselves (the object of the external image) but the knight in flesh and blood. Husserl fails to see that whereas in the case of perception, the hyle (the black lines) is just a means of reaching the true object of perception (the real knight) in the case of the external image the hyle (the black lines) is not the means but the very object of the image. He treats as equivalent the ‘hyle’ or the ‘stuff’ of external images and perceptions, because he also wants to argue that the hyle of mental images is not really different from that of external images and hence from that of perceptions, which would make a mental image not essentially different from a perception. In his view, both images and objects of perceptions are meanings, which fill out empty conceptions or perceptions. A subtle inversion underlies his argument: first, he considers the image as analogous to a thing, which, in turn, he views as the meaning filling out an otherwise empty perceptual frame. Thus, his notions of ‘noema’ and ‘noesis’ rest upon a reduction of the image to a thing, and the subtilization of the thing to a meaning. Sartre gives the gist of Husserl’s argument: Husserl declared that images have the function of ‘filling out’ empty conceptions... as do the things of perception. For example, if I think of a swallow, I may think it vacuously, that is to say, merely engender a signifying intention focused upon the word ‘swallow.’ But to fill out this empty awareness, turning it into an intuitive awareness, it is of no consequence whether I form an image of a swallow or

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whether I see a swallow in flesh and blood. This filling-out of the meaning by the image seems to imply that the image has a concrete impressional matter or ‘stuff’ which, like perception, is itself a fullness. (Sartre 1962: 137)

While Sartre admits that Husserl at least freed the image from its traditional identification with a sign, he also asserts that Husserl failed to refute the traditional conception of the ‘hyle’ of the image as a revived sensory impression. Husserl’s distinction between noesis and noema boils down to a distinction between the ‘hyle’ of an image or perception (the concrete psychic reality) on one hand, and the noema, which is the same in both cases since it is nothing real but an ideally existing meaning, supposedly inherent in consciousness: The set of real elements of the conscious synthesis (the ‘hyle’ and the various intentional acts which animate them) are distinguished from the ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’... which inhabit the consciousness. The concrete psychic reality is to be called noesis, and the indwelling meaning, noema. […] This ‘noematic meaning’ which belongs to every real consciousness, however, is itself nothing real. (Sartre 1962: 139)

Thus, even as Husserl’s notion of consciousness as intentionality11 put all objects of consciousness outside it, he became unfaithful to his own method when he posited the distinction between noesis and noema and reduced the blossoming tree (Husserl’s often quoted example) to the noematic meaning of our actual perception of it, making the tree as irreal as a flute-playing centaur (his other famous example). By reducing perception to the meaning of perception (to the noema), the phenomenological reduction blurs the distinction between the image of the tree and its perception, both of which are now detached from the real tree. Having identified the ‘hyle’ of images with that of perception, Husserl argues that what differentiates between them is the noema or the intention animating this identical ‘hyle’. Sartre, however, doubts that one can at will animate the matter of images and perceptions with whatever noematic meaning one chooses, one time animating the ‘hyle’ to form an image and another time to form a perception. (How exactly does this act of animation take place in the first place?) Sartre allows such hyletic ambivalence only in the case of external images, but not in the case of mental images. While we can choose to perceive the Dürer engraving either as a thing or as an image, in the case of mental images we are faced with the problem of “finding motives for forming ‘matter’ into a

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mental image rather than into a perception” (Sartre 1962: 141), because if the matter of a mental image is identical with that of a perception, one could have no valid reasons for forming a mental image rather than a perception, or vice versa. However, Sartre’s own notion of intentionality is fraught with contradictions. According to him, because consciousness is intentional it can withdraw from the world i.e. negate the objects of which it is conscious. Just because consciousness intends its objects does not necessarily mean that it can withdraw from them or negate them: to argue this is to assume that consciousness chooses to intend its objects, that ‘intending’ and ‘withdrawing’ are opposite though complementary acts preceded by an even more anterior choice, as if consciousness chooses either to intend or not to intend (to withdraw, to negate). However, the intentionality of consciousness is not an attribute of consciousness; after all, perceptual consciousness is intentional too. One cannot, therefore, use intentionality as a criterion for distinguishing perception from imagination. If intentionality is an essential structure of consciousness, it is necessary to establish the status of withdrawal—is it one with intentionality (but then perceptual consciousness would be as much of a negation of reality as image consciousness) or is it rather a product of intentionality? These contradictions come up again in Sartre’s conflicting views of the negating power of imagination: whereas his psychological analysis of imagination conceives nothingness as the self-enslavement of consciousness, his ontological analysis conceives nothingness as freedom (Kearney 1998: 76). Because of this, Sartre cannot make up his mind as to “whether we are free because we imagine or imagine because we are free” (80). Having failed to show how the intentional structure of images and perceptions can be used to differentiate between them, Husserl proposes another basis for such a distinction: mental images are active syntheses while perceptions are passive ones. Sartre finds this equally unacceptable: since the distinction between mental images and perceptions cannot be attributed to intentionality alone, the very ‘matter’ of images and perceptions must be different. External images may be classed together with perceptions, but both of these are fundamentally different from a mental image which, Sartre argues, is itself a spontaneity, a kind of consciousness (1962: 143). By splitting the object of consciousness into a formless matter (hyle) and matterless form (intention) Husserl merely repeats the Bergsonian ‘solution’ to the problem of dualism, which, as we saw in the previous

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chapter, entailed making matter constitutively ambiguous by thinking it as existing in two complementary aspects (conscious and unconscious/ pure perception). By reasoning in this way Bergson was able to argue that matter as an aggregate of images consists of both matter (unconscious perception) and perception (conscious perception). Similarly, Husserl’s hyle/intention pair blurs the distinction between real and unreal objects of consciousness, since Husserl argues that the intention is capable of animating the hyle either as a real or as an unreal object of consciousness i.e., the intention freely chooses whether to intend an object as real or imaginary. The ‘bastardization’ of impersonal consciousness Anticipating the juxtaposition of subjectivity and the Impersonal in the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and Deleuze, in The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre dismisses the ego as a kind of ‘bastardized’ version of pre-reflective consciousness; the ego is an imaginary construct because “[i]f it existed it would tear consciousness from itself; it would divide consciousness; it would slide into every consciousness like an opaque blade” (Sartre 1957: 40). To posit a transcendental ego is to suggest that consciousness is first of all reflective or positional, that it is only the transcendental ego that unifies consciousness. However, the fact that consciousness is “purely and simply consciousness of being consciousness of [an] object” (40) does not mean that it is reflective. On the unreflected level, there is no ‘I’ but only the world of objects: In fact, I am then plunged into the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousnesses…but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. […] And this is not a matter of chance, due to a momentary lapse of attention, but happens because of the very structure of consciousness. (49 my italics)

Sartre characterizes this unreflected level as an impersonal consciousness, in relation to which the ‘I’ is merely another relative existence: “The certain content of the pseudo-‘Cogito’ is not ‘I have consciousness of this chair,’ but ‘There is consciousness of this chair’” (53-54). Thus, on one hand, Sartre describes pre-reflective consciousness as indistinguishable from material reality while, on the other hand, prereflective, impersonal consciousness is consciousness as such. In other words, he posits material reality as a kind of unreflected, impersonal consciousness. Ironically, he will criticize Bergson for doing the same,

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for conceiving matter as a kind of impersonal consciousness and failing to explain how that impersonal consciousness individualizes itself. Sartre does not offer a better explanation for the transformation of impersonal consciousness into reflective consciousness, on the level of which the ego supposedly appears. He gives the example of “Peter who is in need of my help.” The first thing that exists is the object in its quality of “Peter-having-to-be-helped”: [A]t this level there is no ego but only the impersonal, non-thetic consciousness of Peter-having-to-be-helped. It is not I who feel sorry for Pierre and want to help him, but rather Pierre’s distress appears immediately as an object of impersonal or pre-personal consciousness. Only after reflection do I realize that it is I who am conscious of Pierre’s distress. In this and similar examples, Sartre emphasizes the fact that this impersonal consciousness is associated with “an objective world of things and of actions, done or to be done. (56)

Rather than explaining how this impersonal consciousness establishes contact with—or differentiates itself from—the world of objects, he merely laments the corruption of unreflected or impersonal consciousness by the act of reflection and the appearance of the ego: “[I]t is not my fault if my reflective life poisons ‘by its very essence’ my spontaneous life” (59 my italics). However, later he resorts to the same rhetoric of degradation, degeneration, corruption, poisoning or ‘dirtying’ to characterize the unreflected: “But the I, by falling from the reflective level to the unreflected level, does not simply empty itself. It degrades itself: it loses its intimacy” (90). The transition from the ‘I’ of reflection to the body, which belongs to the unreflected level, is also described in derogatory terms: “This is why the body and bodily images can consummate the total degradation of the concrete I of reflection to the ‘I-concept’ by functioning for the ‘I-concept’ as its illusory fulfillment” (90). Sartre’s largely incompatible claims in The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness provide further evidence of his ambivalent, and ambiguous, concept of reflective consciousness. In The Transcendence of the Ego he claims that the ego does not appear unless there is an act of reflection: “On the unreflected level I bring Peter help because Peter is ‘having to be helped.’ But if my state is suddenly transformed into a reflected state, there I am watching myself act” (59). However, the example of the waiter in Being and Nothingness contradicts this by implying that perhaps there is no purely unreflected or pre-reflec-

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tive level of consciousness. Sartre describes the waiter’s behavior in a way that suggests that even on the unreflected level of consciousness the waiter is watching himself act. The waiter unreflectively tries to coincide with himself, to be a waiter the way an inkwell is an inkwell; he does not simply act but rather performs the typical actions of a waiter, even if he is not reflectively conscious of his doomed attempt to ‘be’ a waiter. His spontaneous life appears to be always already ‘poisoned’ by the absolute impossibility to be himself. To take Sartre at his words, we may ask: How would this authentic, spontaneous, unreflected consciousness of a waiter differ from the inkwell which is completely and fully an inkwell? It is precisely because consciousness can never coincide with itself that a pure unreflected consciousness is an impossibility i.e. the impossibility of self-identity is due to the constant play of unreflected and reflecting consciousnesses. The unreflected or the absolutely spontaneous remains hypothetical or ideal but is never actualized since such an actualization would produce nothing else but the in-itself, pure self-identity. The passion with which Sartre denies the existence of a transcendental ego is symptomatic of his general suspiciousness of reflexivity or difference, even if such suspiciousness goes against his own ideas about the nature of the for-itself. Although he discusses the for-itself in terms of its constitutive difference from itself, he also wants to think consciousness as perfectly self-transparent and lucid i.e. precisely as not different from itself. Thus, he explains that if it were true that all our acts are accompanied by a transcendental ego, there could not be anything resembling pure intimacy; rather, one would be always assuming the natural standpoint with regard to oneself, always regarding oneself from the outside, as an object. To prevent the subject/object dualism from obscuring the clarity and transparency of consciousness “all transcendence must fall under the [epoché]” (51). By ‘transcendent’ Sartre understands reflexive and, thus, questionable, relative, as opposed to purely active and spontaneous: “This is to say that everything given to us by our intuitions of the ego is always given as capable of being contradicted by subsequent intuitions” (75). Sartre’s analysis of the relationship between pure, impersonal consciousness and the transcendental ego that ‘poisons’ it recalls the comparison between image and perception in the books on imagination. Perception has all the characteristics attributed to the ego: it is always unfinished, questionable, relative. The image, on the other hand, is absolute, complete, given whole in intuition. Perception still operates on

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the principle of figure/ground i.e. it is by nature metonymical, whereas the image is beyond figuration or representation since it refers only to itself: the image cannot add anything to the world, nor can the world add anything to it. The image is neither a product of the ego (the result of an act of reflection) nor a psychic state at whose edges the ego appears. Therefore, just as the ego is outside, in the midst of other objects and, like them, appears to consciousness, so perception is also outside, in the world. It mimics the spontaneity of the image just as the ego’s spontaneity is merely a bastardization of the absolute authentic spontaneity of unreflected consciousness. If perceptual consciousness is merely reflective ego consciousness, perception cannot be the primary reality: There is consciousness of something” rather than “I have a consciousness of something.” It is not I who creates a consciousness of something, but consciousness creates the I. The original reality is “given above all as individuated and impersonal spontaneity […] We may therefore formulate our thesis: transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity. It determines its existence at each instant, without our being able to conceive anything before it. Thus each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo. Not a new arrangement, but a new existence. (98-99)

Here Sartre sounds very ‘Bergsonian’, even as he hastens to distance himself from Bergson: “The commonly accepted thesis, according to which our thoughts would gush from an impersonal unconscious and would ‘personalize’ themselves by becoming conscious, seems to us a coarse and materialistic interpretation of a correct intuition” (98 my italics). Bergson defines consciousness in its purest state as ‘something’ impersonal and unconscious (Pure Memory); Sartre, on the other hand, posits an impersonal and unreflected, but nevertheless conscious, consciousness. But what does Sartre really mean by ‘unreflected consciousnesses’? Over and over again he repeats that reflection (which appears with human consciousness) degrades the unreflected world which, in turn, implies that true spontaneity does not come from us, as subjects, but is a characteristic only of a pre-human world. Sartre’s example of ‘bastard spontaneity’ can help clarify his use of these terms. He introduces the case of a person mimicking another person as an example of the “degraded aspects of conscious spontaneity” (81 my italics). Since mim-

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icking belongs to the level of reflective consciousness (the ego), not to the level of pure consciousness, it seems that Sartre is identifying the ego with conscious spontaneity, the assumption being that genuine spontaneity—that of consciousness—is unconscious. In other words, whenever Sartre speaks of consciousness, he means unreflected consciousness or what we would commonly call the unconscious—however, Sartre believes that even in the absence of reflection, there is consciousness, because consciousness itself cannot be reduced to reflexivity)—and whenever he speaks of reflection, he means the ego and its ‘bastardized’ (reflected) spontaneity. Everything around us, Sartre claims, “is given to us degraded, that is to say, passive. We are thus surrounded by magical objects, which retain, as it were, a memory of the spontaneity of consciousness, yet continue to be objects of the world” (81-82). The distinction he draws between “magical objects” and “objects of the world” is that between consciousness as absolute spontaneity (image consciousness) and consciousness that is already distinct from its objects (perceptual consciousness). Before consciousness degrades itself into passivity and reflexivity—i.e. perceptual consciousness—it exists in a magical ‘state’ of pure activity i.e., it exists as image consciousness. Originally, then, the things we perceive are not objects in the world, separate from our consciousness of them; rather, the world is a single magical consciousness. It seems that the only way Sartre can posit a significant difference between image and perception is to conceive material reality, a la Bergson, as a vast, impersonal consciousness, which exists only virtually or retrospectively from the point of view of an always already degraded consciousness. In a way, Sartre re-inscribes the transcendence he refutes in The Transcendence of the Ego: on one hand, he denies the existence of a transcendental ego since the ego is an object for consciousness but, on the other hand, he posits a ‘magical’ consciousness which ontologically precedes the everyday consciousness of the world. Supposedly, this magical consciousness can be revived by the imagination i.e. the objects of image consciousness are not “objects of the world” but ‘magical’ objects or spontaneous consciousnesses. In the final analysis, then, Sartre’s idea of “the surpassing of the me [the ego] by consciousness” (99) appears as a reworking, rather than a refutation, of Bergson’s notion of Pure Memory as ontologically ‘older’ than subjectivity.

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Nevertheless, Bergson attributes the richness of our mental life, as well as our freedom, to Pure Memory, whereas Sartre finds the surpassing of the ego by consciousness somewhat disturbing: There is something distressing for each of us, to catch in the act this tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators. At this level man has the impression of ceaselessly escaping from himself, of overflowing himself. […] Consciousness is frightened by its own spontaneity because it senses this spontaneity as beyond freedom. (99-100)

Dread—consciousness’s fear of itself—is constitutive of pure consciousness. The conclusion of The Transcendence of the Ego reads as an excerpt from Bergson: The World has not created the me; the me has not created the World. These are two objects for absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it is by virtue of this consciousness that they are connected. This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of the I, no longer has anything of the subject. […] It is quite simply a first condition and an absolute source of existence. (105-106 my italics)

Sartre’s intolerance for reflexivity and his privileging of pre-reflective consciousness participates in the discourse of the impersonal I am outlining here. The subject is a doubtful object, whose relationship to our states, qualities, and actions, of which it is the spontaneous unification, Sartre describes as “a relation on the order of poetic production […] or a relation of creation” (77). None of our states or actions have been formerly given; rather, they are continually created and would be characterized, in the rhetoric of the postmodern aesthetic of the sublime, as ‘events’. The transition from the ego to its states is always somewhat magical i.e. unintelligible or irrational (79). However, the spontaneity attributed to the ego should not be confused with the spontaneity of consciousness, because “the ego, being an object, is passive. It is a question, therefore, of a pseudo-spontaneity. […] Genuine spontaneity [that of consciousness] must be perfectly clear: it is what it produces and can be nothing else” (79). Everything that is an object for consciousness is necessarily passive; only consciousness is pure activity. Insofar as “the ego is always surpassed by what it produces” (80) its spontaneity is pseudo-spontaneity.12 Sartre’s opposition of ego and consciousness in terms of their spontaneity makes of genuine spontaneity a pure co-

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incidence of the creator with the created thing, the absolute absence of difference. Thus, pre-reflected consciousness begins to resemble the in-itself. Since both are described as self-identical, the only room for difference in Sartre’s ontology is guaranteed precisely by the ego’s pseudo-spontaneity which he so obviously disparages: The ego is a virtual locus of unity, and consciousness constitutes it in a direction contrary to that actually taken by the production: really, consciousnesses are first; through these are constituted states; and then, through the latter, the ego is constituted. But, as the order is reversed by a consciousness which imprisons itself in the world in order to flee from itself, consciousnesses are given as emanating from states, and states as produced by the ego. It follows that consciousness projects its own spontaneity into the ego-object in order to confer on the ego the creative power which is absolutely necessary to it. But this spontaneity, represented and hypostatized in an object, becomes a degraded and bastard spontaneity, which magically preserves its creative power even while becoming passive. Whence the profound irrationality of the notion of an ego. (81 my italics)

There is a striking parallel between this passage from The Transcendence of the Ego and Bergson’s account of memory in Matter and Memory. Bergson traces the movement from pure memory to memory images to, perception; similarly, Sartre insists that the primary being consists of pure, unreflected consciousnesses, which become actualized in states, leading to the appearance of the ego-object. Pure memory is for Bergson what unreflected consciousness is for Sartre: just as pure memory is degraded into memory images, so unreflected consciousness is degraded into reflected consciousness. The image is a completely immaterial reality, different from perception, which, even if viewed as interpretation, is still material in nature insofar as all our memories, especially habit memory, are embodied. The image, however, is absolutely free of memory, and hence of the world. From this point of view, Sartre makes himself vulnerable to the same objection he voiced with respect to Bergson, who, he claimed, failed to account for the birth of a particular consciousness from absolute impersonal consciousness i.e. from pure memory. Now we can ask of Sartre: What particularizes an image consciousness if it is absolutely free of memory? If image consciousness is unreflected, and thus unattributable to a subject, what distinguishes one image from another?

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For his part Bergson admits that reflexivity cannot be avoided, that it is part of our mental life even when it is unconscious. Pure memory “does not necessarily mean conscious recollection, only the preservation of the past in us, even without conscious recall” (Matthews 1996: 33). In Bergson’s philosophy nothing comes to pass suddenly, without preparation, unreflected on, absolutely self-sufficient and isolated from the rest of our mental life. This is why Sartre’s notion of the image does not fit here at all: the Sartrean image has the character of an event, and no events are possible in Bergson’s philosophy. Although it is a philosophy of continuous creation, there is no place in it for pure, absolute creation that breaks the flow. On the other hand, Sartre’s idea of the image preserves the possibility for such breaks: the image is not a part of the flow of time. Sartre’s conception of the real as appearing only on the level of reflective (ego) consciousness anticipates Deleuze’s notion of the “timeimage” as falsification inasmuch as on the level of pure consciousness there is no concept of freedom, free will or the real, because all these distinctions appear only with the ego i.e. on the reflective level: Everything happens, therefore, as if consciousness constituted the ego as a false representation of itself, as if consciousness hypnotized itself before this ego which it has constituted, absorbing itself in the ego as if to make the ego its guardian and its law. It is thanks to the ego, indeed, that a distinction can be made between the possible and the real, between appearance and being, between the willed and the undergone. (Sartre 1957: 101)

If the ego is the level on which the distinction between the real and the unreal emerges, and if consciousness overflows the ego, neutralizing all such distinctions, the difference between our real and our imaginative lives must be only a matter of degree: the distinction between real and unreal is only an object for consciousness and is thus reflected (doubted) indefinitely. Imagination Imagination begins with a historical overview of the major theories of the image, starting with Descartes and ending with Husserl.13 Sartre compiles a list of claims he will challenge: 1) The image is merely the repetition of a sensation. 2) Behind a series of images there is pure thought that organizes and transcends the images which, left to

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themselves, follow one another in no particular or necessary order; pure thought itself is always present but inaccessible to immediate awareness except through an effort of abstraction from individual images. 3) Images serve the formation of concepts. 4) Since thought is inaccessible to immediate awareness, the work of the creative imagination, i.e. all synthesis, takes place outside consciousness and cannot be described phenomenologically. These premises are invalid because they are based on a falsely formulated problem: All the trouble lay in having to come to images with the idea of synthesis, instead of deriving a certain conception of synthesis from reflection upon images. The problem raised was the following one: How can the existence of images be reconciled with the requirements of synthesis? They failed to realize that an atomistic conception of images was already contained in the very manner of formulating the problem. There is no avoiding the straightforward answer that so long as images are inert psychic contents, there is no conceivable way to reconcile them with the requirements of synthesis. An image can only enter into consciousness if it is itself a synthesis, not an element. There are not, and never could be, images in consciousness. Rather, an image is a certain type of consciousness.14 An image is an act, not some thing. An image is a consciousness of some thing. (1962: 146)

Undoubtedly, it is Bergson’s counterintuitive reformulation of basic philosophical categories—body, consciousness, representation, matter—that provokes Sartre’s critique of Bergson in Imagination. Indeed, Bergson juggles categories in such a way that eventually they begin displacing one another: matter ‘becomes’ image, body ‘becomes’ consciousness, and consciousness ‘becomes’ memory. It is tempting to agree with Sartre that Bergson has merely inverted the traditional relationships between body and consciousness, that he has simply made everything mental physical and everything physical mental. Sartre focuses on differences in kind that Bergson has reduced to differences in degree and criticizes Bergson for conflating images with things, images with perceptions, perceptions with memories, imagination with memory-images and, more generally, mind with matter. To begin, Sartre objects to Bergson’s claim that to obtain the image of a thing is the same as to have a perception of the thing. As we saw, for Bergson the image or perception of a thing is attained by a process of dissociation: by merely dissociating the thing from the network of other things in which it is embedded, one produces an image of the

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thing. Before I turn to Sartre’s objection, I want to draw attention to a contradiction inherent in Bergson’s definition of perception as not adding anything to the object but being merely ‘extracted’ from it. To argue that perception is an extraction or a condensation of the object presupposes that one already knows the limits of the object, which is impossible since then perception would have to encompass more of the flow of images than Bergson would allow. In other words, Bergson cannot bypass the paradox that to know that perception is a selection is to know what it is a selection from: the knowledge that it is part of a whole presupposes at least some knowledge of the whole. Furthermore, it is difficult to understand what Bergson really means when he defines perception as selection of that which is of interest to our body. What determines this interest? For example, as I look up at the wall before me, I perceive several photographs and a few other objects. How do I ‘choose’ whether the photographs or any of the other random objects are of interest to me? It is true that the phone, for example, which is further away from me and which I could perceive only if I turned in its direction, is of no interest to me right now, so I do not turn around and do not perceive it. But the photographs and the other objects are of no greater interest to me than the phone—they just happen to be in my field of vision. By identifying perception with action, Bergson limits perception to that which is necessary. But most of the time there is absolutely no necessity to what we perceive, hence no interest. Conversely, necessity is not just applicable to action but can attach itself to imagination as well. Just as in some cases what we perceive is of no interest to us (since not everything we perceive is a preparation for action and it makes no sense to say that it is a potential action, because there is a difference in kind, not in degree, between real and potential action), so on certain occasions what we imagine is of interest to us (for instance, someone bored and tired of his life in the city will easily imagine a distant, exotic land as a way of escaping his real life). In response to Bergson’s notion of the image as dissociated from the aggregate of images, Sartre objects that the image is self-sufficient and complete15 and, therefore, there is no need to dissociate it from something supposedly larger than it. Only material things are embedded in a network of other things; an image does not have the inert material reality of a thing but produces itself spontaneously. Sartre’s gloss of Bergson’s theory of the image is not entirely accurate: he proceeds as if Bergson first distinguished perceptions from images and then confused them,

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reducing images to memory images or revived perceptions. However, contrary to Sartre’s reading, Bergson never argues that images are things but, rather, that things are images, and that perception is nothing more than the response of our body, an image among images, to other images. Bergson does not start from the idea that an image is a mental kind of existence, whose origin then has to be explained, but from the intuition that originally there is only one kind of existence: a universal, pure, impersonal consciousness. Still, Sartre is correct in arguing that Bergson has not explained how an individual consciousness dissociates itself from this impersonal consciousness, which is itself indistinguishable from matter. Next, Sartre addresses Bergson’s argument that matter itself consists of images, that representation is virtually inherent in images (in matter), and that there is no qualitative difference between being and being consciously perceived: “This amounts to saying that everything is first given as participating in consciousness, or rather as consciousness. Otherwise no reality could ever become conscious, could ever take on a character alien to its very nature” (38). Unlike Sartre’s notion of consciousness as consciousness of something, Bergson’s consciousness seems to be a kind of reality simply given: “It cannot arise where it is not, it cannot begin or cease to be. What is more, it can be in a purely virtual state, unaccompanied by an act or by any manifestation whatsoever of its presence” (39). Because of the special nature of the image that is our body, other images can appear to us. But what is this consciousness to which other images appear? Where does it come from? Since Bergson does not consider this question, he must assume that the appearing of other images is already consciousness. Insofar as consciousness is not ‘added’ to the body but is rather the possibility, inherent in our image-body, for other images to appear to it, consciousness is nothing but the delay interposed between a stimulus and a response: There is no need to derive consciousness, Bergson said, since to posit the material world is to have a collection of images. There is no question of getting consciousness out of things if a thing is already consciousness in its very existence. But by a change in terminology Bergson did not, as he thought, eliminate the problem. We still need to know how to pass from unconscious image to conscious image, from the virtual to the actual. ...In particular, we may ask how this unconscious, impersonal consciousness becomes the conscious consciousness of an individual

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While he explains how the body, in the act of perception, individualizes other images, Bergson cannot explain how the body itself is individualized, how it differentiates itself from other images. On one hand, he argues that consciousness is already inherent in matter and only needs to be dissociated from it like a picture; on the other hand, such dissociation is possible only through a special kind of image, the human body, whose unique nature lies precisely in its ability to individualize other images i.e., the human body is consciousness. Thus, consciousness does not yet exist in actuality, but at the same time, the actualization of consciousness presupposes an already existing, actual consciousness (the human body). By treating representation as the mere dissociation of an image from other images, Bergson reduces representation to the order of things. This prevents Bergson from providing a satisfactory account of the transformation of an image into a memory-image. Since an image is produced by the action of the body on the image and its related images, once this action stops, the image should sink back to its original status of a virtual consciousness. What motivates such an image to be preserved in memory? As long as Bergson argues that representation does not add anything to the thing but merely isolates it from other things, he remains unable to explain creative imagination and memory. To argue that imagination or representation or memory are already given, existing in potentia and only awaiting actualization, is to attribute to them a being-in-itself, the being of inert things. On the contrary, Sartre believes the image is a reality radically different from a thing and there is more than a mere difference in degree between being and being perceived, between being perceived and being represented. The aporias in Bergson’s thought can be attributed to his ambivalent concept of consciousness as, on one hand, “an actuality resulting from the bodily state” and, on the other hand, “the capacity to escape the present and the body, in short, memory” (47). Whenever Bergson identifies consciousness with the present, with the body, he fails to distinguish between image and perception, and whenever he identifies consciousness with memory, with the suppression of the body, he cannot explain those cases in which recollections appear not by embodying themselves

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but precisely by suppressing the body (as in the case of paramnesia, dreams etc.) Having posited perception is active and memory as inoperative, Bergson cannot explain what motivates memory to inscribe itself in perception i.e., why memories appear in the first place: “The past, Bergson held, is at least as real as the present, which is but a limit. An unconscious representation exists as fully as a conscious one. Whence, then, this desire to incarnate itself in a body both alien in character and unnecessary to its existence?”(49). In the final analysis, Bergson remains imprisoned in the old conception of the image as differing only in degree from perception, for he sees no difference “between a memory-image, which is a fragment of the past incarnated in a present motor schema... and a perception, which is a present motor schema incarnating a past memory” (50). By suggesting that the image does not require the surpassing of our body since it is nothing other than our body’s response to other images, he does away with the slightest possibility for transcendence. Although Sartre tacitly acknowledges Bergson’s contribution to phenomenology,16 ultimately he believes that Bergson merely performed a cosmetic surgery on the associationist theory of images and, while trying to attribute spontaneity and fluidity to consciousness, left the idea of the image as a thing unchallenged.17 Bergson seemed to distance himself from the associationist viewpoint, according to which perception brings back memory-images and those bring back the ideas corresponding to them; he argued instead that one always starts from ideas, which are then developed into memory-images, and these finally translated into perceptions. Nevertheless, the legacy of associationism remains in Bergson’s view of images as merely illustrating ideas, breaking them down into smaller bits more easily capable of inserting themselves into the sensory-motor apparatus.18 Bergson’s failure to overcome associationism, according to Sartre, proceeds from a badly formulated question: “[How] to link the activity and unity of thought to the inert multiplicity of the sensory” (63-64). While this question rests on the unstated assumption that images are merely copies of objects, for Sartre images “are only procedures for rendering objects present in a certain way” (64). The question of the image is incorrectly formulated insofar as it is assumed to belong to the mind-body problematic, with the image being placed on the side of sense-data (the body): “Imagination, along with the sensory [la sensibilite], remained the realm of bodily passivity” (76) since the point is “to understand how matter can receive a form, how sensory passivity can be

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activated by the spontaneity of mind” (76). But it is a mistake to separate images from thought in the first place only to search in vain afterwards for a way to explain how the passive (images) can be connected to pure activity (thought). Bergson’s error is to reduce ‘image’ to ‘sign’, which locates it ‘outside thought’ since “[a] sign, after all, remains always an external, physical support for the signifying intention” (82).19 Sartre distinguishes image from sign on the basis of their respective objects. The relationship between a sign and its object is external, whereas that between an image and its object is one of possession. By means of the analogue in image consciousness, the real thing appears directly to consciousness: It is assumed that the mental image of a horse is a copy of a horse (something of a lesser horse). And between this well-constituted lesser horse, and the horse of flesh and bone there could be but an external relationship: the relationship of a sign to the thing signified. We have tried to show, on the contrary, that there is an internal relationship between the horse and its image, what we have called a relationship of possession: by means of the analogue it is the horse itself that appears to consciousness. (Sartre 1963b: 120)

Because image consciousness is not directed at an object but is already the object itself, it is already “filled.” The sign is not a consciousness but a thing outside consciousness, which represents by proxy another thing also external to consciousness. While Russell criticized Bergson for collapsing the distinction between the act of knowing and the object of knowledge, Sartre thinks that whereas Bergson should have collapsed this distinction, he did not. Consciousness does not ‘wait’ for images: the image is already a consciousness. Occasionally Bergson modifies the idea of the image developed in Matter and Memory; for example, in his essay “Philosophical Intuition” (in The Creative Mind) he presents the image as a mediating term, as “almost matter in that it may still be seen and almost mind in that it cannot be touched.”20 The most truthful account of the image, Sartre claims, is to be found in Bergson’s theory of intuition, which positions the image closer to intuition than to concepts. Apart from that, however, Bergson did not seriously challenge the traditional view of the image as merely a renascent sensation, but only made the image more flexible: “[Bergson’s] living image drew its meaning, as it reappeared, from the moment of psychic life in which it appeared. The sensory content

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was always there, but the form it adopted was constantly undone and redone” (Sartre 1962: 62). But how can one conceive a sense-datum that is active, that creates itself spontaneously, Sartre asks. Conversely, if the sense-datum does not create itself freely but is merely a quality, it appears inert, passive. Yet, how could there be passive, inert things in consciousness, which is all activity? Bergson merely made the associationist image appear more malleable, covered with “living, delicate mists which change ceaselessly” (63). Sartre acknowledges that when Bergson describes the life of consciousness as a continuous dilation and contraction, he seems to modify his idea of the image: In these accounts the relation of image to perception is quite different from the account given earlier [in the first chapter of Matter and Memory]. The image duplicated the perception like a shadow; indeed, an image was said to be the perception itself fallen into the past, the image-thing simply isolated from its surroundings so as to become a picture-image. Now, on the contrary, perception seems to contain synthetically a multitude of images, which the tension of the body endows with an individual unity, and which scatter as soon as the body lets go. (52-53)

Bergson first argues that perception is latent in matter and through a process of dissociation it becomes actual: the image is nothing but this transformation of perception from virtual to actual representation. However, he later suggests that, insofar as there is no pure perception, perception already contains images (memory-images), which are released depending on the level of our body’s attention to life, the degree to which it is immersed in the present. The trouble is that he does not really explain how images appear in perception in the first place and what kind of transition is effected between matter, perception-images, and memory-images. The Psychology of Imagination In The Psychology of Imagination Sartre continues his critique of Husserl’s theory of the image, which he regards as just another case of the illusion of immanence insofar as, according to Husserl, the image “comes ‘to fill in’ an empty consciousness” whereas Sartre thinks “it is itself a consciousness” (1963b: 83). The image is not merely the meaning of an already existing though empty consciousness but is itself already a kind of knowledge or synthesis of meaning though certainly

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different from pure knowledge; Sartre calls it a “debased knowledge” because it is not conceptual but “affirms itself to itself as waiting for the visual” (93). Sartre’s visual bias21 becomes obvious in his illustration of this debasement through an analysis of the act of reading. When reading a novel, he remarks, one thinks of the words not as pure meanings but envisions them as qualities of things: The physiognomy of the word becomes the representative of the physiognomy of the object. A real contamination takes place. When I read ‘this beautiful person,’ the words no doubt mean, above all, a certain young woman, the heroine of the novel. But to a certain degree they represent the beauty of the young woman. (95)

Sartre’s point is that this envisioning is already a kind of knowledge, though different from pure meaning, which he identifies with conceptual knowledge only. Imaginative knowledge is debased because it has more affinity with sensation—one thinks of the words as representing qualities of real things—than with concepts.22 Thus, Sartre wants to have it both ways: on one hand, he wants to argue that the image too is a form of knowledge, but on the other hand, he does not want to disturb the traditional hierarchy of kinds of knowledge (concepts or ideas always occupying the top places) and, accordingly, he calls the image a ‘debased’ knowledge. The Psychology of Imagination deviates from the main argument put forward in Imagination because, contrary to his claims for the superiority of image over perception, Sartre actually derives image from perception, considering perception “a prime source of knowledge,” to which “we constantly adapt our frames of reference” (99). This is not entirely surprising given that even the organization of Imagination already places imagination in a subordinate position to perception: L’Imagination must...begin with perception, which starts things off, which, of itself, is the starting point. For the inverse is not true: imagination is unable to establish the difference [between perception and imagination]. ‘To affirm: I perceive, which is to deny that I am dreaming’. (Hollier 1986: 51)

Sartre’s method is to explain what an image is by explaining what it is not: “Imagination presupposes the reality which it denies. The absence is secondary in relation to the presence whose lack it thematizes” (Hollier 1986: 52). Instead of affirming the autonomy of the imagination, which

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is what he supposedly set out to do, Sartre reduces imagination to perception by equating absence (which is constitutive of image-consciousness as nihilation) with mere invisibility or imperceptibility. In every example of an image he offers (mental as well as physical images: portraits, caricatures, drawings) the absence of an object is tacitly equated with its invisibility (there are no references whatsoever to the other senses): “[W]hether I see or imagine that chair, the object of my perception and that of my image are identical: it is that chair of straw on which I am seated. Only consciousness is related in two different ways to the same chair” (Sartre 1963b: 7 my italics). All examples involving images of Peter stress Peter’s absence from perception: for example, the image of Peter who is in another city. Following Sartre’s reasoning, we ought to say that an object in another room, or in this room but hidden behind a vase, should be considered absent. For what is the difference between Peter who is present in Berlin but absent here, in Paris, and an object which is present behind the vase but absent from my field of vision?23 Even as he claims that the image is an autonomous reality, Sartre continues to derive it from perception: “More exactly, the object as an image is a definite want; it takes shape as a cavity. A white wall as an image is a white wall which is absent from perception” (179). The reduction of being to presence, and thus of absence or unreality to mere imperceptibility, is again driven home when Sartre admits the possibility of reacting to an image as if it were a perception: “Alive, appealing, and strong as the image is, it presents its object as not being. This does not prevent us from reacting to the image as if its object were before us” (18). Here being is identified with being before me. Furthermore, although Sartre denies that the positional act constitutive of the image creates a gap between creator and created, he also insists that the content of an image is merely a representative of the object of the image, a claim which puts too much stress on the object of the image: “So our conclusion is that the image is an act which envisions an absent or non-existent object as a body, by means of a physical or mental content which is present only as an ‘analogical representative’ of the object envisioned”(1963b: 26). No distinction is made here between the mental and physical content of images but both are presented as equally analogical representatives of something non-existent. Even a mental content is just an analogue of ‘the real’ mental content that is the imagined object.

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Thus, it is not only physical things (like portraits) that refer to a mental content but even the mental content is only a sign for something else: it is not the imagined object itself but only its analogical representation. Sartre collapses the distinction between physical images and mental images, between physical images referring to real or non-existent things (e.g. portraits of real or imagined people) and mental images of real or non-real objects. These four categories of images are mixed up because they are all represented by analogy, which, Sartre argues, can be either physical or mental, where the latter is not a ‘better,’ more authentic or more accurate analogical representation than the former. This lack of distinction between physical and mental content of images contradicts Sartre’s idea of the image as a consciousness, an absolute spontaneity beyond difference and representation. Having argued that the image is not a representation or a sign, Sartre now regards all images (even mental ones) as merely analogical representations of another mental content.24 The confusion in Sartre’s analysis is partly due to his choice of examples: all his examples of absent things involve things that actually exist, though outside the field of perception, to the exclusion of imaginary objects. This suggests that the only time a mental image comes into being is when the real thing is absent which, in turn, attributes to the mental image a compensatory function: the image comes to fill in the empty ‘space’ unoccupied by perception. Thus, Sartre relies upon a double standard of absence: when he is discussing perception he does not equate invisibility with absence but with incompleteness, but when he is discussing images, he treats absence and invisibility as synonymous. Sartre actually regards image and perception as complementary, rather than opposing, realities. First, he observes that if it were that hard to distinguish images from perception—if the difference between them was a matter of judgment rather than of intuition—we would be constantly confusing images with perceptions and vice versa, and our images would be for the most part fantastic, unreasonable, lyrical, and so different from our everyday perceptions. […] Instead, what is, in the main, the imaginary world in which I live? Well, I am waiting for my friend Peter, who could arrive at any moment, and I form a representation of his face. Last night I went to John’s house, and I recall what he was wearing. I then think of the detachable collars in my dresser, then of my inkwell, etc., etc. Nothing real contradicts all these familiar images. […] In fact, our train of images takes its cue most of the time from our train of perceptions, what

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we imagine merely preceding by a little what is coming up, or succeeding by a bit what has already occurred. (Sartre 1962: 99-101)

Paradoxically, we can always distinguish an image from a perception precisely because our images are never really outlandish, never contradicted by reality but merely lagging behind it or speeding up ahead of it. Like Bergson, whom he criticizes on this very ground, Sartre reduces images to memory-images (images lagging behind reality) or expectations, hopes (images that precede perceptions, reality). If an image differs from a perception, but this difference is only a matter of time, as it were (the image lags behind or speeds up ahead of perception), is every object that escapes my perception necessarily an image? Is the image I form of the back side of a cube qualitatively the same as the image I form of a thing that I know does not exist in reality, for example an entity made of bones and melted glass? What motivates consciousness to replace an absent or imperceptible object with an image? More and more imagination appears as already latent within perception and merely awaiting the ‘slipping’ of the object from perception. To use Sartre’s own example: I close my eyes and I no longer see the piece of paper I am writing on. I then create a mental image of the piece of paper, which is absent from the point of view of my body as it sits at the table, eyes closed. The object is thus negated from the particular point of view of my vision. The image is produced by the mere turning off of perception (i.e. of the body): the image is the imperceptible and nothing more.25 Images, unlike objects of perceptions, are not ‘seen’, although people still talk about images in terms of ‘seeing’ them. That an image is not seen means that it is never localized or spatialized26 since “to perceive a thing is, in effect, to put it in its place among other things” (Sartre 1963b: 53). The image lacks the clarity, richness, attention to detail, and individuality of a perception. It is “never anterior to knowledge” (55) which is why it teaches nothing and never surprises us: it appears at once so that its very appearance is all the knowledge we can have of it. Since hypnagogic images or consciousnesses develop during the time of falling asleep (57), sleep is the first level at which imaginative consciousness emerges, positing no difference between the appearing of the object and the consciousness of it. It is precisely ‘pathological’ manifestations of the imagination such as dreams and hallucinations that reveal the fundamentally impersonal,

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pre-reflective nature of consciousness. A dream or a hallucination is an ‘impersonal consciousness’ or a ‘pure event’ because there is no ‘thematic consciousness’ involved. The dream is “the perfect realization of a shut imaginary consciousness, that is, a consciousness for which there is absolutely no exit and toward which no external point of view of any sort is possible” (240). Hallucinations—visual or auditory—are “pure event[s] that appear suddenly to the patient while his perception disappears” (216). Dreams and hallucinations nihilate the subject-object distinction, replacing it with an impersonal spontaneity or an impersonal consciousness, a pure event: “But this event does not coincide with the pure experience of hallucination: in fact an experience implies the existence of a thematic consciousness with a personal unity, and this type of consciousness is denied by the hallucinatory event which always happens in the absence of the subject. In a word, the hallucination happens as a phenomenon, the experience of which can be made only by memory. And this memory is immediate” (229). Whereas perceptual consciousness has to focus on its object, which means that the object is there before our consciousness of it, there is no focusing in the case of hypnagogic images: “Suddenly knowledge appears, as vivid as a sensory manifestation. […] [I]n the hypnagogic consciousness the object is posited neither as in the process of appearing nor as already having appeared” (56). Unlike schematic drawings, sketches, spots on walls etc. where the body plays a major part in representation—insofar as body movements release the representation that has been lying latent in those figures—hypnagogic consciousness is characterized by the diminished role of the body. The blunting of sensations, the poor sense of space and time, foreshadow the unreality of time and space that Sartre later attributes to mental images. In the state of hypnagogic consciousness, “we no longer feel capable of animating our body” (59) and consciousness “permits itself to be charmed” or “imprisoned” i.e., it does not distinguish itself from its objects (59). Nevertheless, Sartre refutes Bergson’s explanation of hypnagogic images, according to which such images are formed as a result of a weakening of one’s attention to the real: This view [Bergson’s] belongs to the illusion of immanence; it assumes implicitly the existence of two complementary worlds, one consisting of things, the other of images, and that when one of them becomes faint the other is thereby illuminated.

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This is putting images on the same plane with things, giving both the same sort of existence. (61 my italics)

Sartre objects to the relativism inherent in this kind of reasoning, arguing instead that image and perception differ in kind and not only in degree. He admits that perception is constantly overflowed on all sides by the object of perception, that we cannot perceive an object from all possible points of view at the same time, but refuses to accept the idea that we ‘correct’ this incompleteness of the perceptual act by completing it with images, projecting unreal qualities where we cannot perceive the real ones.27 If we try to represent to ourselves those aspects of an object which we cannot directly perceive we will inevitably produce images, but as soon as we start producing these images, Sartre argues, the part of the object we were trying to represent to ourselves will no longer be part of a perceptual act but of an imaginative one. Curiously enough, Sartre’s description of this shift from perception to image rests on the figure/ground relationship, and on the idea of dissociation so important to Bergson: Only, if I wish to represent for myself the mural tapestry behind the cupboard, the pure intentions implied in the perception of the visible arabesques will have to detach themselves, to posit themselves for themselves, to express themselves, to debase themselves. At the same time they will stop to ground themselves on the perceptual act and become a sui generis act of consciousness. So also, the hidden arabesques will no longer be a quality of the visible arabesques—namely, as having a sequel, of continuing without interruption. But they would rather appear as isolated to consciousness, as an autonomous object. (174)

What Sartre means by “debasement” here is the translation of pre-reflective into reflective consciousness: as long as we are not reflectively aware of the imperceptible aspects of an object, these aspects are still part of perception, but once we focus on them, once they dissociate themselves from the ground of perception and appear to consciousness, that consciousness is already imaginative, not perceptual. Their very appearance signals the disappearance of perceptual consciousness and its replacement with image-consciousness.28 Later, while discussing the unreal time of images, Sartre elaborates further on the difference between the imperceptible aspects of an object, which still belong to perception, and the image:

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There are a few striking things about this passage, for example the use of the notion of virtuality, a Bergsonian notion which Sartre generally scorns as it implies the complementary existence of the real and the unreal. What is the difference between virtual presence and absence? Having argued that the image presupposes the annihilation of perception, why does Sartre refuse to consider as images those aspects of an object that are not perceived but instead regards them as a special form of perception, virtual perception? Second, it is significant that the example he gives of an image in order to differentiate the image from a virtual perception, involves recollection: the image of Peter is the recollection of his face. Third, the image is described as a product of an act of dissociation or detachment (another Bergsonian trace): as soon as I focus purposefully, reflectively, on the imperceptible, it appears as an isolated, autonomous object to consciousness. It seems that all that is needed for the production of an image is a reflective awareness of an object’s imperceptibility or absence. The very awareness of this absence is already the construction of an image to replace it. Indeed, on several occasions throughout the book Sartre suggests, contrary to his own critique of Husserl, that reality in principle is ambivalent and consciousness is free to intend it now as an image, now as a perception: There is not a world of images and a world of objects [therefore, a world of perceptions]. Every object, whether it is present as an external perception or appears to intimate sense, can function as a present reality or as an image, depending on what center of reference has been chosen. The two worlds, real and imaginary, are composed of the same objects: only the grouping and interpretation of these objects varies. What defines the imaginary world and also the world of the real is an attitude of consciousness. (27 my italics)

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Thus, Sartre repeats the very Bergsonian gesture he previously objected to: he situates the image somewhere in-between a thing and a representation. The ambivalent nature of the image comes to the fore again when Sartre tries to define the difference between perception and image in terms of the difference between belief and knowledge. Because perception is incomplete, it can only be a matter of belief: since we can’t see all sides of an object simultaneously, we have to believe that they really exist. On the contrary, the image is whole, complete: all we can know about it is already constitutive of it. One doubts one’s perceptions but one never doubts one’s images. In this Sartre remains a Cartesian: one does not doubt one’s images because their objects are not external to consciousness and consciousness cannot doubt its existence. Perception tries to conform to the ideal of sincerity—“to be what one is”—or good faith—“to believe what one believes”—both of which are “an ideal of being-in-itself” (1965: 184). Perception wants to coincide with its object but the object overflows it on all sides. But because of the essentially self-destructive nature of consciousness—its lack of being—every belief is bound to fall short, which is exactly why bad faith is possible. Every perception falls short, which is why it is possible to imagine. Although Sartre wants to place the image beyond doubt, his conception of the image as the apprehension of something through an analogue reintroduces the possibility of doubting the image. In the mental image, the analogue is not external but mental: “But transcendence does not mean externality: it is the represented object that is external, and not its mental ‘analogue.’ The illusion of immanence consists in transferring externality, space and all the sensible qualities of the thing to the transcendent psychic content. It does not possess these qualities: it represents them, but in its own way” (1963b: 76). Sartre rejects the idea that the image is an analogue of an existing object, that the image of the Pantheon, for instance, is a mere representation of the real Pantheon: The image will naturally be the analogue. It represented the sensible qualities of the absent object without possessing them: one will say that it had them, without being the absent object. […] Such is the origin of the illusion of immanence: in transferring to the analogue the qualities of the thing it represents, a miniature Pantheon is constructed for the imaginative consciousness and the reflective consciousness presents the imaginative consciousness as a consciousness of that miniature. (126-127)

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By speaking of the ‘stuff’ of the image in terms of an analogue, Sartre suggests that the object of the image is, in fact, separate and different from the content of the image, that the object exists outside the image. But this contradicts his central argument that there is nothing in the image except what we put there, that the image is a consciousness and does not refer to something outside it. ‘Analogical representative’ suggests the need to fit the object of the image to the mental or physical content that merely represents it by analogy, and once such fitting becomes necessary, there is always the possibility for a bad fit, hence for an image that is deceptive. In fact, when he distinguishes an image from a sign, Sartre admits that there are certain cases when a perception cannot be securely differentiated from an image, as in the case of the female impersonator of Maurice Chevalier when only a formal will can prevent consciousness from gliding from the level of the image to that of the perception. In most cases this gliding occurs all the same, from time to time. It even happens quite often that the synthesis is not completely made: the face and the body of the impersonator do not lose all their individuality; but the expressive something ‘Maurice Chevalier’ nevertheless appears on that face, on that female body. A hybrid condition follows, which is altogether neither perception nor image. (40)

The difficulty in distinguishing image from sign is equally evident in Sartre’s discussion of schematic drawings, which he sees as occupying “an intermediate position between the image and the sign” (41). Having criticized Bergson’s idea that the image is inherent in perception and is released merely at isolating the object from its connections to other objects, Sartre now implies that representation is, after all, latent in perception. He analyzes a diagram consisting of several lines, which upon first glance are not representative at all but which already contain the kernel of representation, so that although the black lines represent nothing more than some structural relationships and an attitude...a mere hint of representation is enough for all the knowledge to descend upon it, thereby giving a sort of depth to that flat figure. Draw a man in a kneeling position with arms uplifted and his face assumes the expression of indignant surprise. But you do not see it there: it is there in a latent state, like an electric charge. (42)

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This notion of representation as latent within perception leads Sartre to argue that one can decide to intend an object either as a perception or as an image (43). The self-contradiction is perhaps due to the fact that Sartre groups together images whose material is perceptual—such as schematic drawings—with images whose object is unreal (mental images). (Nevertheless, in the latter part of the book he insists that images are always unreal.) Going back to the example of schematic drawings, Sartre posits the human body as the origin of representation. The figure, he writes, “must be animated by a certain attitude of my body, namely, by my body enacting a certain pantomime” (43). He goes on to describe the relationship between our eye movements and the lines we perceive. It is our eyes that animate the lines with an imaginative intention, with a meaning, and we do that spontaneously. Our body—our eye movements, for example—interpret the figure in a certain way and the figure will, from that moment on, be either a perception of disconnected lines or an image, depending on whether our eye movements have managed to fix the figure and make it provoke those very same eye movements spontaneously. It is not the figure itself that is representative but the movements our body projects on that figure, our body expressing itself symbolically: “So that we now see that the representative elements in the consciousness of a sketch are not really the lines, but movements projected on these lines”(48). Echoing Bergson, Sartre proposes that reflection/representation ought to be understood literally: it does not follow perception but is contemporaneous with it. To perceive is already to reflect or represent, and the body is the agent of representation.29 The image is produced by the free expression of the body by means of movements, and these movements constitute the knowledge or various meanings we can read ‘in’ a sketch. Knowledge is not different from movement: “There are no two realities, knowledge and movement: there exists but one thing, the symbolic movement” (49). This is Sartre’s subtle way of admitting the role of the body in the creation of images, while still keeping it subservient to the pure idea and considering it a “debased” form of pure knowledge: “Knowledge becomes aware of itself here only as an image; the consciousness of the image is a debased consciousness of knowledge” (49).30 In general, Sartre would like to place the image somewhere in between sensation and thought. But because it is difficult to discover where exactly this in-between place is, as soon as the image appears to

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resemble sensation too closely, Sartre emphasizes that the image is a kind of thought and, vice versa, whenever the image begins to resemble thought, and even pretends to be pure knowledge, Sartre stresses its proximity to sensations and movements.31 For example, having differentiated images from sensations, he suddenly devotes an entire section to an analysis of “the motor basis of the image” (119). He cites experiments confirming his hypothesis that kinaesthetic sensations play a role in the formation of images, including cases in which kinaesthetic sensations act as substitutes or analogues for visual impressions. Movement can be an analogue for image consciousness because “when a movement is given by another sense than sight, the consciousness that apprehends it is already imaginative and not perceptual” (115). As soon as perception is turned off, therefore, it is replaced by imaginative consciousness. Sartre concludes that the image “includes an affective analogue which presents the object in its basic nature and a kinaesthetic analogue that externalizes it and gives it a sort of visual reality” (117). Interestingly enough, Sartre’s examples of kinaesthetic analogues involve not an attempt to form an image but rather to recall an image by visualizing the movement involved in perceiving it i.e., the kinaesthetic analogue, as Sartre himself admits, “constitutes an excellent mnemotechnical means” (117). Thus, in the case of kinaesthetic substitutes, a memory serves as analogical material for image consciousness. Nevertheless, the general thrust of Sartre’s argument is that, contrary to what Bergson claims, the image is radically different from a recollection, because it posits a nothingness, an absence, whereas the past is still a reality, not an absence: “If I recall an incident of my past life I do not imagine it, I recall it. That is, I do not posit it as given-in-its-absence, but as given-now-as-in-the-past” (263). And yet, Sartre’s description of recollection is reminiscent of Bergson’s: “[W]hen I recall this or that memory I do not call it forth but I betake myself where it is, I direct my consciousness to the past where it awaits me as a real event in retirement” (263). Like Bergson, Sartre suggests that recollection demands a leap into the past; however, he also puts forward the opposite argument that a recollection is “given-now-as-in-the-past” (263), that it does not demand a leap into the past but happens now. Whatever the meaning of such inconsistencies might be, Sartre’s main criterion for differentiating between image and recollection is the absence of the object. In that sense, an image of an object that actually exists somewhere (Peter who is in another city) resembles closer the image of a nonexistent object

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(e.g. a centaur) than the memory image of Peter. An object is absent either from perception or from the real world at large, whereas the past is never absent but is only “one mode of real existence among others” (263). Image-consciousness It is not until the Conclusion to The Psychology of Imagination that Sartre finally reveals the purpose of his examination of imagination when he asks “whether the necessary conditions for realizing an imaginative consciousness are the same or different from the conditions of possibility of a consciousness in general” or “what must a consciousness be in order to possess the power to imagine” (1963b: 260). And he answers: since the necessary conditions are the same in both cases, consciousness must always already be image-consciousness. Insofar as surpassing is constitutive of consciousness, the imaginary being that toward which the real world is surpassed, consciousness is imaginative by its very nature: We may therefore conclude that the imagination is not an empirical and superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom. […] [A]ll existence soon as it is posited is surpassed by itself. But it must retreat towards something. The imaginary is in every case the ‘something’ concrete toward which the existant is surpassed. (271-2)

The relationship of image consciousness to consciousness is one of emanation: to the extent that negation is a structure of consciousness that becomes thematized or manifested in image consciousness, image consciousness is latent in consciousness as such. Thus, Sartre is forced to go back to the very rhetoric of latency and virtuality for which he so adamantly criticizes Bergson. He must assume that image-consciousness is the condition of possibility for consciousness as such, i.e. that the image exists latently or virtually in consciousness—just as for Bergson Pure Memory is somehow latent in perception—for otherwise he would have to argue that one is always already forming images. And this is, in fact, what he ends up arguing: [The] original necessity of being its own nothingness does not belong to consciousness intermittently and on the occasion of particular negations. […] [T]his does not happen just at a particular moment in psychic life when negative or interrogative

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According to this passage, one is always already imagining, just as for Bergson, one is always already recollecting. In fact, when Sartre tries to explain the nature of consciousness as self-differentiation, he suggests, though probably without being aware of it himself, that consciousness is always already imagining it has being. Take, for instance, Sartre’s example of a waiter who is a waiter only to the extent that he imagines himself one: “I can be him only in the neutralized mode…by mechanically making the typical gestures of my state and by aiming at myself as an imaginary café waiter through those gestures taken as an ‘analogue’” (1956: 103). The above is not an account of imagination (at least Sartre does not introduce it as one) but simply a description of the everyday mode of being of the particular consciousness of a waiter. It is not that the waiter is first a waiter who then develops an imaginative consciousness and tries to be a “real” waiter; rather, from the very beginning the waiter’s consciousness is imaginative and it searches for a fitting material analogue (the typical gestures of a waiter) to express itself. It is not necessary to surpass the world in order to posit myself as unreal: by the very fact that I exceed myself, I have already unrealized myself, I am already “absent to my body, to my acts, I am despite myself that ‘divine absence’ of which Valery speaks” (1965: 169). Once Sartre makes it clear that consciousness is not determined by the material world, the following question arises: Why is not consciousness always ‘choosing’ to be an image (since an image, after all, is a pure spontaneity) but sometimes, in fact, most of the time, it ‘chooses’ to be a consciousness of a thing? If consciousness is by nature imageconsciousness—absolute spontaneity—what motivates it to posit the real without spontaneously surpassing it toward the unreal? After all, as Sartre himself says, “what is denied must be imagined” (1963b: 273). The image coincides with itself from the very beginning: then how can it be a nihilation? Once consciousness posits itself as different from the world, how can it ‘go back’ and cleanse itself of any object, how can it surpass the world without preserving it in this surpassing in order to negate it (but that would not be an originary negation)? The problem can be stated in two complementary ways: there cannot be image-consciousness that does not presuppose consciousness of the real but there cannot

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be a consciousness of the real that is not already image-consciousness. Either the mere positing of the real ends in the positing of the unreal or the unreal is posited always on the foundation of the real. Sartre does not consider the logical consequence of his own definition of consciousness as empty and thus always referring to a transcendent object. True, the image is not a thing referred to, but the image, as a consciousness, must itself refer to something outside it. Nothing exists in consciousness or in the image: both are empty. Thus, Sartre becomes vulnerable to his own critique of Husserl in Imagination. There he points out that Husserl’s phenomenological reduction is not necessary since it brackets out the existence of an object, which makes it impossible to distinguish a perception (of a real object) from an image (of an unreal object). But to say that the image is a consciousness is to endow the image with all the characteristics of consciousness, and if nothing exists either ‘in’ consciousness or ‘in’ the image, it becomes irrelevant whether the objects they refer to are real or not. The discovery that consciousness must already be image consciousness is a perfect illustration of the phenomenological method as Sartre himself describes it: “Should the ‘exemplifying’ datum be pure fiction, the very fact that it was imaginable means that it embodied the soughtfor essence, for the essence is the very condition of its possibility” (1962: 128). But if image consciousness is the essence of consciousness32, it becomes questionable that image consciousness occurs only on certain occasions, that imagining is the exception rather than the rule. Sartre cannot explain what motivates consciousness to turn into image consciousness or, conversely, what prevents image consciousness from perpetuating itself indefinitely. If the image rather than perception embodies the essence of consciousness, shouldn’t we imagine more often than we perceive, unless it is said that most of the time consciousness does not live up to its essence but remains trapped within an inessential perceptual consciousness? Moreover, if consciousness as such, including perceptual consciousness, is defined as nihilation, what prevents the nihilating function from manifesting itself in perception? In fact, does not Sartre argue on several occasions that even perception is a negation of the world since to perceive something is to posit oneself as different from it? If this is not considered the manifestation of the essential power of negation, we must conclude that for Sartre negation implies not merely difference from the objects of consciousness (the difference established by perception)

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but the nihilation of the existence of these objects. Again, given that image consciousness constitutes essential negation while perceptual consciousness only inessential negation, what motivates consciousness to oscillate between negating the existence of its objects, on one hand, and merely differentiating itself from its objects, on the other hand? How can consciousness as absolute nothingness or emptiness make things appear to it and then expel them i.e., how can something that lacks motivation (it is not consciousness itself that motivates the appearance of things but things are motives for consciousness) motivate itself? How can the absolutely empty produce its content spontaneously and annihilate it in the very same gesture of production? Bergson failed to explain what motivates memory images to infiltrate perception; however, Sartre is equally unable to explain what motivates consciousness—nothingness—to produce itself spontaneously. My analysis of the image confirms that Sartre’s fear of the impossibility of a synthesis between the two realms of being is justified. It seems that consciousness never really enters into any sort of relationship with material reality since in the very moment it posits itself as different from that reality, it has to imagine it. This happens simultaneously—it is not as if first there is a reality, which is then denied, and in place of which a new reality is posited; rather, the imaginary is the manifestation of the fundamental nature of consciousness as different from itself. There are two movements of differentiation: on one hand, consciousness is other than the in-itself (its negation), and on the other hand, it is other than itself (its own negation or self-temporalization). But since the surpassing of reality coincides with its surpassing of itself toward the unreal, the unreal is not added to the real; rather, the real is never posited because its positing is only its negation, and negation, as Sartre understands it, is not merely a logical judgment but an originary phenomenon. But if consciousness, by its very nature, is already beyond reality, if it is inconceivable for consciousness “to be ‘in-the-midst-of-the-world’” (1963b: 266), then there cannot be an essential difference between perceptual and image consciousness i.e. perception must already be beyond reality as well. To avoid splitting consciousness into two different parts, one of which is “in-the-midst-of-the-world” and the other beyond the world, to preserve the unity of consciousness, everything Sartre says about the image must be valid for perception too: “To posit an image is to construct an object on the fringe of the whole of reality, which means therefore to hold the real at a distance, to free oneself from it, in a word, to deny

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it”(266). If consciousness is posited as lying beyond the real, there is no way to explain how and why it can still be within the real; hence, it becomes problematic to account for the existence of consciousnesses that are not image consciousnesses. Between Idealism and Realism Sartre’s books on the image do not offer a coherent theory of the relationship of imagination to perception, or of mind to material reality. On the surface, the books seem to be intended as critiques of Bergson’s metaphysics of immanence, which threatens to erase the difference between consciousness and material reality. However, having followed closely Sartre’s argument, I cannot say that he manages to clarify Bergson’s confused distinctions between perceptions and memories, images and perceptions, memories and images, etc. ‘The illusion of immanence’ perpetrated by Bergson and criticized by Sartre is the result of Bergson’s unorthodox use of the concept of the image. Sartre therefore assumes that by redefining the image as a kind of consciousness rather than as a thing he can avoid all the pitfalls I have identified in Bergson’s thinking (see chapter one). It is not surprising that he encounters precisely the same kinds of problems as Bergson, given that his concept of the image as a kind of consciousness ends up fulfilling exactly the same mediating—and in the end confusing—function that Bergson assigns to the concept of the image. Sartre defines the image as a kind of consciousness, but since perception is also a kind of consciousness (for Sartre, unlike Bergson, insists that perception does not take place ‘in’ matter) it becomes difficult to distinguish between image-consciousness and perceptual consciousness. Moreover, since image-consciousness possesses all the qualities of consciousness as such—consciousness is a nihilation of reality; it is absolutely empty and pre-reflective—it is also impossible to distinguish between imagination and consciousness as such. That in Sartre’s philosophy the concept of the image remains essentially ambivalent is not unexpected, especially given the wide ‘mood swings’ between idealism and realism in Imagination and The Psychology of Imagination. Simply put, there are times when Sartre finds the material world ugly and unreal and, accordingly, defines image-consciousness as our only escape from the nausea induced by the real; but at other times he freely (though perhaps glumly) acknowledges the schematic, barren nature of the imaginary and, accordingly, longs for

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the warmth, the novelty and the vitality of the material world and for the plasticity of perception. In his idealistic moments, Sartre often sounds quite Bergsonian. For instance, toward the end of The Psychology of Imagination, when he talks of the imagination as an impersonal force which must be distinguished from its particular material manifestations, he essentially repeats Bergson’s warning against confusing Pure Memory with memory-images and agrees with him that the image is no more than a material analogue of an idea. Moreover, Sartre does not limit imagination to the formation of visual images but expands the notion of the “imaginary” by thinking of it as the implicit meaning of the real. This enlargement (and abstraction) of the notion of the imaginary from something incarnated in images to something purely semantic is especially clear in a short discussion of the work of art toward the end of the book. Refuting the idea that an artist’s work consists in effecting a transition from the imaginary to the real, Sartre explains that the painter [does] not realize his mental image at all: “[H]e…simply construct[s] a material analogue of such a kind that everyone can grasp the image provided he looks at the analogue. But the image thus provided with an external analogue remains an image. There is no realization of the imaginary, nor can we speak of its objectification. (1963b: 275)

By “grasping the image” Sartre understands “grasping the meaning” of the painting. The image is not something material—only its analogue is: the image is internal, the analogue external. The relationship of the image to its analogue is like that of a signified to its signifier, a relationship of ‘possession’: “The painting should then be considered as a material thing visited from time to time (every time that the spectator assumes the imaginative attitude) by an unreal which is precisely the painted object” (275). The image is the meaning of its material analogue.33 Furthermore, in spite of his objections to Bergson’s confusion of things with images, in The Psychology of Imagination he, too, describes images as inactive, heavy, and thing-like and must therefore be “kept alive artificially” (178). Although he challenges Bergson for positing Pure Memory as an impersonal Absolute pre-existing both consciousness and matter, Sartre establishes an equally Platonic relationship between the real and the unreal and considers the real as merely an analogue of the eternal, the

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absent, the immaterial, the impersonal, the unreal. The Psychology of Imagination ends with the condemnation of the real as ugly and repugnant: consciousness of reality is characterized by a “nauseating disgust” for “the real is never beautiful” (281). Even when one assumes an “aesthetic,” contemplative attitude towards the real, the latter does not appear more beautiful but only more nauseating. It becomes derealized but not imaginary. Insofar as he posits the real as ugly, nauseating and doubtful and insists that only the doubt that there is anything real is real, Sartre remains a Cartesian: “Is not doubt the very primary condition of the cogito, that is, at once the constitution of the real as a world and its negation from this same point of view and does not reflective grasp of the doubt coincide with the apodictic intuition of freedom?”(270). The Words provides a literary illustration of what I call Sartre’s Platonic or Bergsonian moods, while also linking his phenomenology of consciousness (and of image-consciousness) to the idea of ‘falsification’ implied by Bergson’s discussion of Pure Memory and elaborated further by Deleuze in his books on cinema. Insofar as The Words is concerned with the origins of Sartre’s interest in literature and writing, it is helpful in throwing light upon his distinction between the real and the unreal. In the novel, Sartre traces his idealism back to his first experience with reading: “In Platonic fashion, I went from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given as a thing” (1964: 51). He describes his buffoonery as a certain lack of being, a failure to become real: I was an impostor. How can one put on an act without knowing that one is acting? The clear, sunny semblances that constituted my role were exposed by a lack of being which I could neither quite understand nor cease to feel. […] I was a fake child, I was holding a fake salad-washer. I could feel my acts changing into gestures. […] I saw only roles and props. (1964: 83-84)

While in the beginning of the book, this imposture still appears assumed, by the end it has become clear that, in fact, one never overcomes this imposture, that buffoonery is constitutive of consciousness, that our acts are never real since they are never determined but always ineffectual, superfluous, and unjustifiable. To the extent that consciousness lacks being, it has lost, from the very start, the opportunity “to become real” but is doomed to remain “abstract” (88). The real is material, impenetrable, like the pebbles in the Luxembourg garden, but nevertheless

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less important than the absent: hence the protagonist envies M. Simonot for being missed, for being absent, rather than for his real existence, since “bodily presence is always a surplus” (91). The real is superfluous whereas the true value of something is measured by the degree to which it is missed when it is absent, by its unreality. Once he starts writing, the real and the unreal switch places for Sartre: incapable of performing real actions in his real life, he is finally able to perform them in his reveries, whereas his acts in real life remain mere gestures. And yet, there are also other times—what I referred to earlier as Sartre’s ‘realistic moments’—when Sartre seems to turn his pre-established hierarchy upside down and contrasts the barrenness, impersonality and pathology of image-consciousness (i.e. consciousness as such) with the plenitude of material reality, which “calls for a sort of indetermination of our feelings, a real plasticity: because the real is always new, always unforeseeable” (1963b: 211). Although he thinks of the image as occupying an intermediate position between perception and concept, he often underscores the quasi-conceptual character of images. The movement from images whose material is still borrowed from the world of perception, to images whose material is already completely immaterial, is characterized by a progressive loss of the individuality of the material. His account of perceptions is often suffused with a certain melancholy or even yearning for the richness and warmth of the objects of perceptual consciousness, in contrast to his unflattering descriptions of unreal or imaginary objects as essentially poor, schematic, and typical. This is especially clear in his analysis of love and quasi-love (love for an unreal or absent person). The love for the absent person “schematize[s] itself and congeal[s] into rigid forms while the images we have of [the loved person] will correspondingly become banal. […] [T]his love lose[s] its nuance: it becomes…love in general and becomes somewhat rationalized (207). The image and the feelings it provokes are an impoverished, generalized version of the real object and the real feelings provoked by it. The image is a degraded perception, resembling a concept by virtue of its barrenness: “Barren, scholastic, abstract, directed towards an unreal object which itself has lost its individuality, it evolves slowly towards the empty absolute” (208). Because of their total immediacy (they appear at once, we are not reflectively conscious of them) images are ritualistic ‘by nature’, which makes them indistinguishable from such specific instances of “the pathology of the imagination” as morbid dreaming or schizophrenia

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(213).34 The schizophrenic’s life is not rich in images but just the opposite, “it is a poor and meticulous world, in which the same scenes keep on recurring to the last detail, accompanied by the same ceremonial where everything is regulated in advance, foreseen” (212). It is not true that imagination becomes pathological when the schizophrenic attributes externality to his images, thus confusing perceptions with images: even schizophrenics are capable of distinguishing consciousness from its objects i.e., they are aware their images are external. The problem, rather, is that these unreal objects appear to the schizophrenic immediately as unreal. The imagination becomes pathological when “we feel ourselves passive before images which we ourselves form” (214), when the unreal objects take control of imaginative consciousness. In this respect, Sartre’s “pathology” of images anticipates Baudrillard’s discussion of the hyperreal (see chapter four). Although as a general rule Sartre considers the imagination a sign of our freedom, in his ‘realistic moments’ he privileges perception on account of its novelty and surprise: The dominance of the real derives from its novelty, its unexpectedness, which mark it unmistakably because according to Sartre the imaginary cannot possibly have these properties. It is easy to see why: consciousness can be surprised by the world but it cannot be allowed to surprise itself…hence the content of the imaginary must always be known in advance. This gives it a comforting certainty, and accounts for the pathology of schizophrenia, for example, in which the unreal is lived. (Caws 1979: 46 my italics)

It almost seems as though Sartre equates freedom with the impossibility of surprise or novelty; this would mean that when we merely perceive the world we cannot be free, because we can be caught unguarded at any moment. Perhaps Sartre thinks that to be surprised by the unpredictable, novel world, is to be determined by it; the opposite of that would be to determine it ourselves which is possible only if we know in advance the object of our consciousness. But this implies that to be free we must escape the world completely and remain locked up in the comforting familiarity of the imaginary. Even apart from the question of freedom, Sartre’s view of the real as novel and of the unreal as familiar is quite extraordinary and opposed to our usual way of thinking the imaginary, which associates the unreal with the unfamiliar and the real with the familiar. The imaginary is the most familiar insofar as we have created

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it ourselves i.e., it is the product of the highest degree of self-consciousness (but not in the objectifying sense of that term). The potentially pathological nature of the imagination should be attributed namely to its comforting familiarity, which can eliminate any connection to the real world.35 What are the implications of this reversal for art? Sartre seems to suggest that the imaginary can never affect us very strongly—it cannot shock us, for example—because its content is always already known (it is part of the constitution of the image itself). The imaginary then could never be the object of a sublime experience, which takes the subject ‘out of himself’. On the contrary, and as we shall see in the next chapter, it appears that only the material world—matter as such or, in the case of art, its material, e.g. paint as such—can be the object of a sublime experience. Perhaps it was because both Bergson and Sartre were more interested in the conditions of possibility for consciousness rather than in how a particular consciousness individualizes itself that Descartes’ ghost returned to haunt their thought under the guise of the impersonal: in Bergson’s case under the guise of impersonal Pure Memory, which degenerates into specific images whenever it inserts itself into the sensory-motor apparatus, and in Sartre’s case under the guise of image-consciousness, absolutely empty and independent both from the body as well as from reality. According to Descartes, there is something bigger and ontologically older than the subject, whether it is an impersonal consciousness or just the mere fact that a subject exists—there is thinking, rather than a particular subject who thinks. Bergson and Sartre were, in fact, thinking along similar lines when they posited mental states as “larger” than brain states (Bergson) and ‘pure consciousness’ as “larger” that the ‘ego’ (Sartre).36 Despite their differences, both Bergson and Sartre looked for the essential structure of consciousness in what removes us furthest from material reality, including from our own materiality. Both viewed the body as a kind of stopper or a safety catch obstructing the free reign of Pure Memory or Imagination. Neither of them offered a convincing account of the individuation of consciousness: Bergson did not explain how perception-images dissociate themselves from ‘the aggregate of images’ (matter) or how Pure Memory becomes degraded into individual memory-images, while Sartre blurred the distinction between imageconsciousness and consciousness as such by positing both as equally

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empty and impersonal. Insofar as the privileged term in their respective ontologies—pure recollection (Bergson) and image-consciousness (Sartre)—was defined as a return to some pre-reflective, pure state of things, in which consciousness is absolutely identical with its object (Sartre’s image) or consciousness is pure memory, not yet debased (actualized) in memory images (Bergson), both Bergson and Sartre retained a metaphysical bent. Their interest in restoring consciousness to an originary, inhuman (impersonal) state attainable by means of overcoming the limits of perception anticipated the development of an aesthetic of the inhuman in later French philosophy, particularly in the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and Deleuze, who set out to identify the conditions under which subjectivity could be annihilated.

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In French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century Gary Gutting observes that after the failure of poststructuralism to become a decisive point in the development of French philosophy, contemporary French philosophy has become interested again in the question of freedom. Accordingly, he feels that Sartre’s philosophy may very well be due for a revival. Arthur Danto calls Sartre’s argument about the nature of consciousness as nihilation “a kind of logical spoof” because “[w]e are, are identical with, these various nihilations…in just the way a stone is identical with itself. ‘Nihilation n is identical with nihilation n’ is as good an instance of the Principle of Identity, as ‘Stone s is identical with stone s’ is. So the first ‘is’ in ‘the pour-soi is what it is not’ is just the ‘is’ of identity. Still, the fact remains…that what we are identical with is a set of nihilations, of not-being-somethings” (1975: 69). Thomas W. Busch underscores the resemblance between Bergson’s dualism of spontaneity/inertia and Sartre’s dualism of for-itself/in-itself. “The character of in-itself, in this sense, is applicable to all that appears to the self, such as trees, the past, the ego, the Other, qualities. Physical, material objects have the character of in-itself—as all objects—but differ in that they are given through profiles and reveal, across our freedom and action, an experience of resistance and adversity, even of independence”(Busch 1990: 25). In A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology Maureen Natanson cites Sartre’s reflections on viscosity as an illustration of this expanded notion of the en-soi. In The Psychology of Imagination Sartre speaks of the imaginary in the same terms he uses to discuss viscosity i.e. in terms of ‘magical possession.’ Jean Wahl attributes Sartre’s dualism to the conflicting influences of Husserl and Heidegger. The in-itself and the for-itself are manifestations of the Cartesian and Hegelian influence on Sartre, respectively: the in-itself “corresponds to what is extended for Descartes; and the ‘for-itself’…corresponds to Thought construed in Hegelian fashion as constant movement” (1965: 24). It is debatable whether the limits of imaginary variation (which indirectly reveals the essence of things) are fixed by the things themselves or by consciousness. Lyotard argues the former is true: “In judgments there are…limits to our fantasying which are fixed for us by the judged things themselves, and which Fantasy itself discloses by means of variation. The proceedings of imaginational variation give us the essence, the being of the object” (1991: 39). There is a pre-reflective, pre-predicative knowledge or non-knowledge, which phenomenology is able to reveal by drawing attention to the very nature of a genetic explanation: “I claim that this eidos [the eidos number two] is ‘prior’ to all theory about the construction of the number, and the proof of this is that all genetic explanation relies on the present knowledge of ‘something’ which this genesis must explain” (40). Even the nature of consciousness as intentionality is revealed through the same process of imaginary variation. Comparing Sartre’s early works (Transcendence of the Ego, Being and Nothingness) with his later ones (Les Temps Modernes, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, The Words, Search for a Method), Busch argues that Sartre’s originally radical notion

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of the power of consciousness is gradually modified to take into account facticity, situation, the past, all of which are “discussed in terms of alterity entering the self” (1990: 57). Thus, the early dualism becomes more and more mediated. The complementary notions of negation and surpassing also undergo a major change: whereas in Being and Nothingness “negation [is] equivalent to rupture, fissure, break” (63), in Search for a Method negation implies conservation. In fact, Sartre’s notion of life as developing in spirals, going through the same points over and over again, but at different levels of complexity, is quite similar to Bergson’s vision of our mental life is lived (and relived) at different levels of condensation or expansion. Peter Caws underscores the difficulty of reconciling Sartre’s notion of consciousness as both powerful and empty: “A power of annihilation would seem, of course, to be just the kind of power emptiness would have, but it is hard to see how it would be wielded, how something not merely empty and otherwise substantial (after the manner of a hollow vessel) but identified as it later came to be with Nothingness itself, could take the kind of initiative that consciousness must take in Sartre’s account of the imaginary”(1979: 42). However, Sartre’s ideas change from Imagination to The Psychology of Imagination: in Imagination he argues that image consciousness intends its object directly, not through an analogue, while in The Psychology of Imagination he not only discusses analogues but posits no significant difference between the analogues of physical and mental images. See Ideas 181-184. Husserl compares the phenomenologist to a “‘pure’ geometer” who employs images (rather than perception) to disclose the essence of geometrical figures. On the notion of ‘intentionality’ see Ideas 222-234. This is one of Sartre’s objections to Bergson’s idea of duration. Bergson’s Essai sur les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience, Sartre argues, does not reveal the absolute spontaneity of consciousness as such but only the ego’s spontaneity (1957: 80). Bergsonian duration, in Sartre’s view, remains a characteristic of the subject. For an examination of Husserl’s, Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of consciousness in relation to Sartre’s, see Mrinal Kanti Bhadra’s A Critical Study of Sartre’s Theory of Consciousness. In “Imagination and the Passions” Jeremy Walker demonstrates that images are not always consciously formed by analyzing what he calls “shadow-feelings,” feelings that we imagine. Thus, he indirectly questions Sartre’s definition of the image as a consciousness on the grounds that Sartre does not take into consideration images we form involuntarily i.e. unconsciously. Cf. Sartre’s idea of the image as a simultaneous occurrence to Bergson’s critique of simultaneity: according to Bergson, an object of consciousness is never fully given to us because of the perspectival nature of perception. Phenomenology’s contribution to understanding images lies in its challenging of three main prejudices, which Richard Kearney summarizes as follows: “(1) dualism—images were generally considered allies of the lower corporeal order and thus inimical to the elevated pursuits of the intellect; (2) representationalism—images were construed as mere copies of our sensible experience; and (3) reification—im-

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The Image in French Philosophy ages were treated as quasi-material things (res) in the mind rather than acts of living consciousness”(1998: 13). See Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation for more contemporary views (confirming Bergson’s hypothesis) on the relationship between memory and images. The essays in the collection challenge Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of memory as merely a storage receptacle from which images are retrieved at will and propose instead a more dynamic model, according to which “the transmission [of images] itself is a mode of memory”( Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion 1991: 3). Bergson explicitly opposes images to thought—“For images can never be anything but things, and thought is a movement” (1991: 125)—even though in the very next paragraph he accuses associationism for solidifying “phases into things.” However, for a critique of Sartre’s opposition between imagination and signification, see the chapter on Ricoeur’s hermeneutical imagination in Kearney (1998: 142-177). Bergson chooses the sense of sight to represent decreasing degrees of materiality and the sense of touch to designate increasing degrees of materiality. Kearney rightfully notes that the phenomenology of imagination has “concentrated on its role as vision, as a special or modified way of seeing the world. […] Husserl describes the act of imagining as a ‘neutralized’ mode of seeing, Sartre as an ‘unrealized’ mode of quasi-seeing, and Merleau-Ponty as a dialectical counterpart of the visible” (1998: 142). He discusses the revision of this visual bias by hermeneutics, specifically in Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of imagination, which considers imagination in terms of language rather than vision. However, in other sections Sartre argues the opposite i.e. that images as schematic and barren like concepts, that they lack the vitality of perceptions. See also Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie for a comparative anlysis of images and concepts. The image and the concept operate on two completely divergent planes and no synthesis is possible between them: “The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life” (1971: 52). The image cannot be studied through concepts but only through other images, “by dreaming images as they gather in reverie” (53). Mary Warnock proposes a Bergsonian modification of Sartre’s views, suggesting that “the degree of reality felt to belong to the images depends upon the degree to which they take over from ordinary perception. It is not that some images are more vivid, or intrinsically more life-like than others, but that as one’s attention is caught by them and so diverted from real phenomena, so one ascribes more and more reality to them” (1976: 168). Images differ from perceptions only in the degree of attention to life, with perceptions representing higher degrees of attention and images a lower degree of attention. Richard Kearney argues, however, that there are many cases in which image consciousness does not pass beyond the material analogue, as for example in the case of non-representational art. However, not all images require the turning off of perception. In The Psychology of Imagination, Sartre classifies images on the basis of the materiality of their objects, starting from images whose objects belong to the realm of perception (portraits, drawings, etc.) and ending with mental images whose objects belong to the world

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of “intimate sense”(1963b: 27). He seems to have forgotten his critique of Husserl in Imagination, where he blamed Husserl for putting mental images in the same class with physical images (portraits, etc.). The matter of these two types of images, Sartre claimed then, is completely different: the matter of physical images is ambivalent and allows us to animate them either as perceptions or as mental images (we can perceive the Dürer engraving either as a thing or as an image) whereas the matter of mental images does not allow such a choice since it can never be animated as a perception. John Sallis criticizes Sartre for continuing to think of the image in terms of space: “Sartre is convinced that the source of the error lies in the habit of thinking in space and in terms of space. Yet Sartre’s assertion that when one perceives or imagines a particular object it remains outside consciousness merely reverses what it opposes without breaking at all with the alleged source of error: for this assertion is itself no less determined by thinking in space and in terms of space” (2000: 9). “Catching a glimpse” of an object—seeing an object from a particular perspective—is, according to Sallis, precisely the mode of being of an image, rather than of perception as Sartre thinks. Sallis believes that the objective world remains inaccessible to us even in the case of perception, but he interprets this inaccessibility not as a failure but as a sign of the subtlety or delicacy of the sensible world. Images are characterized by their delicacy: “One could perhaps picture the image as a membrane separating while also connecting the sphere of one’s own and that of objects” (2000: 96). Although on other occasions Sartre associates the image with the pre-reflective and perception with the reflective (we must learn our perceptions), here he suggests the opposite: perception is unreflective, spontaneous, and the image is reflective. Sartre then turns around and argues the exact opposite i.e. that it is not the body’s movements that initiate representation, but the lines themselves are representative—we perceive the figure as an image from the very beginning, rather than first perceiving it and then imagining it (48-49). The hierarchy Sartre establishes between the different kinds of images is Hegelian in nature: at the bottom are images, which borrow their material from the real world (spots on walls, faces in the fire, motifs on table cloths etc.) and at the top are mental images, which have freed themselves from the last trace of materiality. Warnock stresses the methodological difficulties Sartre faces in trying to define the image. As Sartre himself observes, the mental image does not leave any describable residue, since as soon as the imaginative consciousness fades away, the image also fades away. Therefore, “though we must talk in terms of images, though we must use the noun ‘image, yet we shall always go wrong if we try to separate the image, and regard it as something totally distinct from that of which it is the image”(Warnock 1976: 161). Because of this insurmountable difficulty, in the second part of The Psychology of Imagination Sartre abandons the method of introspection and limits his discussion to a conceptual analysis of the image. Kearney supports Sartre’s hypothesis that image consciousness reveals the essential structure of consciousness because the image reveals nothing about being (what Sartre calls being-in-itself): “It is precisely because the imagination imparts nothing

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The Image in French Philosophy about ‘being’ that it is best capable of imparting something about consciousness as an attitude towards being” (1998: 21). Baudrillard also conceives images in relation to meaning: ‘image’ designates the loss of meaning or transcendence. Upon losing their semantic depth, things deteriorate into images i.e., they become too immediate, meaningless. See Kearney for a discussion of Sartre’s criteria (or rather the lack thereof) for determining the degree of pathology of different modes of image-consciousness such as infatuation, dreaming, schizophrenia etc. (1998: 69-74). Sartre is not the only one to hint at the potentially pathological nature of imagination. Mullarkey reminds us of the origin of the Bergsonian concept of dissociation (which Bergson employs to articulate the relationship of memory-images to Pure Memory) in nineteenth century psychopathology. The American Psychiatric Association defines multiple personality disorder as a dissociative identity disorder (Mullarkey 2000: 84). See John Mullarkey’s Bergson and Philosophy for a discussion of the two major theories of the relationship between mind and brain, Identity Theory and Eliminative Materialism (2000: 39-42).

Lyotard’s Sublime: The Ontologization of the Image

Bergson and Sartre situate the image within an ontological rather than an aesthetic discourse, using the concept of the image either to mediate between mind and material reality (Bergson) or to distinguish between them (Sartre). Stripped of its representational functions, the image becomes a starting point in the interrogation of being, of the nature of reality and the structure of consciousness; it enters the discourse of the impersonal i.e., ontology. In The Poetics of Space, introduced by its author as “a phenomenology of the imagination” (1994: xviii), Bachelard conceives ‘ontology’ as ‘independence from causality’. Insofar as the concept of causality implies the existence of a past, ontology is the ‘science’ of phenomena lacking a past. Bergson and Sartre consider the image precisely such a phenomenon: Bergson’s image lacks a past insofar as he posits matter as always already ‘made up’ of images; Sartre’s image lacks a past insofar as he conceives it as a consciousness without an object and thus without a past. For consciousness to have a past, it must have its object outside itself; thus, only perceptual consciousness can be said to have a past (the material world is the past of perceptual consciousness). Lyotard uses another term to describe the image as a phenomenon without a past: ‘event.’ The event The discourse of the event—which is part of a larger tendency in contemporary philosophy to consider reality in impersonal, vague terms such as becomings, forces, bodies, multiplicities, flows, desire, flux, event, production, etc.—revives metaphysics as essentially “a thinking pertaining to [impersonal] forces much more than to the subject” (Lyotard 1988b: 6 my italics). Bluntly put, according to this (currently fashionable) discourse, if we could only realize that everything is everywhere and at all times ‘becoming’, we would finally grasp the true

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nature of things. This supposedly anti-metaphysical philosophy declares that the precise nature of the world is that it is imprecise, unpresentable, consisting of ‘events’ and ‘becomings’ rather than, for instance, ‘things’ and ‘subjects’. An ‘event’ is a mode of being that is absolutely self-sufficient and that cannot be reduced to a description of itself (cannot be represented). The only thing that can be said of the event is that it is. Therefore, there cannot even be a discourse of the event: the event is ‘pure expression’. The philosophy of the event limits ontology to the study of consciousness: only that which is alive, which is irreducible to a past, which cannot be an object of knowledge, ‘has’ an ontology. As we saw in the previous two chapters, matter falls outside the realm of ontology because matter is the past. Only beings which could have just as well not existed, whose existence is not a necessity but pure accident (or ‘pure fatality’ as Baudrillard would say) can come into being in the first place. Only the absolutely precarious, unpredictable, unnecessary and unjustifiable—i.e. consciousness—is the proper object of ‘the science of ontology’. Only that which has no reason for existing and which can be annihilated at any moment ‘is’ an ‘origin’. Only effects that remain irreducible to causes are ‘events’. The philosophy of the event claims to preserve the indeterminacy of the world, reveal the nature of consciousness as origin, save us from solipsism and allow material reality, which has so far been suppressed by subjectivity and its delusions of grandeur, express itself. The concept of the event is recruited as a useful weapon in the battle against metaphysics, truth and pre(over)determination. Although event-philosophy recommends itself as a critique of metaphysics, it is, in fact, the triumph of metaphysics. The notion of the event rests on the distinction between the quod and the quid. The quod is the fact that something happens (that it happens), the event stripped of any attributes and determinations. The quid is ‘what happens’; it includes everything that can be attributed to the quod, to the sheer that-ness of the quod i.e. the quid is the sum of attributes and determinations that make up the event. The philosophy of the event stresses the ontological precedence of the quod over the quid, the irreducibility of the event to any determination, which comes only ‘after’ the event. While difference emerges only in the distinction between the attributes of different events (the quid), the event is the triumph of the self-same, the asignifying (the quod) i.e. the principle of identity.

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From nausea to sublimity: Sartre and Lyotard Although both Sartre’s and Lyotard’s reflections on image-consciousness (Sartre) and on the postmodern sublime (Lyotard) as a particular kind of ‘poor,’ pre-reflective consciousness can be situated within the philosophy of the event outlined above, there are also considerable differences between them. Image-consciousness, which neither signifies beyond itself nor is an object of signification itself, is a shut-in consciousness lacking an object, a spontaneous event which nothing can predict or determine and which expresses our freedom to tear ourselves from the given. On the other hand, when Lyotard defines the sublime as ‘event’, he thinks the event as everything that consciousness has not yet assimilated and inscribed. The event expresses the fact that there is still something beyond consciousness, that consciousness is still capable of being affected, as opposed to Sartre’s image-consciousness which, inasmuch as it lacks an object, is better described as a kind of auto-affection. The capacity of consciousness to be affected—what Lyotard calls ‘passibility’—is the defining characteristic of the postmodern sublime. Whereas in Sartre’s account affectivity is just one of the preliminary stages leading to the birth of true image-consciousness, for Lyotard affectivity becomes significant from an ethical point of view. Sartre’s idea of image-consciousness as an autonomous, active being is still indebted to the conception of presence exclusively as “masterful intervention” and thus implicitly devalues more contemplative states of mind as “merely passive” (Lyotard 1988b: 118). By contrast, Lyotard (as well as Deleuze) is more concerned with preserving our ‘destiny,’ which always lies beyond subjectivity. Lyotard, Baudrillard and Deleuze bring out the ethical implications of Sartre’s implicit exclusion of the in-itself (whether that is identified with matter or is more broadly defined as anything that has the character of an object for consciousness) from ontology. One can gauge the distance between Sartre’s and Lyotard’s concepts of the image by examining the subtle differences in their use of what on the surface appears to be the same rhetoric, for instance the rhetoric of ‘poverty’. According to Sartre, the meaning of an image, even of the poorest image occurs without a need to decipher it. This is also the reason why the world of images is a world in which nothing happens. I can at will produce this or that object into an image, make a cube turn, make a plant grow, make a horse run, without the least shift between the object and consciousness. Not a moment of surprise: the

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While Sartre’s image does not make anything happen, Lyotard formulates the sublime experience as a question: Is it happening? Sartre emphasizes the autonomy of the image: the image emerges without margins, there is nothing outside it, and neither is it the outside of anything. It does not precede the consciousness or intention of it, but neither does it appear after consciousness. The reason for this is that the object of the image “is not alive”; only an object that really exists can be a surprise for consciousness. On the contrary, the object of the sublime work of art is sublime precisely because it is alive, real. ‘Poverty,’ in Sartre’s case, is the poverty/freedom of consciousness insofar as it remains empty of any content. ‘Poverty,’ in Lyotard’s case, is the poverty of the object, which is left ‘unconsumed’ by a representational consciousness. While Sartre expels things from consciousness, Lyotard’s aim is to extinguish consciousness itself without, however, extinguishing its object. Rather than taking for granted, as Sartre does, the transcendence of the object (the objects of consciousness are always already outside consciousness and thus always already transcendent), Lyotard considers the object’s transcendence a goal: he starts from the premise that consciousness is, as it were, ‘glued’ to its object and argues that it must be ‘unglued’ so that the object can stand self-sufficient, transcendent. Lyotard conceives the relationship of consciousness to the world not from Sartre’s naively dualistic point of view, but rather from Baudrillard’s point of view. Both Lyotard and Baudrillard recognize the possibility that the world might be merely virtual, that the object’s transcendence is merely simulated. Sartre’s question is merely this: Why is there something (a world) at all? The doubt underlying Lyotard’s question is far more potent: Is there anything (a world i.e. something other than consciousness) at all? The difference between these two questions is exactly that between nausea and sublimity. The problem for Sartre is that one cannot escape from material existence, since the consciousness of that existence cannot prevent itself from existing. Conversely, Lyotard’s question is permeated by a fear that consciousness cannot reach material existences any more, that it assimilates and annihilates anything outside it (presumably by representing and signifying everything). Nothing justifies existence; therefore, Sartre

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concludes, existence is nauseating. Nausea would be, in fact, welcome by Lyotard, because it would at least show that we can still be affected by something beyond our reach. By asking “Is there something rather than nothing?” Lyotard neatly brushes aside Sartre’s depressing idea of existence as nauseating and instead rethinks existence itself as ‘rare’ and ‘event-like’. Wonder, awe, amazement, shock—the sublime—replace nausea and disgust. This is indeed an optimistic turn for thought: instead of agonizing over every little, meaningless existence, whose only reason for being is that it cannot prevent itself from existing, we can now transform this lack of justification into its exact opposite, a gift. It is not surprising then that while Sartre sees the present as a source of nausea, Lyotard considers it a shock to consciousness and thus a source of sublime experiences. The postmodern sublime privileges the present: that something ‘happens’ means that it happens now. The present is identified with instantaneity. On the other hand, for Sartre the sense of nausea remains inextricably linked to the present, or rather to its lack of presence: A fundamental non-presence of the present cuts it off from itself. And the experience of nausea is first of all that of the non-presence of the unpresentable present: an excess of the present which is simultaneously a lack of presence, a desire for presence which veers into a disgust with the present. […] [E]xistence, [Roquentin] says, is an ‘enormous presence,’ but a presence without presence (things having lost their diversity, their individuality) which it is impossible to escape. […] A temporality without solidity, without reality or objectivity. (Hollier 1986: 86)

Nausea is the sense that the present is lacking in presence, and thus in reality, that it appears to be an analogue of itself rather than being itself. Hollier interprets this lack as a lack of individuality, particularity, suggesting that only the particular is really objective and solid. The excess of the present is its anonymity. To Nausea’s protagonist Roquentin things appear disconnected—for instance, in several scenes in the novel he describes others’ human limbs as detachable from their torsos—because they are anonymous. They lack internal unity but are mutually exchangeable as each other’s parts, with no part belonging to a body by necessity. The contingency of existences is related to the perception of their contiguity, for when things appear to be outside one another, they have lost any necessary relationships with one another: “Roquentin discovers his contingency by discovering that things are

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merely contiguous and nothing more, that they touch one another but do nothing but touch one another” (1986: 141). The present is defined by its future, but once the present dies, its future also dies—it does not replace the dead present as the next present. The real or the present is nauseating because it is “unassimilable and indigestible; it is, rather, that with which hands get dirty. Such is the fundamental axiom of the nauseous epistemology for which to know is not to eat but to vomit” (111-112). Since consciousness is by definition empty, it can only try to assimilate or digest the real and, failing to do so, vomit it. Roquentin’s nausea is provoked by things, which touch him as if they were alive, as if they were not mere things or utensils. His sense of derealization and depersonalization is linked to his inability to deal with objects as objects any more, because they have slipped from the practical realm of means and ends. All objects become, at his touch, unreal, sinister (114). However, within the aesthetic of the postmodern sublime, it is exactly when things slip from the usual framework of utensils that they are able to shock us. The foreignness of the present, its unassimilability or indigestibility, which Sartre finds nauseating, becomes, for Lyotard, nothing short of sublime. The postmodern sublime: the image as event The ontologization of the image—the reconceptualization of the image as event—can be examined through a comparative analysis of the Kantian and the postmodern sublime. The postmodern sublime is fueled by a barely disguised hatred for subjectivity or intentionality, both of which have become ‘tainted’ by their association with the idea of representation. Accordingly, the postmodern theory of the sublime no longer construes the image as an extension of subjectivity but as an access to a pre-reflective, a-signifying, pure consciousness that has not yet ‘debased’ itself into subjectivity. The image is defined negatively as an event, as the mere possibility of something happening despite the threat of nothing else happening. I will examine the Kantian sublime from the point of view of Lyotard’s critique of it in the collection of essays entitled The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. My analysis will rely mostly on three essays dealing specifically with the sublime: “Newman: The Instant,” “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” and “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetic.” In these essays Lyotard addresses the crisis in aesthetics provoked by the end of the aesthetic of the beautiful foreshadowed in Kant’s Critique of

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Judgment. The Kantian sublime does not leave room for an aesthetic as it returns the imagination, in its failure, to pure reason. Kant’s conventional treatment of the relationship between matter and form (imagination and reason) plunges the mind into a solipsistic state in which the mind “is lacking in nature.” Lyotard’s sublime is tinged with Christian humility (e.g. the rhetoric of an originary debt that cannot be repaid and the urge to disarm the mind and make oneself accessible to presence) in stark contrast with the arrogance of the Kantian sublime. Lyotard’s concept of the postmodern sublime as the ‘rehabilitation’ of matter—of the quod, the event, presence, the Thing—falls in line with Bergson’s and Sartre’s discourse of pure origins, with the fantasy of returning to a spontaneous, pre-reflective, disembodied and impersonal (inhuman) state, the fantasy of evacuating subjectivity or reflexivity (difference), ‘getting down’ to its conditions of possibility, treating subjectivity as an ‘event’ rather than as an agent of inscription and representation. Relying on Bergson’s Matter and Memory, in “Matter and Time” Lyotard fantasizes about a return from a representational consciousness to the “pure perception” of a “‘bare’ material point” and coins the concept immaterial materialism to signify the dethroning of the subject as an origin and its exile into a mere transformer or a supplement to a self-sufficient process of cosmological complexification. We can see this fantasy of self-purification at work in “Something like: ‘Communication…without Communication” where Lyotard claims that the true task of the arts is not to engage in communication (create culture) but to seek out their own conditions of possibility, their own rules, to generate occurrences before knowing the rules of this generativity. This task belongs to an aesthetic of the sublime rather than to that of the beautiful, which appeals to mere taste and ‘common sense’ (both of which are considered suspect because of their association with subjectivity). Similarly, in “Conservation and Color” Lyotard speaks of art in terms of grammatology which, instead of killing ‘live presence,’ produces an aesthetic ‘before forms’ by disarming the mind and suspending ‘the capacity for plot.’ In “Time Today” he thinks the aesthetic in terms of the event, in which the mind is disappropriated and becomes passable to what is not it, to “a recurrent alterity.” “Scapeland” and “Domus and the Megalopolis” call upon the avant-gardes to bear witness to the event, to the landscape as “an excess of presence,” a “neutralized space-time,” but never a place.

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Thinking along similar lines, though this time about music, in “God and the Puppet” Lyotard compiles a series of synonyms—timbre, nuance, immaterial matter, trace, frankness, death—to signify the hereand-now of a color, a sound, or a word, a certain presence that escapes archiving altogether and breaks the support of thought. This discussion takes place in the context of Lyotard’s critique of the phenomenology of time. The event, he claims, bypasses even the minimal synthesis of apprehension that philosophy demands in order for appearance to take place at all. The event is proposed as an analogue of Leibniz’s “divine monad,” which opens up the possibility for synthesis while remaining itself free of all diachrony. In “Obedience” Lyotard observes that technoscientific research has purged the arts to such an extent that all that is left is their material. This material—“non-formalized matter”—is the radically unthought, that which obliges us to listen, and attains a “presence of time or to time.” The search for what is proper to art becomes inseparable from the project of making us present. However, the desire for the Impersonal/the Inhuman, manifested in this fantasy of self-purification, does not result in the overcoming of subjectivity but in an excess of self-reflexivity. The paradoxically excessive nature of such neo-metaphysical fantasies of abstinence (in the sense that the subject attempts to ‘abstain’ from representing the world and to ‘regress’ to a pre-subjective, impersonal state) can be illustrated by a quick look at the history of the arts after WW2. In that period the arts were involved in a general process of self-purification: painters stared at the canvas rather than at the world beyond the frame, filmmakers stared at the zoom instead of seeing the object they were zooming in on, and dramatists stared at the stage rather than at the scene they were supposed to be staging. The temporal arts (e.g. cinema and theatre) were in the process of redefining themselves as spatial/visual arts (cinema refused to tell stories while theatre became interested in the architecture of the stage and in the creation of images out of words) while painting—a spatial/visual art—was in the process of reclaiming its temporal dimension (abstract expressionism reconceived the painting as an event rather than an object). Ironically, the effect of this self-proclaimed abstinence produced an effect opposite to the one intended: hyperself-conscious, self-reflexive works about painting (abstract expressionism), about cinema (structural film), about literature (metafiction), and about theatre (Beckett’s and Ionesco’s ‘anti-theatre’). The arts’ newly found subject matter was noth-

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ing less than (or rather nothing more than) the fundamental precondition for aesthetic experience: the reader’s/spectator’s sense of time and space. Time and space were de-narrativized: ‘anti-theatre’ productions offered a catalog of techniques for falsely narrativizing time while space was denarrativized when the very precondition for painting objects—the belief in our ability to distinguish between separate bodies—became the object of representation (abstract expressionists painted the very emergence of forms thereby making explicit the illusory nature of the initial framing of space underlying every act of perception). It became clear that the object of representation merely distracts the viewer from the true work of art: the consciousness of being (being present, being affected). Gaston Bachelard’s argument, in The Poetics of Space, that the image of immensity, for example, does not concern objects in the real world but refers to an expansion of ‘intimate space,’ is a case in point. For Bachelard the art work as such remains incidental to aesthetic experience; the true work of art is consciousness as an ‘event’. The Kantian sublime The major concern of Kantian aesthetics is to assert our free self-determination; nowhere is this made more explicit than in Kant’s notion of the sublime as a disclosure of our supersensible destiny and of our independence from nature both within and outside us. Why then does Kant insist that the analytic of the sublime is merely an appendix to the analytic of the beautiful? The reasons have to be sought in Kant’s concept of the human being as a rational being that not only establishes but also applies laws of Reason. The application of these laws requires an objectively existing reality. Examining the significance of what he calls Kant’s “determination of ethical substance,” Constantin Behler concludes that for Kant “the prime material of moral self-constitution is ‘practical reason’” (1995: 116). Thus, the ethical aspect of Kantian aesthetics is concerned with the moral deliberation and action of human beings. Since it is in the analytic of the beautiful that the reality of the objective world, and hence the possibility for moral action, is implicitly guaranteed, the sublime, even though it is the standard-bearer of our freedom (Reason), must be proclaimed secondary to the beautiful, since the latter provides the necessary conditions for Reason to act. Despite the openly declared privileged status of the beautiful, however, Kant implicitly valorizes the sublime and, in so doing, separates it completely from the beautiful, in the judgment of which Reason does not play a part

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at all. For Kant, man is fully human–fully rational–in the experience of the sublime. The judgment of the sublime, like the judgment of the beautiful, is a reflective aesthetic judgment. Kant considers aesthetic judgments as mediating between nature and freedom insofar as, on one hand, we can grasp the sensible only as appearance but not as an in-itself while, on the other hand, we can grasp the supersensible only as an in-itself but not in intuition. Thus, aesthetic judgments unite the supersensible underlying nature with that which the concept of freedom contains practically. When making an aesthetic judgment one acts as if nature had a purpose given it by a higher understanding i.e. nature’s purposiveness is purely formal. While Hegel denies the possibility of conceiving nature as supersensible, Kant introduces the indeterminate concept of a supersensible substrate underlying nature, which he posits as identical with the indeterminate concept of the subjective purposiveness of nature.1 Thus, Kant assumes a lawfulness in nature—though an indeterminate lawfulness—which matches our understanding, where the understanding is considered indeterminately, apart from any specific concepts. This lawfulness is the form imagination takes in order to harmonize with the understanding thereby making empirical cognition possible. For Kant aesthetic judgment is, in fact, the condition of possibility for cognition in general: aesthetic judgment does not start from a concept but refers us to a concept. The judgment of the beautiful is disinterested since the pleasure we feel in the beautiful is merely our nonconceptual awareness of the form’s purposivesness for our cognitive power as such, purposiveness for the harmony of imagination as such with the understanding as such. What makes aesthetic judgments universal is that the pleasure we feel derives from the minimal condition for cognition as such—the harmony of imagination and understanding as such—a condition we all share. Although Kant insists that reflective aesthetic judgments are not cognitive, their universality lies namely in that they make cognition as such possible. In aesthetic judgments, then, the imagination is necessarily subsumed under the understanding: the imagination can harmonize with the understanding only by adopting its structure. Kant’s critics point out that despite the introduction of the indeterminate concept of a supersensible substrate underlying nature, the Critique of Judgment never attains anything more than a subjective mediation of nature and reason. While acknowledging Kant’s attempt to analyze objectively the subjective moments in a judgment of taste,

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in Aesthetic Theory Adorno contends that Kantian aesthetics is still an aesthetics of effect, that it still participates in what Adorno calls “the idealist terror,” the belief that human freedom and dignity entail a repression of nature, hence that nothing in art deserves respect unless it owes its existence to the autonomous subject. Adorno sees the Kantian sublime as a manifestation of bourgeois delusions of grandeur insofar as the sublime is not aroused by phenomena in their immediacy but by the spirit’s resistance against nature. Kant attempts to ground aesthetic objectivity in the subject, positing reason as the unifying moment—reason is both a subjective faculty and the prototype of objectivity insofar as it is necessary and universal. Adorno objects that Kant’s subsuming of particulars under universals (common sense) violates the notion of grasping things from the inside, the need for which Kant had introduced with the notion of purposiveness. For instance, the beautiful must please universally and without a concept, but universality and implicit necessity are conceptual. Kant’s formal conceptualization does not do justice to aesthetic phenomena, which are by definition particulars. Moreover, since formal conceptualization is an activity of the subject, it is bound to remain contingent. In The Truth in Painting Derrida continues Adorno’s critique of Kant’s quasi-reconciliation of nature and freedom by pointing out that this alleged reconciliation is based on a mere analogy between reflective aesthetic judgments and logical judgments. In spite of his insistence that aesthetic judgments are not logical judgments insofar as they do not concern a relation to the object as an object of knowledge, Kant imports the four logical functions from the Critique of Pure Reason (quality, quantity, purpose, necessity) into the Critique of Judgment. A priori concepts exist only in the understanding—reflective judgment uses them but has no concepts proper to it. Reflective judgment does not have its own a priori principles but only a subjective rule of applying those of the understanding; yet this subjective rule is applied to judgments claiming universal validity. Because of this, according to Derrida, Kant does not offer us an aesthetic but only the formal conditions for the possibility of aesthetic judgment in general and of aesthetic objectivity in general. The Kantian sublime refers not to the thing but to the presentation of its concept, which is almost too big for presentation.2 In the final analysis, Hegel understood the sublime better than Kant, for Hegel attributed the inadequation between nature and spirit characteristic of the sublime to the infinity of the Idea itself, whereas Kant reduced it to a mere inad-

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equation among the subject’s faculties, when he should have recognized that the sublime inadequation must be thought on the basis of the more and not the less, on the basis of the signified infinity (what lies beyond subjectivity) and not the signifying finitude (subjectivity). While Adorno’s and Derrida’s critiques of Kant center around Kant’s failure to distinguish reflective aesthetic judgments from logical judgments, Lyotard is more concerned with the ethical implications of Kant’s aesthetic of the sublime.3 The sublime, as Kant understands it, is subjectively contrapurposive insofar as the imagination cannot comprehend an object of vast magnitude as a whole and therefore fails to meet the demand of reason. We feel displeasure at imagination’s failure but this displeasure is mixed up with the pleasure we feel that imagination (sensibility) is inadequate to the ideas of reason. Through the failure of imagination we become aware of our supersensible freedom and destiny, of our superiority over nature. Thus, while Kant calls nature sublime, the truth is that he merely attributes the sublimity of our mind to nature, he proceeds as if nature itself—rather than reason—were sublime. Kant suggests that both the judgment of the beautiful and that of the sublime refer the imagination to the understanding or to reason i.e. to concepts. It is important to note that in the Critique of Judgment Kant does not distinguish clearly between “imagination” and “empirical understanding.” (In chapter one, we saw that Bergson does not distinguish between them either.) For example, he describes the sublime as a failure of imagination, which is nothing more than a failure of simultaneously apprehending and comprehending the greatness of the sublime object. The difference between imagination and Reason is that between a quantitative, gradual apprehension of the world and its qualitative, immediate comprehension. Imagination is for Kant what perception is for Sartre: they are both flawed insofar as they are incomplete, ‘overflowed’ on all sides by their respective objects. Moreover, the object of Kantian imagination is present and thus indistinguishable from that of perception. The failure of imagination in the Kantian sublime consists in its inability to add totality to its objects; instead, it is forced to ‘go around’ them, never coinciding with them. Lyotard’s critique Kant’s separation of the sublime and the beautiful, and especially his disparagement of the beautiful as irrelevant to what is most essentially human (Reason) provokes Lyotard’s critique of the Kantian sublime

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sentiment as a strategy for asserting our self-sufficiency, a strategy threatening to alienate human beings from the world, Reason from Nature. From Lyotard’s point of view, Kant analyzes nature (the beautiful) only to suppress it once again and to affirm Reason’s superiority over, and independence from, it. The analytic of the beautiful turns out to be secretly an appendix to the analytic of the sublime, which celebrates the triumph of subjectivity. The Kantian sublime is constituted as the demand for active intervention, which Lyotard criticizes as incongruous with the true idea of what he calls “passibility” to the event.4 In the Kantian sublime, “[n]ature is ‘used’, ‘exploited’ by the mind according to a purposiveness that is not nature’s” (Lyotard 1988b: 137). The mind becomes ‘passable’ to the event when it allows that which the mind is not to give or donate itself to it. In Kant’s description of the sublime experience, however, the mind does not accept any donations, but, instead, reason adds itself to what it is not (nature), subjecting it to its own purposiveness. Lyotard’s critique starts from the premise that in Kant’s analytic of the sublime reason ‘wrongs’ the imagination. That certain phrase regimens correspond to parallel faculties of the mind is a point Lyotard makes in The Differend: the regimen of reasoning overlaps with reason, the regimen of knowing with the understanding, the regimen of ostension with imagination. In this context, when the mind encounters the sublime, the imagination’s failure and the triumph of reason become the silencing of one phrase regimen by another. The impossibility to prove the reality of an event (for instance, the impossibility to prove the existence of gas chambers) corresponds (in Kant’s analysis) to the inability of the imagination to produce a sensible presentation of an idea of reason. The imagination is wronged because it cannot testify to the wrong that has been done to it; it cannot produce a sensible presentation of the sublime. To testify in its defense it would have to produce as evidence exactly that which it cannot produce, and then it would not be justified in complaining that it has been wronged because it wouldn’t be inadequate any more. Its very inadequacy deprives it of the means to prove the wrong: either it is inadequate and cannot prove the wrong or it can prove it but then it is no longer inadequate and the wrong is merely a “damage.” This, then, is a case of the differend, “the case where the plaintiff [the imagination] is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim” (Lyotard 1988a: 9). Furthermore, reason wrongs the imagination by imposing its own rules on it, the rules of logical

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inference: from the inadequacy of the imagination an inference is made about the superiority of reason. But inference is not the rule under which the imagination operates; its rule is ostension. We might say, using Lyotard’s terminology, that Kant tries to resolve the differend—the conflict between imagination and reason—as if it were a litigation. By ascribing totality to the object of judgment reason makes linking impossible. It claims that there is only one way of linking onto the event: by ascribing totality to it. Nothing in the Kantian sublime, however, proves the necessity of adding totality to the object of aesthetic judgment or the reality of reason’s superiority. Totality cannot be judged as real or unreal, true or untrue. Hence, it is not at all the reality or the truthfulness of ideas of reason that makes them superior to the sensible world. That an object can be thought even without a sensible presentation does not mean that it is (or it appears) real despite the absence of a presentation to make it (appear) real. It is sublime that thought thinks in spite of, or against, the obstacle. It doesn’t even matter so much despite what; what matters is this despite as a sign of resistance. Reason can be called ‘superior’ only if the imagination fails to do what it is, in principle, competent to do. To call the imagination’s inability to produce a presentation of the sublime a failure is to presuppose that it is its job to produce such a presentation. This, in turn, presupposes that the sublime (in Kant’s case, raw nature) belongs, a priori, to the regimen of knowledge, which requires “the conjunction...of an ostensive with a cognitive” (Lyotard 1988a: 64). Thus, reason’s superiority rests merely upon a wrong, unstated assumption–the assumption that nature, or the object of judgment in general, is always and by necessity an object of knowledge and, hence, that it falls under the regimen of knowledge. Collapsing the Kantian hierarchy of the faculties, Lyotard insists that it is possible to link to the event without ascribing totality to it. While Lyotard is intent upon saving the art work from any foreclosure, the Kantian sublime is exhausted by the idea of reason that remains unrepresented—the idea of totality. For Kant totality belongs to the first logical function of judgment, quantity. Quantity is an attribute, a quid. For Lyotard, however, totality does not fall under any of the four logical functions. It does not concern the power of judgment nor is it added to the object of judgment. It resembles form as a presentation of quality, but there is a radical difference: totality is a matter of form as time, not of form as space (as it is for Kant). Lyotard’s quod is temporal, but not

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in the usual sense of temporality as time-consciousness. The postmodern sublime work of art breaks the support of time-consciousness and lets time be, which, for Lyotard, is equivalent to letting being be insofar as he understands being as the ‘concentration’ of time. Since matter is only “confused thought,” since it remains matter only because it cannot concentrate itself sufficiently, cannot attract enough memory/time around itself, and since, on the other hand, the sublime work of art must testify to being by approximating as closely as possible pure thought, pure energy, pure being (Lyotard 1988b: 38-39), in order for the sublime work of art to rise above mere matter, mere plasticity, and to become—in Barnett Newman’s terms—plasmic, it must create a very intense physical sensation of time. It might seem that as a preparation for the moral feeling the Kantian sublime is ethically unquestionable: “The principal interest that Kant sees in the sublime sentiment is that it is the ‘aesthetic’ (negative) sign of…the transcendence of the moral law and of freedom”(136). However, Lyotard draws attention to a moral problem in the Kantian sublime, which he identifies as “the end of an aesthetics, that of the beautiful” (137). He explains that as “the sacrificial announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field” the Kantian sublime is “not without some specific problems for the ethical evaluation of the sublime sentiment” (137). Because Lyotard is trying to rehabilitate that which has been sacrificed “in the interests of practical reason”(137)—the beautiful (which he expands into the aesthetic, juxtaposing it with the sublime, which is similarly expanded into the ethical)—his notion of the sublime, though sharing common ground with Kant’s is, in fact, more akin to Kant’s notion of the beautiful. Lyotard is concerned with overcoming the danger of solipsism inherent in the Kantian sublime as a “Geistesgefuhl, a sentiment of the mind” (137). The Kantian sublime experience is a state in which “the mind is lacking in nature [and] nature is lacking for it. It feels only itself” (137). On the other hand, Lyotard’s emphasis on the quod of the aesthetic object and on the addressee instance of the communication structure are elaborations of Kant’s notion of the beautiful as “a sentiment that proceeds from a fit between nature and mind”(137). However, the stakes in Lyotard’s aesthetic are higher. For Kant, at stake is the transcendence of the moral law, and the sublime merely reaffirms the already assumed hierarchy of the faculties of the mind. On the other hand, Lyotard regards the sublime as an attempt to ‘bear witness’ to the

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Being of beings: our being, rather than the determination of our destiny, is at stake.5 The postmodern sublime, theorized by Lyotard and exemplified in Barnett Newman’s abstract expressionist painting,6 refers back to the Kantian analytic of the beautiful (rather than to the analytic of the sublime) inasmuch as what is at stake in all three is the relationship of the mind to the world. The beautiful, Kant argues, implicitly affirms the relationship between mind and world; similarly, the postmodern sublime is the wonder at the very possibility of such a relationship, which Lyotard formulates as a question: Is it happening? The Kantian sublime, by contrast, is an affirmation of our ability to think an object even if the relationship between the mind and the object cannot be proven. Although he claims that Kant’s emphasis on the aesthetic as a preparation for the ethical is itself ethically suspect as it compromises the purity of the category of the aesthetic, in his own rehabilitation of the purely aesthetic Lyotard not only does not circumvent the ethical but indeed carries Kant’s aesthetic grounding of the ethical to the extreme i.e. he ontologizes the Kantian ethical law. While the Kantian sublime announces “You are a rational being!” Lyotard’s sublime commands (without actually commanding, which is exactly what makes the command ‘super-ethical’) “You are!” or rather “You must be!” Thus, the Kantian proto-ethical aesthetic becomes, in Lyotard’s case, a protoontological aesthetic. Because for Lyotard our development “has no necessity itself other than a cosmological chance” (7), he deems it naïve to continue to view human beings as the ultimate source of “complexification.” Lyotard’s notions of the differend, the unharmonizable, the inhuman, and the sublime are irreducible to a human subject; they are indeterminate, not “attached to an Idea” (7), at least not to an idea of Reason in the Kantian sense. Distancing himself from Kant’s “anthropomorphism,” Lyotard claims that his aesthetic revives “the essential of metaphysics which [is] a thinking pertaining to [impersonal] forces much more than to the subject” (6). It is rather difficult to offer a point by point comparison of the Kantian and the postmodern sublime since Kant provides only a vague definition of the sublime in The Critique of Judgment. He specifies that the sublime is not in the natural world but only in our supersensible power, but it is not clear whether the sublime is that supersensible power (reason as actually existing), the use to which this power is put, or the very the possibility of reason:

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Yet this inadequacy [of the imagination] itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power; and what is absolutely large is not an object of sense, but is the use that judgment makes naturally of certain objects so as to [arouse] this (feeling). (Kant 1987: 106)

In this passage our consciousness of the sensible world’s inadequacy to our reason, our consciousness of the superiority of reason to nature and, finally, reason itself, figure as competing definitions of the sublime. Kant suggests that reason looks for certain objects that will ‘provoke’ the feeling of the sublime, which will then make us aware of our superiority. It appears, then, that there are certain objects which allow or even encourage reason to apprehend them as sublime. Reason apprehends them as ‘naturally’ sublime either because they are inherently sublime or because reason itself is inherently sublime. The confusion stems from the difficulty of determining whether reason itself is sublime (reason as an attribute of human beings, as a quid) or the fact that there is reason is sublime (reason as a quod). Kant conflates the faculty (reason) with its being (the fact that there is reason) and with its function (reason as irreducible to the order of the sensible and as a reminder of our real vocation). One of Kant’s other definitions of the sublime (in fact, one he gives in the same chapter) is strikingly similar to Lyotard’s: “Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense” (Kant 1987: 106). Here Kant defines the sublime, as Lyotard does, in terms of privation: the sublime is that which is so difficult to think, so close to the unthinkable, that the mere ability to think it nevertheless is a source of pleasure and a proof of a higher purposiveness within us. Lyotard will go even further, arguing that the sublime is the unthinkable rather than our ability to think something despite the lack of a sensible presentation. The sublime does not belong to, or is not produced by, the subject. While for Kant what makes us human is what we can do, for Lyotard the human is what we have not done yet, what is lacking in us, ‘the inhuman.’ Lyotard distinguishes between two types of ‘the inhuman’. The first inhuman, which in fact is not different from the Kantian notion of the human, stands for human beings’ emancipation as a finite process leading up to a result, a synthesis. The second inhuman is the resistance to the first inhuman—it is our debt to our own humanity as something that “needs no finality” (1988b: 7). Lyotard defines the human as a horizon,

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an expectation, a coming into being, a lack. The second inhuman, which marks our insufficiency, makes us human since it is an openness to the future, a promise that It Is happening. The human is not a given but waits to give itself; it “heralds and promises things possible” (4). Just as Kant argues that only through the inadequacy of the imagination do we become aware of our supersensible vocation, for Lyotard it is only through our insufficiency, our inhumanity, that we are human. In both cases the human is defined negatively, in terms of a certain deficiency, but whereas Kant attributes the deficiency to one particular faculty (imagination) thereby exalting another (Reason), Lyotard defines deficiency as a more general insufficiency signaled by tension, terror, and conflict. The postmodern sublime still remains the standard-bearer of freedom but it is no longer Kantian freedom. Lyotard’s critique of “telegraphy” (‘telegraphy’ or ‘inscription’ are implicitly identified with ‘subjectivity’) suggests that the mind’s freedom depends on the preservation of what Lyotard calls “an ‘initial’ reception,” “an empirical or transcendental mode whereby the mind is affected by a ‘matter’ which it does not fully control, which happens to it here and now” (1988b: 50). While the Kantian notion of freedom consists in the mind’s independence from and control over nature, the sublime being merely an occasion for the mind’s superiority over nature to manifest itself, for Lyotard the absolute control of the mind over that which affects it creates the danger of simulacra, the danger of making even “initial reception” “telegraphable.” (I will return to the question of the place of the image in the discourse on ‘telegraphy’, ‘simulacra’, and ‘subjectivity’ in the next chapter when I examine Baudrillard’s concept of simulation.) The mind has to free itself by giving back to itself the lack of full control over what affects it. Not to be fully in control is to preserve the unthought. The mind is free only if it lacks absolute control, if it can be affected. Only a truly free mind foregoes absolute freedom. In its affirmation of the mind’s ability to be affected, the Lyotardian sublime harks back to Kant’s notion of the beautiful as an implicit confirmation of the link between mind and world. Kant’s definition of the sublime as the revelation of the superiority of reason over nature within us (time-consciousness) and outside us (matter) points to the failure of the judgment of the sublime to remain a purely reflective judgment. Reflective thought, Lyotard argues, is thought that proceeds without rules but wants to find them. Reflective thought, then, is not rational. However, the Kantian judgment of the sublime is a presentation, though

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negative, of reason: hence the paradox that in judging aesthetically or reflectively Kant ‘falls back’ on reason. From Lyotard’s point of view, the Kantian judgment of the beautiful would be the only purely aesthetic judgment inasmuch as the judgment of the sublime is still, in a certain sense, a rational judgment, even though it does not involve concepts. Although the conflict between reason and imagination in the judgment of the sublime remains unresolved, Kant’s explicit hierarchization of the two faculties suggests a quasi-resolution. The conflict has a Resultat— the mind’s awareness of its superiority over nature. Kant’s prioritization of reason is the main target of Lyotard’s critique. For Kant “to be able even to think the given infinite without contradiction” (1988b: 111) is a proof of our supersensible destiny, while Lyotard thinks it is no longer a question of what the mind is able to do (think the infinite) but a question of that the mind is able to do it at all. Thus, on a formal level, Lyotard privileges the quod (thought is), while Kant privileges the quid (what is thought). For Kant it is sublime that the mind links to the world in a certain way: by adding totality to the object the mind becomes superior to, and independent from, it. Lyotard, however, thinks it is sublime that the mind links up at all, that there is something onto which the mind can link, that there is something Other than the mind i.e., that thought can never exhaust itself because it can never contain the whole of itself. Kant believes that there is an infinite only because there is a mind to think it, the infinite serving as an occasion for distinguishing between mind and world, whereas For Lyotard that the infinite is what makes thought possible in the first place. The Kantian sublime is a negation (of world), which affirms (reason); Lyotard’s sublime is an affirmation that preserves negation (in the unthought). Kant goes as far as to claim that reason as such is sublime: “But the mind feels elevated in its own judgment of itself” (1987: 113). Yet reason itself cannot be sublime: we have reason whether or not we judge aesthetically or whether or not there are objects that we can judge aesthetically. Similarly, the fact that we have reason cannot itself be sublime since it is not only in aesthetic judgments that we become aware of our supersensible vocation but in moral judgments too. There is a touch of smugness in the Kantian notion of the mind growing enamoured with, and hypnotized by, its own superiority over the sensible world. In this sense, the Kantian sublime experience provokes a self-congratulatory feeling. Kant takes measures to disguise his claim that what is sublime is the status our reason confers on us, but all

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he can accomplish is a rather transparent false modesty: “But by a certain subreption (in which respect for the object is substituted for respect for the idea of humanity within our[selves, as] subject[s] this respect is accorded an object of nature” (1987: 114). Thus, the sublime becomes a kind of denial, an uneasy suppression of human narcissism: reluctant (to the point of coyness) to admit that Reason is sublime, we make the sublime an object of our judgment. The confusion over whether the sublime is attributed to the object of judgment, to the judgment itself, or to our capacity for such a judgment stems from the failure to disguise completely this mechanism of denial. In Lyotard’s notion of the sublime, on the other side, the Kantian respect for human beings’ supersensible destiny is replaced by a respect for the object of aesthetic judgment. This shift from the agent to the object of judgment—a shift foreshadowing the new conception of the sublime as event, as something impersonal—is accompanied by a shift in the universal validation of the aesthetic judgment. Lyotard’s definition of the judgment of the sublime as one interested in the quod of the object, although seemingly incommensurable with Kantian disinterestedness, does not depart from it in a radical way. The interest in the object’s quod is different from that in the object’s existence: the quod of the object belongs to volition, while its existence belongs to cognition. Lyotard’s aesthetic object remains within the general Kantian formulation since as an object of the will it does not represent a cognitive interest and, therefore, leaves us free. But it also leaves us unfree because, as Kant has noted, “[a]ll interest presupposes a need or gives rise to one and…it makes the judgment about the object unfree” (1987: 52). The postmodern aesthetic object remains unfree insofar as it originates in the desire to resist the terror of not happening; it is born out of the need to resist privation. But if this privation—the impossibility of nothing happening—is itself a lack of freedom, then postmodern art’s resistance to it, although arising out of a need, is not unfreedom but a struggle for freedom. Kant privileges disinterestedness, which is assumed to be hard to attain since we are normally interested in the world. For Lyotard, however, to have an interest in the world is precisely what is most difficult to attain. ‘Interestedness’ now stands for ‘a sense of being’ while disinterestedness becomes synonymous with apathy, lack of resistance, lack of critical thinking, absence. Disinterestedness is unethical rather than a proof of one’s objectivity. From Lyotard’s perspective, Kantian objectivity or disinterestedness renders the aesthetic judgment unethical because, by

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taking for granted the existence of the object of judgment, the judgment neutralizes the object. Kant evaluates the purity of an aesthetic judgment by the degree to which it manages to forget its object. Lyotard, however, searches for the minimal conditions of possibility not of the judgment but of the object of judgment. The question Kant asks—How is this judgment possible?—prioritizes the judging subject over the object of judgment. Lyotard’s reformulation of the question—How is this object possible?—seeks to affirm the possibility of the object of judgment as something independent from the judging subject.7 Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime has curious implications for the nature of interest and for the proximity of our different faculties to the objects of judgments over which they preside. Kant suggests that what we like by way of our senses we like indirectly, whereas what we like by way of our reason we like directly: “Sublime is what, by its resistance to the interest of the senses, we like directly”(Lyotard 1988b: 127). It is odd to call “direct” an interest which derives from a resistance (the resistance to the interest of sense). If in our judgment of the sublime we like the object directly, then in our judgment of the beautiful–a judgment involving the senses—our liking must be indirect. In judging the beautiful we judge “without interest”(177)—this suggests that the senses represent an originary interest—while in judging the sublime we judge “even against our interest (of sense)”(127). By Kant’s logic, judging against our interest is more primary, more spontaneous than judging without interest since the first is direct, the second indirect. Resistance, then, is more ‘natural’ to us than disinterestedness. (This would mean that we should more often find things sublime rather than beautiful if it is true that normally we do what is most natural to us. In reality, however, we are far more likely to find an object beautiful than to find it sublime.) Resistance implies consciousness of that which is resisted. Since for Kant what is resisted is within us—the interest of sense, which fails to measure up to the command of reason—resistance implies self-consciousness. Translating this psychological analysis into a philosophical one, it becomes clear that Kant’s sublime as resistance points to a transcendental law that makes us like the sublime directly. In the case of the beautiful, however, there is no resistance, no conflict, no tension, because reason does not ‘add’ itself to the mere form of the beautiful object. The consciousness of an interest of sense arises only with reason, as an opposition to, or a prohibition against, this interest. The consciousness

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of interest arises exactly at the moment when interest is thwarted and the imagination proves itself inadequate. From this point of view, the Kantian judgment of the sublime has a privileged status since it provides an occasion for resistance, and thus for the Law, to declare itself. The judgment of the beautiful, on the other hand, is not particularly valuable since it does not activate or stimulate the mind. In judging an object beautiful we cannot be given credit for liking the object without interest since our judgment does not obey an a priori law. The judgment is disinterested merely because no interest can arise other than that which arises from the clash with reason. There is no interest without a conflict, without a Law. This is why for Kant the analytic of the beautiful is an appendix to the analytic of the sublime, despite his argument to the contrary. Lyotard’s critique of the unethical nature of this disparagement of the beautiful challenges Kant’s understanding of the moral as something for which we ought to be given credit, and reformulates the moral as our ability to withdraw from that resistance to the interest of sense, a resistance which Kant identifies as human beings’ highest vocation. To sum up, Lyotard’s sublime emerges as a hybrid between Kant’s notions of the sublime and the beautiful. The two key Kantian ideas Lyotard elaborates on in his own notion of the sublime are, first, “mere form” (analytic of the beautiful) and second, the conflict between reason and imagination (analytic of the sublime). Lyotard’s notion of the quod is indebted to Kant’s analytic of the beautiful: both mere form and the quod cannot be subsumed under a concept. Lyotard’s debt to the analytic of the sublime, on the other hand, consists in the idea of the shock-value of the sublime (insofar as shock implies conflict). However, whereas Kant considers the conflict internal—a conflict between the mind’s faculties—Lyotard moves the conflict to the level of the quod itself. The law governing the Kantian sublime is the law of reason. The imagination obeys that law by proving its own inadequacy to represent ideas of reason. What is at stake in this conflict is the manner of presentation (hence questions of “adequacy” or “inadequacy”). To use Lyotard’s terminology, the Kantian sublime poses the question of types of linking—how will the mind attribute totality or what is the law of attributing totality? In the Lyotardian sublime it is not the manner of presentation that is at stake but presentation itself or rather the object of presentation. The question now is: is there an object of presentation? The conflict is internal again but this time it is not so clearly situated ‘within’ the human mind. It is not, strictly speaking, a conflict since there is no interest involved. The

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conflict is within the quod; it is the mere possibility of the quod. The quod and the quid cannot really be viewed as two conflicting forces the way imagination and reason can. The only place where the conflict can be situated, under these circumstances, is in the relation between the mind and what is not mind (the infinite). Questioning the unethical nature of the Kantian subjugation of the infinite by reason, Lyotard insists on a proto-ethical, originary law, according to which thinking is possible at all only because there is an infinite (‘the unthinkable’) inaccessible to the mind, even to reason. We have a determinate concept of the possibility of something other than the mind (the possibility of the infinite) but the infinite as such cannot be conceptualized. Thus, the infinite is a possibility that never becomes a necessity. That of which we have a concept is generally cognizable. However, the infinite or the unthought cannot be an object of knowledge, since we have no concept of it. Thus, paradoxically, we are able to cognize the possibility of being (what something is) but not being itself (that something is). The sublime, as Lyotard describes it, is not an object of cognition but of a special kind of feeling. The quid is an object of cognition but the quod is an object of feeling: we cannot know the event; we can only feel it. We know the limits of our cognition but not what is bound within those limits. We know that our existence is possible without knowing whether we actually exist. We know that reality can be given but we do not know if it is given. The postmodern sublime emerges from within this self-perpetuating anxiety and the irreconcilable tension between determinate and indeterminate thought. The sublime experience is both pleasurable and painful: the pleasure derives from the awareness that we do have a concept of possibility, the pain from the awareness that we have no concept of actuality (the actual cannot be conceptualized since it merely is). We can know the minimal conditions of being without knowing being. We know that which is further removed from existence (possibility as meta-existence) but not that in the midst of which we exist. Imagination can render sensible the concept of possibility (this concept includes both aspects of possibility—that something is and that it is not possible) through its presentations. What is unpresentable is the quod, because we have no concept of it. We can present the question that haunts every possibility, the doubt, the fragility, the negation, but we cannot present the that it happens despite or, rather, along with the possibility of it not happening. The sublime is what cannot be presented, not simply the quod, but the

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quod as a resistance to its quid. We present the threat of nothing happening, not the resistance itself. Kant’s solution—to present that there is an unpresentable—limits itself to presenting that there is a resistance, rather than presenting the resistance itself. The quod, however, cannot be presented except as a resistance, which, in turn, is never presentable as absolute positivity. The artist first presents the doubt (the quid) out of which this resistance springs forth. Lyotard’s notion of anamnesis captures the paradoxical nature of the quod, which is both fragile (since it is unpresentable) and thus vulnerable to inscription and, on the other hand, a strong resistance to what is already inscribed. Anamnesis is the recalling of that which has not been inscribed: “It makes sense to try to recall something…which has not been inscribed if the inscription of this something broke the support of the writing or the memory” (1988b: 55). Interestingly, anamnesis—the recalling of that which has not been inscribed (which is different from recalling something one has merely forgotten)—is structurally similar to Bergson’s déjà vu or ‘false’ memory, the recalling of that which does not belong to one’s personal memory but rather to Pure (impersonal) Memory. In both cases, recollection has an ontological significance as it enhances our sense of being. As we saw in chapter one, Bergson declares déjà vu the experience most accurately expressing duration or our very mode of being; now Lyotard, too, invokes anamnesis as our access to being. Both déjà vu and anamnesis involve the recollection of something that has not been forgotten, because it is not part of one’s personal past but belongs to a vaster ontological realm. The only thing that cannot be inscribed and that can break the support of inscriptions, of memory in general, is being. Being cannot be remembered because it cannot be forgotten. Being, Lyotard suggests, resembles a sort of false memory: we recall it but we recall it not because we have forgotten it; rather, we recall it precisely because it is beyond both forgetting and recalling. Although the Kantian sublime also involves a kind of recalling—the recalling of our supersensible vocation—this recalling does not ‘break’ anything but, on the contrary, reaffirms reason as a support. Lyotard’s sublime is, supposedly, a more radical form of resistance insofar as it breaks the support of reason, which is just another inscription forcing an eventual synthesis. However, the postmodern sublime is not that radical a resistance either, because it cannot completely dissociate the quod from the quid,

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it cannot save the quod from inscription. Lyotard wants to argue that “ignorance [of whether ‘it is happening’ or not] is the ultimate resistance that the event can oppose to the accountable or countable [comptable] use of time” (1988b: xvi) and to disclose the fragility of being as the only resistance to the interpretation (the quid or the What is it?) of the event. Supposedly, by making itself rare, dubious, suspect, the event guards against the projection of an interpretation that would predetermine it. However, by undermining itself, making itself scarce, the event actually achieves the opposite effect—it makes itself unreliable, surprising, unforeseeable, unpromised, indeterminate i.e., it valorizes itself. The quod becomes overdetermined or inflated: the resistance to inscription is eventually inscribed, too. The fragility of the postmodern sublime as a testimony to the event follows from the very nature of testimony, which implies the doubtfulness or forgetfulness of that to which one must testify. In the final analysis, the postmodern sublime might be less radical a resistance than the Kantian sublime, especially if it is true that, as Lyotard himself admits, the insistence on synthesis (the Kantian sublime as the ascription of totality) actually “refine[s] our anamnesis resistance”(55). It is also possible to demonstrate the inadequacy of Lyotard’s view of the sublime as a kind of ‘testimony’ to Being from a logical point of view, using Lyotard’s own analysis of the “phrase universe” in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. The postmodern sublime work of art is not self-referential; rather, self-reference is here situated on the referent instance. (By contrast, in a self-referential work the referent would be the work itself rather than the self-reference of the work.) Self-reference, then, is “the subject of the utterance” (1988a: 34). Barnett Newman’s art illustrates the “conversion of a proper name from the position of ‘subject of the uttering’ to that of ‘subject of the utterance’ [or]...the displacement from the situation of addresser in the universe of a current phrase p to that of referent in the universe of a current phrase q” (34). The phrase p in Newman’s case is “The work is,” while the phrase q is “The work means that it is.” Validation procedures apply to the phrase q, not to the phrase p. Thus, in judging a work’s sublimity we do not judge its being (phrase p), but we judge if the work really means that it is (phrase q). We agree on procedures to present Being (present that it is), not on Being itself. This takes us back to the question of techne, to the idea that certain presentations are ‘better’ (more effective) than others. We must agree on the most effective presentation of Being, not on Being as such.

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The call to continue to testify to Being is a call to testify to Being as a referent, not as an addresser. In fact, the very nature of testimony is to neutralize the addresser into a referent. If “the addresser of p becomes the referent of q when he is named” (35), all that the sublime work of art must do is name the addresser (and thus neutralize it). Here Lyotard falls into self-contradiction. On one hand, he says that the name need not be validated since it “is not a property attributed to a referent by means of a description (a cognitive phrase)” (35). On the other hand, however, the reason an addresser is named is that by becoming a referent, by being named, it is ‘ushered’ onto the level where procedures can begin to be established for validating it. There is a danger that the incorrect evaluation of its reality as a referent may lead to the annihilation of its reality as an addresser but, at the same time, it must be displaced from the addresser to the referent instance for validation to start at all. The addresser cannot be validated, but when it turns into a referent it should not be validated (since one cannot validate “the truth of a name” (35)). Perhaps the sublime is this tension between referent and sense, the tension between the phrase (referent and sense as instances only) and the desire for something beyond the phrase, an addresser outside the phrase, an obligation rather than a mere phrase instance. And yet, at one point Lyotard explicitly says that “[t]he addresser [Being] must be understood as a situated instance in a phrase universe, on a par with the referent, the addressee, and the sense” (55). Validation procedures must be (can be) established only for Being as a referent of a phrase, not for Being ‘outside’ the phrase. Lyotard’s fantasy of pure signification, like Sartre’s theory of natural signification in poetry and Deleuze’s idea of the time-image as purged of signification, is in the end just that, a fantasy. True, the postmodern sublime can be seen as a rebellion against the Hegelian view of art as an image of the Idea, against all theories of imitation, against the theological thought of the visibility of the invisible. Nevertheless, the postmodern sublime remains Hegelian, for it is an art of the residual Idea. The more art tries to purify itself, the more residual or Platonic/ Hegelian it becomes.8 The sublime and time The sublime work of art is expected to perform two mutually conflicting feats: first, it must strip itself of time (it must shatter time-conscious-

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ness) and, second, it must create “not the sense of time, but the physical sensation of time” (Newman 1990: 175). The quod is not the forgetfulness of time but, on the contrary, its intensification or concentration. The sublime work of art must resist time not in the sense of defying it but for the purpose of being it. It must overcome time-consciousness, which renders the quod a given by situating it beyond or outside itself i.e., the work must come neither ‘too early’ nor ‘too late.’9 As long as we assume that the that-ness of things is atemporal, we cannot be shocked by being. It is only when we feel the quod as time itself that we are affected, that we experience sublimity. Because the sublime is defined in terms of time rather than space (it is ‘happening’) totality cannot be attributed to the sublime object. This, in turn, changes the relationship between the sublime and the moral, insofar as from a moral point of view, the stakes in the postmodern sublime are higher than in the Kantian sublime, which obliges us to give up the sensible in the interest of reason. Reason is something we can fall back on after we have stripped ourselves of the sensible and feel vulnerable because of the failure of the imagination. However, the sublime work conceived as an occurrence or an event requires us to strip ourselves not only of the sensible but, in a certain sense, of reason as well. What we fall back on, in the Kantian analytic of the sublime—our ability to add totality to formlessness despite the failure of the imagination—is lacking in Lyotard’s sublime, since we cannot add totality to the event. The work of art as an event is the initial difference that creates a split without, however, establishing a beginning or marking an end, because difference is incommensurable with totality. Our consciousness has the capacity for synthesis because it is time-consciousness: only that which is distended can be synthesized or totalized. The Kantian dynamical sublime, for example, is possible due to a formal similarity between the spatial distension of nature (revealed in its might and magnitude), and the time-distension of consciousness. It is because of this formal similarity, because of the capacity for totalization of time-consciousness, that we are able to add totality to raw nature. In the case of the work of art as an event, however, there is no distension that would allow at least for such a formal similarity between the object of judgment and the consciousness that judges it. Occurrence as primal difference resists any totalization. Thus, the postmodern sublime encompasses two failures. Not only does the imagination fail to produce a sensible presentation but reason,

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too, fails to apprehend the occurrence: reason comes ‘too late.’ It tries to account for the quod, to add totality to this primal difference, but this attempt itself already suggests that there was something ‘before’ reason, which resists reason. The obligation one feels in the postmodern sublime experience is more intense or more rigorous than that in the Kantian sublime experience, where reason is at least sure of itself. The obligation is greater because the law is more impossible or because the doubt is greater. One must continually testify to the quod despite the fact that testimony is bound to remain insufficient, inconclusive. Lyotard’s understanding of the work of art as an ‘event’ bridges the gap left behind by Kant’s analytic of the beautiful, the gap between the noumenal and the phenomenal that makes disinterestedness possible in the first place. The whole issue of interest is transposed to another level. Kant views the object as already arrived, already come into being—for him difference does not ‘emerge’ until ‘after’ the arrival. Difference marks the gap between what has started arriving (the noumenal) and what eventually arrives (mere form). Kant’s ‘mere form’ is a sort of a residue or a vestige of what started arriving, of Being. It is our only link to the world as a plenitude of being, as a totality and, as such, it is privileged over the existence of the object. Mere form functions as an intermediary, by means of which we are able to be disinterested in the object’s existence. Since we know that mere form, as a ‘representative’ of Being, is privileged over the existence of the object, we are able to ‘forego’ the object’s existence (and our interest in it) having been ‘reassured’ by mere form. If we are reassured in a higher reality (mere form), we do not need to be reassured (and reassurance is, after all, the purpose of being interested) by a lower reality (the object’s existence). This is why the analytic of the sublime is merely an appendix to the analytic of the beautiful, which is concerned with mere form. The postmodern sublime, however, no longer asks what started arriving and what finally arrived. Instead, everything has arrived but it could have just as well not even started arriving. This transposition of the line of difference, which collapses mere form into the quod of the object, creates—in fact demands—a certain interest in the ontology of the object. The word ‘ontology’ is not very appropriate in this context as it connotes a positivity. It is because of the profound doubt in the object’s existence that its existence is recast as an event. And it is because the event is fragile and doubtful that we take such an interest in it. The Kantian sublime has an epistemological or psychological function—the

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discovery of man’s supersensible vocation; the postmodern sublime, on the other hand, has an ontological significance for it (supposedly) restores the reality of the world by eliminating the tyranny of totalizing subjectivity. Barnett Newman Barnett Newman’s art, which Lyotard discusses as an example of the postmodern sublime,10 is based on the evacuation of any notion of subjectivity (agency, intentionality, meaning, purposefulness). While Sartre provides a detailed account of the nature of mental images as pre-reflective (pre-subjective) consciousnesses, Newman’s paintings illustrate the extent to which the trend toward de-subjectivization or ontologization has come to dominate not only mental but even visual images, which also aspire to creating a sense of being rather than to representation. Like Sartre, Newman is obsessed with purging his paintings of anything external, distended or spatial: the only trace of externality remains the artistic medium itself, the paint. The paintings’ aesthetic aspect is subordinated to the newly proclaimed ontological destiny of the image; their sole raison d’être is to affect the viewer: the viewer must feel something (anything). Newman’s paintings testify to the proximity between the Kantian notion of the beautiful and the postmodern sublime, which lies in their shared emphasis on, and interest in, the linking of mind to reality. Discussing the failure of non-objective painting to deal with subject matter, Newman insists on the need to discover a new subject matter that will make contact with reality (1990: 91). Lyotard’s idea of the sublime as situated neither ‘in’ the human being nor ‘in’ Being but somewhere in-between is clearly indebted to Newman’s mysticism and his admiration for primitive art. Newman emphasizes the religious nature of primitive art, an art “preoccupied with the creation of gods, with the expression of forces, with numinous beings” (89). Religious feeling is determined by our perception of ourselves: when we see ourselves on a par with other living beings, we become interested in divine forces (93). While the Kantian sublime does not provoke a religious feeling, the notion of the beautiful, with its disinterestedness and its freedom from concepts, puts us on equal grounds with the world. Because we cannot cognize the beautiful object, we do not ‘possess’ it. The judgment of the sublime does not involve cognition either, and yet, inasmuch as the sublime is merely the site of reason’s annunciation, reason does

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conquer or possess the object of judgment. Thus, it is in the judgment of the beautiful rather than in that of the sublime, that we attain something approximating a religious experience. In the judgment of the beautiful nature is transcended only in the sense that it is reduced to its quod. The transcendence of nature involves a transcendence of an attitude of sensibility toward nature: Communion with nature is confused with love of nature. […] [A] concern with nature, instead of doing what it was supposed to do—give man some insight into himself as an object of nature—accomplished the opposite and excluded man, setting him apart to make nature the object of romantic contemplation. […] But the primitive artist…portrayed the phenomenon…as an expression of the original noumenistic mystery in which rock and man are equal. (Newman 1990: 109 my italics)

The postmodern sublime, like the Kantian beautiful, puts human beings back in a primitive state of “totemic affinity” (109). As we shall see in chapter five, Deleuze’s notion of the time-image, in which the subjective point of view dissolves into a multiplicity of objects as points of view, is not too far away from this fantasy of “totemic affinity” even though it lacks explicit religious connotations. Neither Lyotard’s judgment of the sublime nor the Kantian judgment of the beautiful attribute as great a significance to the subject as does the Kantian judgment of the sublime, because reason is not involved in either of them, which leaves the object of judgment unclouded by the value of the judgment. Lyotard’s awareness of the danger of solipsism inherent in the Kantian sublime manifests itself in the distinction he draws between reflective thought and what he calls “determinate [rational] thought” (Lyotard 1988b:15). Reflective thought is “a thought that proceeds analogically and only analogically—not logically” (16). Determinate thought, which disregards or excludes time, is a somewhat poor analog of reflective thought. It is a kind of confused reflective thought, in the same way that matter is “the failure of thought, its inert mass, stupidity” (38). Lyotard defines thinking—supposedly, the essence of thinking rather than a particular kind of thinking such as philosophy—as “a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think” (19). But this is exactly what is proper to reflective thought as a kind of thought that differs from determinate thought in that it is not “a selecting and tabulating of data,” but just “the opposite of overweening,

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selective, identificatory activity”(18). In reflective thought “the mind isn’t ‘directed’ [as in determinate thought] but suspended. You don’t give it rules” (19). Thus, when Lyotard writes that a certain emptying of the mind is required for the mind to be able to think at all, he implies that reflective thought is the ‘origin’ or the ‘essence’ of thought i.e., that philosophical thought makes all other genres of discourse possible. Philosophical thought is the quod of thought, the happening of thought, thought as event. Since Lyotard considers reflective or indeterminate thought a sign of our freedom, the relations he posits between reflective thought, memory, and time call to mind Bergson’s account of the liberating power of memory. Consciousness is born as a result of the dissolution of cerebral disturbance into many possible responses and the delay of a particular response (30). This delay is made possible by memory, which is a sign of the indetermination of our will in the field of consciousness (65). Memory, then, “allows the being to free itself from the rhythm of the flow of things and to retain in an ever greater degree the past in order to influence even more deeply the future” (Bergson 1991: 22). Lyotard’s analysis of the distinction between different forms of energy is clearly indebted to Bergson’s work. He carries out a Bergsonian reformulation of the relationship between mind and matter, both of which he conceives as forms of energy differing only in the types of “transformers” that determine the reality of that energy: “The reality to be accorded to such-and-such a form of energy, and therefore of matter clearly depends on the transformers we have at our disposal” (Lyotard 1988b: 43). The reality of matter, and of the different modes of thinking, depends on the transformers involved in the respective judgment. Transformers delaying immediate reaction and complexifying the response, tend to increase the range of possibilities—all of them, except the one realized, remain “inscribed in a virtual state” (42)—and thus increase the indeterminability or freedom of the material world from subjectivity: The complexification of the transformers, theoretical and practical, has always had as its effect the destabilization of the fit between the human subject and its environment. And it always modifies this fit in the same direction—it delays reaction…it increases material liberty. (44 my italics)

At the same time, reflective thought leaves man free as it delays immediate response. Transformers which delay “complexify memory” (44)

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or even create memory inasmuch as memory is “the influx…of other possible—but currently ignored—paths which form memory” (42). For Lyotard, as for Bergson, matter is characterized by its forgetfulness i.e., by the absence of those other possible paths. It would seem logical to suppose that matter (and those modes of thought that are closer to it in their forgetfulness of time, particularly “determinate thought”) should be the most condensed form of energy and thus the most real one. But condensation is impossible in matter or in determinate thought, simply because there is nothing to be condensed and there is no memory to do the condensing. Memory is the great condenser; it condenses “an enormous multiplicity of shocks, which appear simultaneously to us although they are successive’” (Bergson qtd. in Lyotard 1988b: 42). The only reason the human mind is more real than matter is that the human mind is a transformer, which delays and through this delay creates memory that, in turn, condenses the delay and achieves a sense of absolute simultaneity, a sensation of time. Lyotard privileges transformers that delay in order to condense over any other kind of transformers. Sublime art is such a privileged transformer because it delays the response absolutely—no response is possible except a feeling of Voila!— and thus absolutely condenses information (time). As a movement toward the unthought, the postmodern sublime provokes contemplation, a mode of reception associated with the Kantian beautiful rather than with the “masterful intervention” of the Kantian sublime: “[W]e think of presence according to the exclusive modality of masterful intervention [and as a result] contemplation is perceived as a devalorized passivity” (Lyotard 1988b: 118). Lyotard’s sublime is “a passibility to lack,” an “ontological melancholy” (118) provoked by the lack of a destiny (destiny=objective reality). The elimination of subjectivity from Deleuze’s time-image is, similarly, an expression of ontological melancholy, of a desire for the object, a desire which desperately realizes that it must eliminate itself (see chapter five). However, one question neither Lyotard nor Deleuze addresses is whether what they ‘diagnose’ as an ‘ontological melancholy’ is really ontological or historically determined. As we shall see in chapter five, the problem in the case of Deleuze is that he assigns a more or less specific date to the birth of the cinema of the time-image i.e., he asks us to see an ontological significance in what is a historically determined event (the end of World War II). Lyotard’s notion of the sublime seems

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similarly determined by particular historical factors, such as the process of industrialization that swept across Europe in the XIXth and early XXth century. Is it a coincidence, for example, that the conditions which make possible the postmodern sublime emerge only in the megalopolis, where everything is destined and where we feel a nostalgia for that which lacks destiny, for the indeterminate? Is this sublime really an “ontological melancholy” or merely a historical one? Is an “aesthetic ‘before’ forms” really possible or is Lyotard offering us merely a rhetoric of “passibility”? The Kantian sublime threatens the event insofar as by privileging reason it “ratioanaliz[es] the given and neutraliz[es] the future” (Lyotard 1988b: 69), as a result of which “the present loses its privilege of being an ungraspable point”(65). It is exactly this sense of foreclosure that Lyotard wants to avoid. From Lyotard’s perspective, the Kantian sublime is not philosophical or not reflexive enough since it still clings to inscription—inasmuch as the addition of totality to the object of judgment is an act of inscription—instead of “generat[ing] occurrences before knowing the rules of this generativity”(72). It does not show itself as “accessible to the event”(73) because it involves too much security, stability, preparation—we are prepared to fall back on reason when the imagination fails, nor are we surprised that we can do that. It is sublime, for Kant, that we can still comprehend something even in the absence of a sensible intuition and/or concept, that we have a ‘back-up plan’. We only seem to be out of control. However, in the postmodern sublime experience, we are not prepared except prepared to be unprepared: “Being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking” (73). Kant’s judgment of the sublime does not involve real thinking since it does not question radically everything, including itself. Kant does not consider the idea of totality “interpretation [that] will itself be interpreted as a message”(74) but declares it to be the final message, the end of time. To judge sublimity a la Kant is not to think reflectively and, perhaps, not to think at all, since reflective thought, for Lyotard, is the essence of thought. By subjecting the event to the idea of totality, the Kantian sublime renders “passibility” to the event impossible. In the very act of ascribing totality to an object the mind, proclaiming itself as everything, makes the passage into the object as event impossible. If the mind encompasses everything, there is nothing toward which it could pass. From Lyotard’s point of view, the Kantian sublime would be the

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supreme arrogance of the mind, which presumes to declare itself “the witness or the guarantor of the event” (75) as if the event flowed out of the mind rather than the mind opening up to the event. The Kantian sublime compromises the purity of the aesthetic by identifying it with a certain capacity of the mind, whereas it ought to leave it undetermined as “the ungraspable and undeniable ‘presence’ of something which is other than mind and which, ‘from time to time,’ occurs” (75). With his definition of sublimity as a state of privation, which, however, seems applicable to every existent, Lyotard actually compromises the event instead of saving it. One might ask: How are works of art different from any object that is rather than not? If it is true that everything is rather than not, but only sublime works of art make us aware of that by letting the event happen, this would suggest that they overemphasize, and thus render superfluous, what should have been (but is not) self-evident, namely presence. Lyotard acknowledges this problem in his discussion of Boileau, without realizing, however, that it is a problem in his own aesthetic too. It is the problem of distinguishing between, on one hand, “a hidden figure” or “a figure for the erasure of figures” (95) and, on the other hand, what is not a figure. Although Lyotard’s sublime attempts to bypass the figure at all, it still has a meaning: It is happening means that it means nothing else, that it cannot be interpreted. A figure for the erasure of figures, the postmodern sublime is still a figure. What Lyotard claims to be a radical shift from “the didactic forms” (97)—poetics and rhetoric—to an ethical aesthetics does not seem so radical after all. If the old aesthetics is formulated along the axis poetics-figure-sender, and the new one along the axis ethics-erasure of figure-receiver, the second axis inevitably links back onto the first because the erasure of figures is itself a figure. Shifting the emphasis from the sender instance to the addressee instance does not remove the figure i.e. the referent. The referent is preserved in Lyotard’s reformulation of the central question of aesthetics—“What is it to experience an affect proper to art?” (97 my italics)—which makes the event proper to art and thus figures the event. We cannot let time be, because what is letting time be is exactly that which also prevents time from being: time-consciousness. No matter how hard postmodern art tries to ‘sink down’ to a minimal degree of meaning, its “poverty” cannot help preserve an element of intentionality. The ‘poverty’ of Newman’s ‘zip’ paintings is superficial or superfluous: his paintings are “neither seductive, nor equivocal; [they are] clear, ‘direct,’ open and ‘poor’” (83) but they are all these things for a reason.

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In the final analysis, Lyotard’s project of circumventing speculative discourse compromises itself, partly because it refines the very aesthetic of “superfine sensibility” it scorns and wants to transcend. The postmodern sublime, as exemplified in the work of Barnett Newman, is not as innocent and self-evident as it declares itself to be: it can identify itself as a break from tradition only against the background of that tradition. Newman enthusiastically contrasts the ‘barbarity’ of modern American art with the ‘superfine sensibility’ of Greek and European art, which adores “the elegant column and the beautiful profile” (Newman 1990: 170). American art is, supposedly, superior to the art of “superfine sensibility” because it disregards the object or exiles it: the artist in America “does not even have the objects” (170). Nevertheless, isn’t it possible to develop a “superfine sensibility” for something that does not belong to the sensible realm? In fact, does not the appeal to reflective thought or to Being—the ‘subject matter’ of American abstract expressionism—require a sensibility even more refined than the Greek/European one? The harder an object is to grasp, the more refined our capacity for grasping it must be. Provided that thought and Being, are harder to ‘grasp’, the art that presents them must refine our responsiveness or our “passibility” to them. In the final analysis, isn’t Lyotard’s notion of “passibility” the postmodern version of Greek sensibility? The objects of sensibility and passibility might inhabit different realms, but sensibility and passibility themselves serve one and the same function, that of awakening or opening up the mind to what is Other than the mind. The continuity between Greek and American art is evident in Newman’s critique of Longinus, who “could not extricate himself from…the problem of value, so that to him the feeling of exaltation became synonymous with the perfect statement—an objective rhetoric” (171 my italics). Newman’s and Lyotard’s wonder at the quod is a problem of value in its own right. The statement There is something rather than nothing is a statement of value: the quod is evaluated or valorized even though it is evaluated against non-existence. There is no phrase that would not involve the value of what is being phrased i.e. even Being is an object of value. After all, what exactly is the meaning of phrases such as “the perfect statement,” “perfect form,” “ideal sensibility”? Newman assumes that “ideal sensibility” refers exclusively to the ideal, correct, symmetrical, perfect form of an object of the senses. However, “ideal sensibility” may refer not only, or not merely, to the ideal nature of the object, but also to the ideal nature of the feeling provoked by an object and/or idea.

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The postmodern sublime cannot circumvent this “ideal sensibility” or what Newman calls “the rhetoric of exaltation” (172) of Greek (and European) art, and, thus, cannot deny its debt to the Kantian analytic of the beautiful. “Rhetoric” poses the question of effectiveness, the use of “props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful” (173). Newman’s art is not purposeless because the command Be! has to be given in an effective manner. Having admitted that reality and Being are not given but must be made to be, Lyotard claims this art is “self-evident,” “real and concrete”(173) i.e., he wants it to be signifying (reflective) and asignifying (pre-reflective, pre-subjective) at the same time. The postmodern sublime, however, cannot be ‘understood,’ for lack of a better word, without the props and crutches of aesthetic theory. The ambition of Newman’s art to distinguish itself from the “pure rhetoric of abstract mathematical relationships” (173) rests on the assumption that these relationships, however abstract, are still recognizable, that they are means to an end (rhetorical strategies) whereas the images created by Newman’s art are, supposedly, unrecognizable and thus irreducible to the status of mere means serving a rhetorical end. (Similarly, as we shall see, Deleuze’s time-image is one that we cannot recognize or recall.) This kind of logic presupposes that only objects of sensibility and their abstract representations are recognizable, that there is a certain level or limit to which an object can be reduced and still remain a potential object of rhetoric; supposedly, Being is this limit. Newman believes that Being cannot be reduced and that, therefore, it is outside the realm of rhetoric and superior to abstract form, which itself is just as recognizable as sensible form. However, even if this were so, his art has no way of ‘proving’ this except by first undermining its own claim: if Being is unrecognizable and irreducible, and if Newman’s art wants to testify to Being, his art must first pretend that Being is recognizable, in order to present the unpresentable. Newman has to resort to rhetoric in order to allow his art to be unrhetorical.11 Underlying Lyotard’s notion of Is it happening? is a fear of solipsism. The mind must be moved, the addressee must be affected, an opening or a space between the mind and everything that the mind is not must be preserved. Saving the honor of thinking means saving the mind from self-obsession, self-consumption, self-destruction. Lyotard’s sublime, like Kant’s notion of the beautiful, is concerned with preserving the difference between the mind and what is not mind, with

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linking these two without, however, collapsing them into each other. However, the formulation of the problem of passibility in terms of a ‘project’ (the project of saving the honor of thinking) renders the result somewhat suspect. When we ask the mind to make itself passable to--, to make room for the remainder, we are already implying that there is no remainder but that the mind ought to create it, that the mind is not naturally, spontaneously accessible to--. Instead of revealing Being as the “donation”(Lyotard 1988b: 111), the mind is asked to become its own ‘donor,’ to donate a remainder—which it has extracted, as it were, from itself—back to itself. But if the mind creates that to which it will be passable, how can it deceive itself: “[I]f what we are passable to has first been plotted conceptually [plotted because it is a project] how can it seize us?”(111). The attempt of the sublime to make the viewer be is thwarted by a structural impossibility: after all, could we be the addressees of the question “Is it happening?” given that this question bears on our very ability to be present (inasmuch as we are not already present but must be made so)? Lyotard acknowledges this problem in his analysis of language: “[C]an you be the addressee of a question bearing on your ability to be the addressee of a question?”(129) As an attempt to rehabilitate the aesthetic of the beautiful from the forgetfulness and the disguised disrepute into which it has fallen in the Kantian aesthetic, the postmodern sublime constitutes a critique of the danger inherent in the Enlightenment project of compromising what, in Lyotard’s view, is most essentially human, reflective thought. The Kantian sublime, conceived as a certain capacity of the human mind, rests on a notion of freedom as the mind’s superiority over objective reality. The Kantian judgment of the sublime is still partly a rational judgment, manifesting the teleological character of what Lyotard calls “determinate thought.” Since this judgment has a value beyond itself—the annunciation of Reason as our final destiny—it serves an epistemological function (the objectification of subjectivity) rather than a purely aesthetic one. As the judgment itself is considered valuable, the agent of the judgment is accorded greater importance than the object of judgment, but the neutralization of the object of judgment makes the latter ethically suspect. Lyotard, on the other hand, refuses to analyze the sublime in terms of what the human mind is capable of. Restoring the value of contemplation typically associated with the Kantian notion of the beautiful, he thinks freedom as the mind’s passibility to the aesthetic object. Insofar as the quod of the postmodern sublime object revives the

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“mere form” of the Kantian beautiful object, the postmodern sublime remains closer to the Kantian notion of the beautiful (despite the fact that the latter does not have an explicit ontological relevance) rather than to the Kantian sublime as an expression of the mind’s superiority and control over nature. Lyotard’s idea of art making man present is based on his identification of presence with matter, which is in line with Bergson’s understanding of the difference between mind and matter, both conceived as vibrations, in terms of rhythm. Mind differs from matter thanks to its greater capacity for retention i.e. its capacity for memory. Matter does not retain any memories, cannot experience repetition, and is free of inscription. In terms of time, matter is the instant: matter does not exist in time for it is the very sensation of time. Thus, to be present, for Lyotard, is to be “matter” (138). “Passibility to the event” assumes a mind lacking for itself, as opposed to Kant’s sublime, in which nature is lacking for the mind. The ideal state of aesthetic reception envisioned by Lyotard—a state requiring the dismantling of consciousness—bears a disturbing resemblance to the state of a material point obeying the laws of mechanics. Lyotard believes that our will is manipulated to such an extent that the only way we could receive anything at all—for example, receive/respond to a work of art—is not to will at all. To be aware of our being, Lyotard suggests, we have to be deprived of volition, of consciousness. Art should not strive to reach our consciousness but precisely to miss it. Art, then, is at its best—art is sublime—when it affects us subliminally. Lyotard goes as far as to compare the sense of being sublime art provokes to the unconscious ‘being’ of automatic dolls. To demonstrate his idea of the sublime experience of ‘that there is time’ (the sensation of time rather than the experience of chronological time) Lyotard refers to the mechanism of puppets:12 At least there is some precedent for it in an observation made to the narrator of Kleist’s Puppet Theatre by the maker of automatic dolls. Nothing, he explains, is closer to infinite grace than the mechanism these puppets obey. Deprived of all intention (I’d say, deprived of all capacity for temporal synthesis), the dolls merely place their limbs at the moment as they are ordered, following the law of gravity alone. [...] The grace...Kleist writes about would be like the freeing of the mind from all diachrony, from all task of synthesis. […] [Sublime art]…[a]spires to exemption from syntheses, forms, becomings, intentions and retentions [i.e. memory], from repetition, in a word. Aspires to that unique pinch or to that ‘pinch’

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of the unique in which the differentiation of the one and the multiple would not have place or time. (163)

Lyotard suggests that the Impersonal—or sheer automatism—is the greatest freedom man could hope to achieve, but which he could never achieve since he is unable to reduce himself completely to matter, to what Lyotard calls “the pain of an impossible sainthood”(164). Nevertheless, sublime art can hope to make man sense his being by reducing the human to the being of a material point, whose uniqueness lies in that it does not endure. Whereas the Kantian sublime ‘congratulates’ us for our ability to think an object even in the absence of a sensible presentation, the postmodern sublime is the wonder at the very possibility of the object of aesthetic judgment. This wonder, however, is not provoked by the mere absence of ocular proof but by the cognition of the equally valid impossibility of the object. This wonder and this impossibility have nothing to do with our ability to cognize the world. It is not a question of our possibility or impossibility, our triumph or failure; it is a matter of establishing an ontological fact or, rather, an ontological doubt. Although the postmodern sublime appears to be a descendant of the Kantian sublime inasmuch as both are determined in terms of privation—in one case, the absence of a sensible presentation, in the other, the absence of possibility—it is more akin to the Kantian notion of the beautiful in that it shifts the emphasis away from the subject and envisions a state in which the opposition subject-object loses relevance as it dissolves into the pre-ethical and pre-rational command: Be! Reason becomes just another inscription, whose support must be broken in order for us to link to the aesthetic object at all. Thus, while the Kantian judgment of the sublime establishes merely the necessity of a certain type of link—the mind linking to the aesthetic object by adding totality to it—the postmodern sublime, by problematizing the very possibility of linking, establishes a necessity even more originary than the Kantian one. Linking to the aesthetic object and, in general, to what the mind is not, becomes an ontological law. The Kantian sublime serves as the basis for Lyotard’s articulation of an aesthetics of privation, in which the greatest importance is assigned to that which can affect us despite the fact that it lies beyond sensibility, beyond representation and, thus, beyond the image, even beyond imagination. This is what Lyotard calls ‘event’: an everyday occurrence that

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remains hidden under a barrage of significations. Becoming aware of events demands a heightened sensitivity to “the ‘it happens that’ rather than to the ‘What happens,’ [and] requires…a high degree of refinement in the perception of differences…[which consists] in the power to be able to endure occurrences as ‘directly’ as possible without the mediation or protection of a ‘pre-text’”(Lyotard 1988c: 18). Bill Readings has rightfully pointed out Lyotard’s indebtedness to Kant’s idea of the sublime as something that “leaves us without criteria and requires indeterminate judgment” (1991: xxxi). The event appears throughout Lyotard’s writings under different names: “the figure of discourse,” “the unconscious,” “the sublime,” “the unthought,” “the intractable,” “the inoperable,” “the differend.”13 Lyotard develops the notion of the event as a resistance to the metaphysical conception of subjectivity, which focuses on the spirit as a survivor and ignores the sheer possibility of things: “Birth itself, the beginning, is reckoned, through melancholia, as an illusion. What comes to life—the instant as event, emerging from nothingness—is already doomed to return to nothingness” (Lyotard 1993: 146). Against this metaphysical melancholy, Lyotard draws attention to “the enigma of appearance” (147): Rather than nothing, being gives entities, instants, objects. Since being appears in ‘objects’, it gets forgotten. Yet it gives objects, something happens. Expressions like ‘yet’ are concessions to melancholia. But by conceding, of course, I am impugning; or, rather, I am emphasizing the impugnment that exists in melancholia. What melancholia impugns is the fact that there is ‘nonetheless’ something rather than nothing. (147)

Lyotard’s privileging of that which is present—despite all odds—over the disappointment at the possible and perhaps inevitable disappearance of things, gestures back to Bergson’s critique of negation. As we saw in chapter one, Bergson argues that what we designate as “absence” is merely our disappointment at finding something else present in the place of what we expected or hoped to find. Lyotard contrasts this metaphysical melancholy with a child-like openness to the indeterminability and irreducible non-discursiveness of the world. This image of childhood is not, however, entirely devoid of melancholic overtones, which has prompted some critics to regard Lyotard’s philosophy as “arrest[ing] the imagination in a nostalgic reverie” (Browning 2000: 157) and ultimately “climaxing in a melancholic reverence for what eludes human concep-

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tion” (85). As we shall see in the next chapter, Baudrillard’s philosophy is also frequently ‘charged’ with melancholy.14 The indeterminate judgment to which the event gives rise proceeds by way of experimentation or invention rather than cognition, since it does not rely on any pre-given criteria for judging15: Reflection supposes that we do not possess the rule. Consequently, we do not even possess the object since we are not yet in a position to signify or name it. We can just barely indicate it as ‘this,’ as a case or an occasion. […] [R]eflection is a disposition of the mind by which it judges without concept. […] We see that this reflection is not a bending of thought back upon itself, but rather a bending within thought of something that seems to not be itself since thought cannot determine it. Yet it is the bending of something that is possibly more ‘inside’ thought than itself. This further inside is nothing other than feeling, Empfindung, or, as we say today, affect. (Lyotard 1993: 174)16

The paradoxical nature of the event lies in the incongruity between the event’s exceptionality—the event is possible precisely because we are usually oblivious to the being of things, which remains buried under the various meanings we ascribe to them—and the alleged universality of the event: all things are potential ‘events’, but we simply do not notice them. Bill Readings rightfully draws attention to the problematic nature of the almost unavoidable reduction of the event’s resistance to discourse to a case of mere “opposition between the absolute meaninglessness of the event and the discourse of meaning. Paradoxically, all events would then be indifferently, interchangeably, commensurably meaningless” (1993: 104).17 If we were capable of noticing the eventhood of all things, their quod (that something happens) would coincide with their quid (what happens). The event and the indeterminate judgment it provokes are possible only as the result of a “bracketing out’ of the meaning of things. We cannot be surprised by, or made “passible to,” the forgotten materiality of things unless we have first “fallen” into signifying them. The indeterminability or sublimity of the world demands that we first take a step back from determining or representing the world: the pure being of things becomes accessible to us only after things have become inaccessible to us i.e. after they have been signified. In chapter five I will extend this critique to Deleuze’s fantasy of meaninglessness in the time-image.

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This suggests that the movement from determination to indetermination, from meaning to being, can only be a rhetorical18 and, ultimately, sentimental gesture. In On Naive and Sentimental Poetry Friedrich Schiller contrasts the Greeks’ naïve attitude toward nature with modern man’s sentimental attitude: while the Greeks feel naturally, modern man feels the natural. While ‘feeling naturally’ presupposes a direct, intimate relationship with nature, ‘feeling the natural’ signifies man’s relationship with himself, a relationship with one of his mind’s faculties. Similarly, insofar as the eventhood of events can be experienced or “noticed” only after one has purposefully refrained from representing them, the event is a sentimental experience of being. The event is a rhetorical gesture because it is the experience of an excess of being rather than of mere being, the experience of something unpresentable, which cannot even be represented as unpresentable; it is this very unpresentability of the event that is experienced as excess. This kind of experience is possible only if we have already placed ourselves on the level of representation or signification: if it were otherwise, the impossibility of representation would be experienced as a falling short of an end (that of representation). In the final analysis, Newman’s art is not intrinsically or spontaneously unrhetorical i.e. it does not fall under “an aesthetic ‘before’ forms” (Lyotard 1988b: 150). The work of art is not a presence but we, the viewers, must make it so (or we must let it be a presence) by assuming a particular approach (a rhetoric of passibility) to it: we must experience the work “without referring it to [its] supposed initial situation, in the studio, at the moment of the ‘first’ sketch, or even what might have been the artist’s ‘first’ imagination of [it]” (150). We must be prepared to experience “as many states of freshness as what we might call disarmed gazes” (150). It is not the work that has overcome “plot [intrigue]”(150), but we are doing the overcoming as we make an effort to resist the temptation of letting ourselves ‘conquer’ or ‘possess’ and thus neutralize the work: we disarm our own gaze. Thus, the responsibility for the sublimity of a work of art is entirely ours; it depends on the sophistication with which we educate ourselves to disarm our gaze. Newman’s art is even more deceitful than mimetic art since it claims that it does not phrase but merely is. In mimetic art, that which is necessary to understand a painting is in the painting itself—the entire tradition of painting—while in Newman’s art, that which is necessary to understand the painting (to understand that we should not try to understand) is removed from the

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painting and ‘hidden’ in the aesthetic theory behind it, without which it is impossible to ‘get’ the painting. The viewer is not immediately affected by the work (as Lyotard would like them to be) but must learn how to be affected, must forbid himself to try to understand, let alone interpret the work. The work cannot become its own referent spontaneously or address the viewer directly in a natural way, because the theory must first distribute the instances in the phrase universe: the referent does not fall out naturally but is removed by the theory. The ‘event’ presupposes the suppression of subjectivity, which Lyotard identifies exclusively with a certain kind of thought he calls “determinate” and which he contrasts with indeterminate or reflective (inhuman) thought. To simplify things, in determinate thought, the subject stands outside the material world and represents/determines it. Indeterminate thought is characterized by the suppression of the subject as a source of representation/determination. However, the only way determination can be transformed into indetermination is by means of transferring the alleged source of determination from outside the system inside it. The subject can be deprived of the power of representation (rather, the subject can “give up” that power) only if it ‘agrees’ to put itself on a par with the objects of representation, thus reducing itself to just another arbitrary signifier within the system of signifying units. The only way the subject can become, in Deleuze’s words, “any-point-of-viewwhatever” is to become as arbitrary, unmotivated, and neutral as any other signifier within the system of signification. Since consciousness is never identical to things, the self-annihilation advocated by Deleuze concerns only the subject, not consciousness. However, insofar as subjectivity is defined precisely as a particular point of view, to annihilate ourselves is necessarily to annihilate ourselves from one place (outside the system of signification) and appear in another (inside the system of signification). Thus, at the very moment when representation seems to be bypassed, the system of representation rises from the ashes, for there must be a ‘place’ where the dethroned subject can re-inscribe itself. Just as the Bergsonian doctrine of the education of the senses betrays a structuralist rather than a phenomenological understanding of the place of the human in the ‘aggregate of images’, Lyotard’s philosophy of the event does not really present a radical critique of structuralism, and this is perhaps what Bill Readings misses in his impressive study Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. In one of the early chapters Readings praises Lyotard’s Discours, figure as a critique of structuralism:

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For Saussure, signifiers are pre-eminently differential units which have value (signify) insofar as they are signified as elements in an invariable system. It is the absence of motivation or direct relation between signifying elements and their signification which determines textual space, the space of arbitrary codes. In Lyotard’s terms, textual space is space which is pre-eminently flat, two-dimensional. (Readings 1991: 10-11)

To structuralism’s “textual space,” Readings argues, Lyotard opposes “the visual space”(11) of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, which acknowledges the fact that the subject is always already a point of view in the world i.e. that the subject is motivated and that the meaning it attributes to things is not merely the arbitrary result of a neutral process of elimination but is actually dependent on “the capacity of language to point, to refer, to indicate [which] is not itself a matter of meaning”(14). The event does not fall under the category of signification but rather belongs to “the capacity for showing or indicating. It presupposes that ‘something’ particular is given, here and now”(Lyotard 1993: 165).19 It seems to me, however, that in its radical singularity the event resembles not the situatedness of phenomenological perception but rather the place occupied by the Saussurian signifier as an unmotivated, discrete element reducible to any other element within the system of signification. Readings’ account of the differences between ‘designation’ or ‘reference’ on one hand, and ‘signification’, on the other hand, or between phenomenology and structuralism, suggests (despite what Readings intends to argue) that the event disturbs rather than affirming the continuity between man and the world: Designation is figural…in that it applies a continuity to a linguistic field which in principle only allows shifts between discrete elements. […] This is not like linguistic space in that it is not chopped into little bits, and it is not a matter of identifying a discontinuous bit by its opposition to all other discontinuous bits within the system. The continuity that designation introduces to space is thus also the introduction of motivation to the signifier of designation, of a non-arbitrary relation between elements. (Readings 1991: 16)

The problem lies in Lyotard’s understanding of the figure or of figural space. The common thread running through Lyotard’s various redefini-

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tions of the figural is that the figural (the unthinkable, the intractable, the sublime, the incommensurable) is something beyond subjectivity (since Lyotard limits his notion of subjectivity to determinate thought); in fact, it is subjectivity’s condition of possibility. However, the essential characteristics of the figural as described by Lyotard himself—“motivation and continuity [or irreversibility] between elements” and “depth and opacity for elements themselves” (Readings 1991: 18)—presuppose subjectivity as a point of view. Thus, if subjectivity is eliminated with a view to revealing the eventhood of events—which is exactly what Bergson, Lyotard, and Deleuze advocate—that is, if the subject becomes just another unmotivated and arbitrary unit in the system, another ‘bare material point,’ there would be nothing left to lend continuity and depth to the elements of the system, whether this ‘system’ is Bergson’s material world as ‘an aggregate of images’, Deleuze’s “crystal universe of images,” or Lyotard’s “phrase universe.”

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Since the purposiveness of nature does not involve any determinate concept of a natural purpose, it is a purely formal and free purposiveness. In The Truth in Painting Derrida rightfully observes that although Kant refuses to reduce the sublime to a quantum as it exceeds all comparison, he nevertheless defines the sublime as large beyond comparison. Why, Derrida asks, is the sublime large rather than small if it is not a matter of quantity? Lyotard’s critique of the ethical problems inherent in the Kantian sublime applies to phenomenology as well. While complimenting phenomenology’s attempt to “overcome the dichotomy of subjectivism and objectivism” by inventing new, neutral concepts (essence, transcendental ego, and Leben in Husserl’s philosophy) Lyotard nevertheless insists that phenomenology is, in fact, a return to speculative metaphysics since it fails to do justice to matter: “In locating the source of meaning in the interstices between the objective and the subjective, it [phenomenology] has not realized that the objective (and not the existential) already contains the subjective as negation and as overcoming, and that matter is itself meaning” (Lyotard 1991: 135). Passibility to the event is the capacity to sense “something in excess of what the body can sense, of what is sensible as circumscribed by the (biological, cultural) institutions of the body. […] Sensation is not only the reception of useful contextual information, it is also in its immediacy the reminder of a threat. The body doesn’t belong to you, it is sensible only insofar as it is exposed to the other thing, deprived of its self-distinction, in danger of annihilation. It is sensible only as lamentable” (Lyotard 1997: 217-233). Strangely enough, while the notion of ‘passibility’ demands an openness to the world, Lyotard describes ‘affect’ (the effect of passibility) as feeling enclosed within itself, a “‘pure’ feeling in the Kantian sense, pure in that it is not motivated by anything [not motivated by anything in the world]” (Lyotard 1993: 164-175). Lyotard’s critique of the Kantian idea of freedom is equally applicable to Sartre, who, like Kant, construes human freedom as demanding the suppression of the given i.e., of nature. In What Is Literature? Sartre contends that “our freedom is never called forth by natural beauty” (1988: 59). As long as natural beauty appears unintentional, accidental, it remains unreal; it is only through human intervention that “a deeper finality” (61) comes to express itself. Thus, Vermeer’s almost photographic realism is “closest to absolute creation, since it is in the very passiveness of the matter that we meet the unfathomable freedom of man” (62 my italics). Sartre defines human freedom as the “passiveness of the matter” whereas Lyotard defines it as a “passibility to matter.” Although in The Inhuman Lyotard offers Newman’s art as an example of sublimity, in his later work Postmodern Fables (1997) he contends that there is no aesthetics of the sublime: “There is no sublime object. […] Nor is there some aesthetics of the sublime, since the sublime is a sentiment that draws its bitter pleasure from the nullity of the aisthesis” (1997: 17-32). Instead, the sublime belongs to a “negative ontology” (1997: 235-249).

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The shift from subject to object, however, does not do away with the Kantian notion of purposiveness. The unpurposiveness of the quod is purposive—it is a formal kind of purposiveness and thus somewhat similar to that associated with Kant’s notion of the beautiful. The Kantian judgment of the beautiful is based on a purposiveness of the mere form of the object; Lyotard’s judgment of the sublime is based on a purposiveness of the quod of the object. Residual art is the opposite of vestigial art. “Vestigial art” is a term Jean-Luc Nancy coins to define art that has passed beyond representation but also beyond the intention not to represent. See Nancy’s The Muses. Lyotard conceives the time of the event as the event’s anachronicity: the event happens too soon to be assigned any meaning and, at the same time, too late to be recovered. However, to say that the event is anachronistic implies that time is nothing else but the process of assigning meanings to things. If at the moment of their happening events do not ‘yet’ have a meaning, time must be the coincidence (always illusory) of things with their significations. Only from the point of view of this spectral or simulacral time can the event be characterized as “anachronistic.” For an illuminating reading of Newman’s version of a post-modern Kantian sublime, see Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. Gilbert-Rolfe proposes an interesting interpretation of Newman’s art in relation to cinema, comparing a Newman painting to a film frame rather than a picture frame, “the frame as the whole image rather than what surrounds it” (1999: 64-66). Another reason Newman may have for claiming that his art is unrhetorical is that it addresses the individual rather than a social community. But “to reject the Sublime in the social sense” and to claim that “one experiences the Sublime or not, according to one’s fate and character” (Motherwell 1992: 53) is merely to proclaim a new, private rhetoric in the place of the old, social one. The attribution of sublimity to one’s personal reaction to art, rather than to the artist’s intention or to the work of art itself, only shifts the stress from one instance of the rhetorical structure to another, from the sender to the receiver. Besides, the addressee’s reaction itself can never be purely personal. In Postmodern Fables Lyotard goes as far as to argue that what he calls “anima minima” (the minimum condition for an aesthetic experience) “exists only as forced,” and that its life proceeds “from a violence exerted from the outside on a lethargy” (1997: 243). See Bill Readings’ Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. Readings traces Lyotard’s elaboration of the idea of the event, starting with the figural (in Discours, figure) and ending with Lyotard’s political writings. However, in Postmodern Fables Lyotard himself admits that melancholy is an affect characteristic of postmodernity (1997: 83-101). Perhaps the interest in the ethical aspect of the indeterminate judgment can be traced back to Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction, which Husserl describes as “a certain refraining from judgment” (1962: 98). Lyotard defines the indeterminate judgment as one that proceeds through experimentation, in the absence of any pre-given criteria for judging, as a passibility to things. Similarly, the epoche works through experimentation, through varying a thing in one’s imagi-

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The Image in French Philosophy nation so as to reveal what is essential to the thing. See Husserl’s Ideas for a more detailed account of the epoche. Gary Browning criticizes Lyotard’s analysis of the Kantian judgment of the sublime for focusing too much on the indeterminate, reflexive nature of aesthetic judgment while ignoring Kant’s idea of nature’s objective teleology (2000: 74-85). This is also the paradox of the Kantian aesthetic judgment (on the basis of which Lyotard develops his idea of the event): it is always a judgment of the particular (for example, a single flower) but it nevertheless requires a universal agreement. I developed this argument in greater detail in another essay. See Trifonova, Temenuga. 2004. “Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man: The Origins of the Postmodern Sublime in the Ethical Evaluation of the Aesthetic” in Kritikos (1). See Readings (1991: 13-52) for an extended discussion of the differences between the interiority or self-sufficiency of ‘signification’ and the exteriority of ‘reference’.

Baudrillard’s Simulacrum: The End of Visibility

The involuntary Platonist Baudrillard has been often criticized for his bleak interpretation of postmodern culture. In place of his “‘sour’ post-structuralism,” we are urged to accept “a ‘sweet’ post-structuralism…for example, Derridean post-structuralism, with its emphasis upon the delirious free play of the signifier” (Coulter-Smith 1997: 92). Baudrillard is strangely out of place in this technological age because he is too apocalyptic and at the same time too ‘romantic’ (read ‘neo-Platonic’) in his inability to overcome the melancholy provoked by “the loss of the real, the natural and the human” (98). Scott Durham’s Phantom Communities: the Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism is representative of this line of criticism. Durham distinguishes two different interpretations of the simulacrum— that of Jameson and Baudrillard and, on the other hand, that of Foucault and Deleuze. Durham finds Baudrillard’s version of the simulacrum as “the non-representation of the object or as the non-participation in the Idea” (1998: 8) a “strangely inverted Platonism, where the desire to pass judgment on existence has survived the belief in any ‘true world’ in the name of which it might be judged”(86). Deleuze, on the other hand, presents the simulacrum “in its daemonic aspect, as the positive expression of metaphoric and creative ‘powers of the false’ (8). The Deleuzian simulacrum is not a simple imitation but rather the challenging of the very idea of a model or a privileged position; it is rooted in Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s will to power as a creative power of falsification, metamorphosis and becoming (11). That Durham prefers the Deleuzian simulacrum to Baudrillard’s “performative simulation model” (54) is clear from his decision to link the simulacrum to memory rather than to communication, thereby recuperating the simulacrum as that through which “one recalls, awaits, or imagines what is virtual or unactualized in the very object that one sees” (17-18).

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Echoing some of the familiar criticisms of Bergson, other critics warn against Baudrillard’s seductive, aphoristic style, which merely disguises what are generally insubstantial ideas or, if we were to go with Durham, merely an inverted form of Platonism. Finally, there are those who point out that the simple fact that much of the criticism on Baudrillard has been written by his devoted confirms that his works “[can] be regarded as little more than strings of aphorisms, and thus not worthy of critical engagement” (Willis 1997: 138). There is a strange incongruity between these two critiques: according to the first, Baudrillard is not sufficiently postmodernist, and according to the second he is too postmodernist, as his fragmented, aphoristic style testifies. Rather than discrediting Baudrillard’s work these criticisms present it as worthy of critical attention, especially now that postmodernism is drawing closer and closer to the brink of self-exhaustion and we are less and less interested in “the sweet and delirious free play of the signifier.” The real: Bergson and Baudrillard In many ways Baudrillard’s ontology of the image gestures back to, while also reworking, Bergson’s image ontology in Matter and Memory. Although both Bergson and Baudrillard begin their analyses by examining the ontological and epistemological significance of light as the prime guarantor of the real, their concepts of the image, and therefore of the real, differ significantly. As we saw in chapter one, Bergson does not distinguish an image from a thing: things do not ‘have’ images and neither do we ‘produce’ their images. Insofar as they are made of light vibrations, things are already images or, taken more metaphorically, a thing is an image (or a representation) of the totality of images from which perception isolates it like a picture. However, Baudrillard regards images as capable of detaching themselves from things and either preceding or following them: having lost their solidity things have been dematerialized into images, reduced to their pre-given meanings. Images, as such, are neither exclusively visual nor exclusively mental; rather, Baudrillard emphasizes their pre(over)determination, their extreme proximity to us, which makes them virtually invisible. In Baudrillard’s work, then, the image becomes a metaphor, and a deliberate misnomer, for the end of visibility. When everything has been rendered visible, nothing is visible any more and we are left with images. The image is a sign of overexposure or oversignification. Bergson describes the ‘production’ of images as a process of dissociation or

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diminution (the image is dissociated or isolated from something bigger); for Baudrillard, on the other hand, the process has been reversed: the image is produced through a process of intensification or saturation, which ‘overexposes’ a thing into an image. Nevertheless, both refer to photography to illuminate the nature of the image: the Bergsonian image is produced by obscuring rather than by throwing more light on the object; conversely, Baudrillard’s image is produced by overexposing the object, throwing excessive light on it, making it ‘more visible’ than visible. The real, Baudrillard argues, does not exist or never ‘takes place’ since it is determined by, and varies with, the speed of light. The essential immateriality of the world is a result of the very nature of light insofar as it renders things distant or absent from themselves: The objective illusion is the physical fact that in this universe no things coexist in real time—not sexes, starts, this glass, this table, or myself and all that surrounds me. By the fact of dispersal and the relative speed of light, all things exist only on a recorded version, in an unutterable disorder of time-scales, at an inescapable distance from each other. And so they are never truly present to each other, nor are they, therefore, ‘real’ for each other. The fact that when I perceive this star it has perhaps already disappeared—a relationship that can be extended, relatively speaking, to any physical object or living being—this is the ultimate foundation, the material definition…of illusion. (1996: 52)

Our world of “restricted materiality” is opposed to the original world of maximal density: But in the beginning, this materialization involves both matter and anti-matter. It is only the eclipsing of anti-matter that puts an end to maximal density and energy, in favour of the minimal energy of reality. The cooling of the universe is accompanied by a restricted materiality, governed, at last, by a few verifiable physical laws (including, with the emergence of light, the possibility of observation, and thus of an ‘objectivity’ of the world). (61)

Paradoxically, both the objectivity/materiality and the illusion of the world are functions of light.1 Bergson had suggested something similar when he observed that insofar as perception is never pure but always pregnant with memory, there is always a delay between the world and our perception of it so that what we actually see is only the past.

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Baudrillard’s vision of the universe before it begins ‘cooling off’ recalls Bergson’s notion of the universe as an ‘aggregate of images’ which are merely refracted off of one another, incapable of acting upon one another. Only in the initial stage of the world, when matter is still collapsed back upon itself, is the world absolutely real, present to itself, existing in real time. From the very beginning (since the initial stage is only hypothetical) things are already absent from themselves (not contemporaneous with themselves) and absent from other things (distant from them). Thus, both time (contemporaneity) and space (distance) are, originally, unreal. The ‘objective illusion’ of the world consists in the fact that things are not contemporaneous but exist only “in a recorded version.” Recording is namely the non-contemporaneity of things with themselves and with one another, their different durations, the fact that they vary for one another. It is not we who dematerialize or derealize the world but things themselves are immaterial insofar as they exist in different times and are never co-present. Strictly speaking, there is a material world only in the original maximal density of matter before space and time, when all particles of matter are co-present and at no distance from one another. If recording is a manifestation of difference and non-contemporaneity, it cannot be identified with the hyperreal (self-identity or simulation) but precisely with the real i.e. with the objective illusion of the world. Although Baudrillard defines the objective illusion of the world precisely with the delay in time and space between things, with the fact that they appear to one another and to us ‘merely’ as recorded versions, he often considers even this ‘objective illusion’ as a kind of degradation or a loss of reality, thereby lending at least some support to those who ‘charge’ him with a neo-Platonic melancholy that stands out as curiously ‘un-postmodern.’ The real: Sartre and Baudrillard While Sartre distinguishes real time (the time of perception) from imaginary time (absolute time, time become intrinsic to the unreal object), for Baudrillard real time is only hypothetical inasmuch as absolute simultaneity is impossible. We never live in real time since that would mean to “be identified at each moment exactly with ourselves. […] No more absence from oneself, no more distance from others” (1988: 53). In Sartre’s view, consciousness is the only derealizing force; the world itself cannot be a source of illusion. Since the image is possible only

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when its material analogue is absent or non-existent, a material thing can never be transformed into an image. The image, Sartre cautions, must not be confused with an aesthetic attitude: one cannot apprehend an existing object imaginatively. When one tries to contemplate real objects, the result is not an image but an intensification of the nauseating disgust that characterizes the consciousness of reality (1963b: 281). The object then appears as an analogue of itself; its materiality, or the absence of anything transcendent in the object, is underscored. An image, on the other hand, is beautiful precisely because it is not bound by its material analogue, because the analogue points to something transcendent that does not show itself. The doubling (analogue of an analogue) which occurs when one contemplates real objects is the derealization of the real: the real appears too real and, namely because of that, as falling short of something essential, transcendent that would have (should have) made it real. Because it is real, it appears now as only real. Sartre’s description of the degradation of things to their analogues anticipates Baudrillard’s account of the derealization of the world as a result of its increasing immediacy. In the same way that one cannot contemplate a real object because it is not sufficiently distant from us (contemplation requires distance), things that are too immediately available are no longer real (we cannot look at them because ‘looking’ requires distance). But while Sartre refuses to call real objects ‘images’, Baudrillard describes this degradation of ‘looking’, this obscene immediacy of the world, precisely as a proliferation of images. The image, Sartre postulates, demands the absence of the material world; the image, Baudrillard objects, epitomizes the inescapable immediacy of the world. Baudrillard demonstrates that Sartre’s failure to find a point of contact between the two realms of being is not a failure to be lamented or criticized but one that reveals the fortunate indeterminacy of the world. The world preserves its constitutive illusion and is saved from the hyperreal only as long as thought and reality remain separate and the world remains unverifiable, non-signifying: At all events, there is incompatibility between thought and the real. There is no sort of necessary or natural transition from the one to the other. Neither alternation, nor alternative: only otherness and distance keep them charged up. This is what ensures the singularity of thought, the singularity by which it constitutes an event,

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The Image in French Philosophy just like the singularity of the world, the singularity by which it too constitutes an event. (1996: 96)

Baudrillard asks: “What distinguishes the consciousness of a real object from that of an unreal one?” “Nothing,” he answers, recalling Sartre’s conflation of image-consciousness with consciousness as such: It is not true that, in order to live, one has to believe in one’s existence. Indeed, our consciousness is never the echo of our existence in real time but the ‘recorded’ echo, the screen for the dispersal of the subject and its identity (only in sleep, unconsciousness and death do we exist in real time, are we identical to ourselves). That consciousness results much more spontaneously from a challenging of reality, from a bias towards the objective illusoriness of the world rather than its reality. This challenging is more vital for our survival and the survival of the species than the belief in reality and existence, which is of the order of otherwordly spiritual consolation. (94)

Whereas Sartre still upholds, if only in theory, the existence of an originary intimacy with ourselves, a pre-reflective consciousness, which is not preceded or determined by anything since it is itself an origin, Baudrillard denies that we can find such a starting point, a point of intimacy, an origin, since even our consciousness is already outside itself: hence the analogy between consciousness and ‘a recorded echo’ or a ‘screen’, both of which suggest externality. The virtual In addition to stressing the role of light in determining the limits of the real, both Bergson and Baudrillard attribute ontological significance to the virtual although their concepts of the virtual are strikingly different. From Bergson’s point of view, Baudrillard’s virtual would be a false concept as it relies on the erroneous though common identification of the virtual with the merely possible: Once, the two terms were linked in the living movement of a history: the actual form emerged from the virtual, like the statue emerging from the block of marble. Today they are entwined in the notorious movement of the dead. For the dead man continues to move, and the corpse of the real never stops growing. The virtual is, in fact, merely the dilation of the dead body of reality—the proliferation of an

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achieved universe, for which there is nothing left but to go on endlessly hyperrealizing itself. (1996: 47 my italics)

For Bergson, however, the virtual is an aspect of the life of the real precisely because the real is never fully realized. The real is not merely preceded by its potentiality or virtuality, which is eventually fulfilled in the real; instead, the virtual is the unexpected in the real, the present’s capacity to change its past. It is more than the real yet it comes neither before nor after the real but is contemporaneous with it: the virtual consists of all the possible meanings of the real. Baudrillard is not particularly consistent when discussing the real and the virtual: e.g., he attributes to the virtual both a destructive and preserving potential. Sometimes, he identifies the virtual with the threat of total realization, the threat of hyperreality. The virtual is, then, the opposite of illusion, which guarantees the reality of the world namely by derealizing it. But at other times, he attributes to the virtual a power of derealization, and thus opposes it to the real. The virtual stands either for total realization itself or for a strategy of escape from the threat of total realization; it has either already happened or it is a premonition, a warning against the danger of hyperreality. It is essential to grasp that Baudrillard does not identify the hyperreal or the virtual with the imaginary/the unreal. The latter is a force of negation (as we saw with Sartre) but the pathological involution of the real into the hyperreal puts an end to negation. The virtual or the hyperreal is the fulfilling of the dialectic: Today, we have to think a reality which lacks nothing. […] [T]he dialectic has indeed fulfilled itself, but ironically…not at all by taking in the negative, as in the dream of critical thought, but in a total, irrevocable positivity. By absorption of the negative, or quite simply by the fact that the negative, denying itself, has merely generated a redoubled positivity. Thus, the negative disappears in substance and, if the dialectic has run its course, it has done so in the parodic mode of its elimination, by the ethnic cleansing of the concept. (1996: 65)

The imaginary is not produced but destroyed by the surpassing of the real. And yet, Baudrillard argues, even when the world has hyperrealized itself, it has not yet realized itself since hyperreality or virtuality is itself just another illusion, only one perhaps less vital than the material illusion of the world, an illusion we have to resist by making thought

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even more positive than the positive, more real than the hyperreal. Having argued that the dialectic has fulfilled itself but has expelled the negative, now Baudrillard asserts that it is still not too late to restore the negative by revealing the hyperreal itself as an illusion rather than a pure positivity. But if nothing can really eliminate the illusion of the world, if one illusion is only replaced by another, why should Baudrillard care that the world has become hyperreal? He admits himself that the end of metaphysics might just as well be the birth of a new illusion, that of the ‘pure object’: All metaphysics is swept away by this turnabout in which the subject is no longer the master of representation (‘I’ll be your mirror’), but the operator of the objective irony of the world. It is, henceforth, the object which refracts the subject and imposes upon it its presence and its random form, its discontinuity, its fragmentation, its stereophany and its artificial instantaneity. […] Stripped of all illusion by technology, stripped of all connotation of meaning and value, exorbitated—i.e. taken out of the orbit of the subject—it is then that it becomes a pure object, superconductive of illusion and non-meaning. (1996: 74 my italics)

The question how real of a danger the virtual/hyperreal is imposes itself even more forcefully when one tries to distinguish the ‘good’ illusion of the world—its non-anteriority, its suddenness, its sublimity—from the ‘bad’ transparency of hyperreality. The virtual/hyperreal results from a reversal of causality, the introduction of the finality of things at their origin, the accomplishment of things even before their appearance: “All signs have been reversed as a result of this precession of the end, this irruption of the final term at the very heart of things and their unfolding” (66). Things become excessive when they appear as already accomplished, when there is no gap between their appearance and their realization, when their end coincides with their origin, when they emerge as already there. However, Baudrillard describes the constitutive illusion of the world also in terms of a disturbance of causality. The event is not determined: it appears as an effect without a cause. Just as the world is illusory insofar as it is uncaused, unintelligible, the hyperreal does not have a cause either: its end functions as its cause. Baudrillard clarifies the difference between illusion and hyperreality/virtuality in the following way: “The great philosophical question used to be ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Today, the real question is: ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’”(2). Although

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in both cases the cause as such no longer exists, the results are different. The illusory is that which exists though it could have just as well not existed (the possibility of disappearance, of nothingness); the virtual is that which has always already existed and cannot be destroyed (the impossibility of disappearance). In the first case, nothing is given that could not be taken away at any moment, while in the second everything has been given from the beginning and, therefore, nothing remains to be given. It is necessary that there always remain something to be revealed because the real exists only as long as it reveals itself as illusion. The virtual/hyperreal is a perfect illusion that threatens to destroy illusion precisely through its perfection: “Virtuality tends toward the perfect illusion. But it isn’t the same creative illusion as that of the image. It is a ‘recreating’ illusion (as well as a recreational one), revivalistic, realistic, mimetic, hologrammatic. It abolishes the game of illusion by the perfection of the reproduction, in the virtual rendition of the real” (1997: 9). The Bergsonian virtual, on the other hand, does not threaten to extinguish the real or be confused with it; it is also the double of the real but it does not drive the real toward an identification with itself which would attenuate it, collapse it into a perfect image, a perfect reproduction of itself. The virtual is the sign of difference, which can always infiltrate the present moment or the real, not to question it but rather to enrich it. Bergson insists on a distinction between images and virtuality, arguing that images themselves—memory-images—are not virtual, but are merely the actualization of virtuality and, thus, its degradation. The virtual cannot be exhausted in an image: one can follow the self-actualization of the virtual in images but one can never reconstitute the virtual from images. For Baudrillard, however, the difference between virtuality and image has collapsed. There is no more virtuality: there are only virtual images, perfect copies of the real which have supplanted the real. The virtual is the annihilation of representation, illusion, distance, time, and memory (e.g. “real time” is the destruction of time as duration). Given that ‘illusion’ does not signify another world behind this one but the fact that nothing is itself, that everything differs from itself, Baudrillard’s virtual poses the ultimate threat of absolute self-identity, absolute selfcontemporaneity, absolute proximity. On the contrary, the Bergsonian virtual expresses the fact that everything is larger than itself, that nothing coincides with itself because the past is preserved in everything without being actualized.

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Baudrillard’s description of virtuality stresses the poverty of the virtual: of the virtual one can only say “it exists, I’ve met it” (1996: 28). The world is virtual or poor because “referential substance is becoming increasingly rare” (29-30). We are reminded of Lyotard’s description of the sublime as intrinsically poor. Like the poverty of the virtual, the poverty of the sublime lies in the fact that it neither signifies nor is it the object of signification. Lyotard notes that the only response the sublime provokes is “Voila!” or “Here I am!” However, it is difficult to differentiate between poverty as excess (something is, and that is already more than what was expected) and sheer poverty (the only thing we can say of something is that it merely exists). At any given moment, then, the sublime object—the image which does not signify—could slide into the hyperreal, the virtual. The problem is that there are no criteria for distinguishing between the sublime as non-signification and the virtual/hyperreal as non-signification, between ‘good’ self-referentiality (an image drawing attention to itself, thus underscoring its autonomy) and ‘bad’ self-referentiality (the hyperreal drawing attention to its own reality and thus surpassing it, making itself dubious) i.e., there is no way to distinguish between ‘event’ and ‘simulacrum’. In the first case, it is a question of affirming the autonomous existence of something other than the mind by eliminating ourselves as a privileged point of view. In the second case, just the opposite—the affirmation of the connection between mind and reality—is at stake. Reality is virtual or hyperreal when it operates independently of us and we cannot even determine whether it is real or not. Whatever exists independently of us has withdrawn absolutely and we can no longer affect it. It develops according to its own laws: it has become ‘obscene’. ‘Obscenity’ refers to the annihilation of duration, of the slightest delay or lag in the existence of a thing, which makes it different from itself and thus impossible to decode or appropriate: “Now, there is something obscene about the instant replication of an event, act or speech and their immediate transcription, for some degree of delay, pause or suspense is essential to thought and speech” (1996: 31). What happens in real (virtual) time is not an event, because it is instantly telegraphable, already containing its double. However, what is memory other than the instant replication or telegraphability of each moment? If, as Bergson suggests, the photograph is already snapped in matter (perception is already ‘in’ matter) couldn’t we say that the photograph is always already snapped in conscious

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perception, that the memory image is already inherent in the perception image? And what is this ‘memory image’? Could the memory image be simply the unreflective (latent) consciousness of the present moment, while the perception image is the manifest, reflected consciousness of the moment? Could we conceive the relationship between image and memory image, or between perception and memory, as that between reflective and unreflected consciousness? According to Bergson, all unreflected consciousnesses are preserved in duration, constantly enriching our mental life. However, for Baudrillard precisely the richness of memory is dangerous, the fact that each moment has already its double—the (unreflected) memory image that accompanies it rather than following it. This preservation of the past in the present threatens the present by making it instantly telegraphable. Thus, unlike Bergson, who credits memory as a sign of our difference from matter, Baudrillard ‘blames’ it for the loss of transcendence. The difference in their views of memory accounts for their contrasting interpretations of the virtual. In Baudrillard’s works memory implies the derealization of each instant, the collapse of distance, the turning of the present into a shadow of itself, a memory. As the memory image supplants the present, the image becomes a repetition of itself and the past coincides with the present. Time is the indetermination of things, the possibility for a thing to appear and to vanish. The real exists only as a limit: things are real only as long as they keep crossing the limit, constantly appearing and disappearing. Once disappearance—illusion—is no longer possible, the world is derealized and time rendered obsolete. Baudrillard distinguishes subjective from objective illusion. Subjective illusion is the possibility of mistaking the unreal for the real or the real for the unreal: “So long as an illusion is not recognized as an error, it has a value precisely equivalent to reality. But once the illusion has been recognized as such, it is no longer an illusion. It is, therefore, the very concept of illusion, and that concept alone, which is an illusion” (1996: 51). Objective illusion, however, is the very nature of the physical world insofar as it is not what it is: it is never contemporaneous with itself and, thus, never contemporaneous with our perception of it. Illusion does not exist as such, because, as Baudrillard remarks, as long as an illusion exists, it is indistinguishable from reality, but after the illusion has been recognized, it is no longer an illusion. The only way we can formulate the status of the real is this: the real is the recognition of the illusory nature of the world. Even if the world is an

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illusion, our consciousness of it is real, because consciousness has the same structure as the real: consciousness, too, is a limit. Thus, as soon as one becomes reflectively self-conscious, one ‘loses’ oneself, until a new, ‘higher’ reflective consciousness emerges in which the present one is reflected and one finds oneself again. Consciousness is always losing itself precisely because it is always one step ahead of itself. There is no reason why Baudrillard should exempt consciousness from the dialectic of illusion/reality. As soon as a consciousness is reflected in a higher consciousness, the first consciousness becomes, retrospectively, illusory. In fact, it is not even correct to say ‘retrospectively’: after all, with consciousness everything takes place ‘simultaneously’, because unreflected and reflected consciousnesses do not relate to one another as objects and subjects. Baudrillard’s view of illusion remains ambivalent. On one hand, he considers it the only resistance to total simulation. Illusion is the possibility of things to disappear, but also to appear: only that which is destructible or which has not appeared is capable of appearing at all. On the other hand, however, illusion signifies the possibility of passing beyond matter and into the realm of the virtual. These conflicting views on the nature of illusion might be attributed to Baudrillard’s reconceptualization of the role of memory in perception: if Bergson is right, if the duration of a given perception represents the work of habit-memory, and if that work is a variable, then it must be possible to influence or control it, thus controlling perception as well. Indeed, Bergson’s belief that every perception is already a memory is intricately connected to Baudrillard’s idea of the disappearance of the real as a result of the slowing down of the speed of light. Since the real depends on the speed of light, if the speed of light changes—if, for example, it drops very low—images will start reaching us with greater and greater delay, which, however, will be impossible to measure precisely because of the change in the speed of light, the original criterion for establishing the reality of a phenomenon. While Bergson considers memory a source of spirituality, Baudrillard is much more suspicious of the work of memory. Bergson stresses the role of habit-memory in facilitating perception (memory has a pragmatic significance). Conversely, Baudrillard proposes that the work of memory has gone beyond mere condensation: perceptions have become memories in the more dangerous sense of being predetermined (i.e. not spontaneously recollected). Perceptions have become neutralized, habitualized

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but not in the ‘harmless’ sense of habit as condensation for the purpose of action. The impersonal When Bergson speaks of impersonal pure memory, he imagines it as the periphery circumscribing subjectivity. The impersonal is a limit toward which consciousness can, does, and should expand, but a limit that precedes it or envelopes it. In the context of Baudrillard’s account of our technologized culture, in which images have become ex-orbited, no longer proceeding from or controlled by a human subject but operating on their own, the impersonal acquires a different meaning. These images are impersonal not in the sense that they ‘precede’ the subject but insofar as they have disengaged themselves from the subject, reproducing themselves independently of it. Even though they can no longer be referred to a subject, they still preserve within themselves the shadow of the subject. The paradox lies precisely in the fact that the proliferation of images signifies not the increased independence of the objective world but just the opposite, the subject’s inability to transcend itself. For example, images in the media do not constitute an objective reality over which the subject no longer has control or which it can no longer access; rather, images are mere extensions of subjectivity, which the subject cannot transcend and thus pass into an objective reality beyond them. The autonomous operation of images is not a sign of an autonomously existing objective reality, but rather a sign of its disappearance. Simulation is namely this: the illusion that because images reproduce themselves independently of the subject, they constitute an objective reality. Simulation is a form of ‘bad faith’ insofar as the subject ‘knows’ that these images are extensions of itself—since they refer only to other images and not to a meaning transcending them and thus transcending the subject—but, at the same time, the subject believes it has no control over them because they seem to have acquired a being of their own. Thus, whereas in Bergson’s case the impersonality of pure memory is pure and original, in Baudrillard’s case it is produced or simulated: the images circulated by the media only appear impersonal while in reality they are the strongest manifestation of a subjectivity locked up in itself. In Bergson’s philosophy the impersonal is still a transcendence; for Baudrillard, on the other hand, the impersonal marks the impossibility of transcendence.

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The fatal If the virtual is the pathological involution of the real, then the ‘fatal’—Baudrillard’s term—is a resistance to the virtual. Toward the end of Fatal Strategies Baudrillard introduces the idea of the fatal object as a way of thinking beyond metaphysics. ‘Radical’ or ‘fatal’ thought assumes the point of view of pure objectivity or what Baudrillard calls “the principle of Evil” (1987: 182). The object is Evil or inhuman because of its resistance to interpretation, its secrecy or seductiveness. The inhuman is beyond causality and accident, even beyond negativity. In line with the ethical appeal of Lyotard’s idea of the inhuman as a resistance to the tyranny of subjectivity, Baudrillard defines the fatal or the inhuman as an expression of the enigma of the world, of its resistance to metaphysics: Metaphysics…wants to make the world into the mirror of the subject. […] Metaphysics wants a world of forms distinct from their bodies, their shadows, their images: this is the principle of Good. But the object is always the fetish, the false…the factitious, the lure, everything that incarnates the abominable confusion of the thing with its magical and artificial double; and that no religion of transparency and the mirror will ever be able to resolve: that is the principle of Evil. (1987: 184)

Fatality is “the absolute liberty of effects” (190), the absence of causes or origins. The ‘fatality’ of things lies in their excessiveness, which can never be represented or made transparent. Existence is always already a surplus or, to carry this argument to the extreme, only that which has been annihilated really comes into existence. Only through the threat of annihilation, through the return of the annihilated, and thus ultimately through repetition, does a thing appear at all2: From a certain moment on, these second comings comprise the very design of existence, where consequently nothing happens by chance; it’s the first coming—which is not meaningful in itself and loses itself in the banal obscurity of living—that happens by chance. Only by redoubling can it make of itself a true event, attaining the character of a fatal happening. […] Predestination eliminates from life all that is only destined—all that, having happened only once, is only accidental, while what happens a second time becomes fatal; but it also gives to life the intensity of these secondary events, which have, as it were, the depth of a previous existence. (187)

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What is the significance of conceiving the fatal—which is supposed to be a resistance to, even a liberation from, the hyperreal/virtual—in terms of repetition, as a ‘second coming’? It is important to clarify that Baudrillard does not think of repetition and predestination as overdetermining an object or event, just as an image is not a mere shadow of an object. I note here the same gesture I described earlier when I suggested that imagination is no longer conceived as an addition to reality but as the condition of possibility of perception and, thus, of the real. The imagination is no longer a posteriori, but precedes and founds the real. A phenomenologist like Sartre has no other alternative except to argue that since imagination expresses our freedom and cannot be reduced to a cause, the only way to explain it is to conceive it as an origin. The image does not add itself to consciousness because the image is a consciousness or consciousness is already an image; whatever ‘emerges’ or ‘originates’ is a consciousness or an image-consciousness. Similarly, repetition is not an external addition to some original substantial reality; rather, the real is (substantial) only insofar as it is repeated. Thus, repetition is the origin of the real. What happens only once is merely an accident, but if repeated it is an event. The real is produced, dissociated, repeated, represented, predestined but none of these terms have their usual negative connotations. For example, ‘predestination’ does not signify unfreedom or overdetermination; on the contrary, it underscores the uniqueness of the predestined object or event, its irreducible singularity. More generally, representation—the key metaphysical concept—is no longer a ‘bad word.’ It is as if Baudrillard has stolen this concept and turned it against metaphysics, identifying representation with event. As the second coming of something, representation makes it significant in itself, absolute, singular. Representation is not an act performed by the subject on the objective world but a law presiding over all beings. Baudrillard confronts metaphysics by enlarging the concept of representation well beyond the realm of subjectivity and turning it into an ontological law: everything (both subjects and objects) are representations. Refusing to think representation in terms of agency, Baudrillard implicitly posits an impersonal force which (indiscriminately) represents everything. From this point of view, the image is not a threat to the real but its ground. Such a positive interpretation of the image, however, is the exception rather than the rule in Baudrillard’s work, which generally treats the image as an epitome of the simulacral or the hyperreal. Baudrillard’s

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critique of obscenity, in The Perfect Crime, is based on a notion of the simulacrum as transparency, excessive visibility, over-exposure, supersaturation of the real with itself, which leads to the production of the hyperreal. In The Ecstasy of Communication, however, he notes that the “simulacra have passed from the second order to the third, from the dialectic of alienation to the giddiness of transparency” (1988: 79). The notion of the simulacrum as a threat to the material illusion of the world is based on a still existing belief in a subject and its discourse, whereas the idea of a third order simulacrum constituting the illusion of the world, its infinite reversibility, is already developed from a point of view beyond that of the subject and its discourse, from the point of view of the object itself, from beyond the end of the symbolic order: The object itself takes the initiative of reversibility, taking the initiative to seduce and lead astray. Another succession is determinant. It is no longer that of a symbolic order…but the purely arbitrary one of a rule of the game. The game of the world is the game of reversibility. It is no longer the desire of the subject, but the destiny of the object, which is at the center of the world. (1988: 80)

While transparency is the absolute proximity of the object to the subject, the object rendered more visible than visible, fatality is the absolute inaccessibility of the object, which is “always already a fait accompli. It is without finitude and without desire, for it has already reached its end. In a way, it is transfinite. The object is therefore inaccessible to the subject’s knowledge, since there can be no knowledge of that which already has complete meaning, and more than its meaning, and of which there can be no utopia, for it has already been created” (88-89 my italics).3 Thus, the illusion of the world is preserved even in a simulacral world, with a slight twist: originally, illusion is the possibility for meaning (things are meaningful insofar as they are different from themselves) but in a world where things have become themselves, illusion exists only as the absolute meaninglessness of everything, as indifference and inertia (93). Even after the disappearance of the subject, there still remains a world, the world of pure events (1987: 70) in which the subject appears and disappears, following the rules of the game just like any other object (1987: 76).4 At this stage, there are only effects, no causes; things metamorphose into other things “without passing through a system of meaning” (78). Baudrillard refers to this process as “panic,” “ecstasy” or “speed”, recalling Sartre’s notion of speed. But whereas Sartre’s ‘speed’

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designates only the mode of being of the for-itself as continually diverging from the in-itself, Baudrillard’s ‘speed’ characterizes the mode of being of everything. Although in Forget Foucault Baudrillard calls ‘ecstasy’ the liberation of effects from causes, the originary meaninglessness (or the objective illusion) of the world, in The Ecstasy of Communication he uses the term ‘ecstasy’ as a synonym for ‘simulation’, placing it on the side of the virtual/hyperreal. From Baudrillard’s point of view, then, Lyotard’s sublime is an example of ‘ecstasy’ in this second sense of the term. The sublime is a kind of simulation, because it draws attention to the sheer existence of something, “verifying to the point of giddiness the useless objectivity of things” (1988: 31-32). The intentional poverty of the postmodern sublime might be compared to that of pornography: “Often our erotic and pornographic imagery…has no other meaning but to express the useless objectivity of things. Nudity is but a desperate attempt to emphasize the existence of something” (32). The postmodern sublime is obscene because it tries not to signify or to signify only its own existence. Because nothing is left of reality, of the material illusion of the world, art works reduce themselves to their quod, hoping to bypass signification completely but actually still signifying: they signify that there are. Rather than seducing us, the postmodern sublime fascinates us: In truth we never really look at these images. Looking implies that the object viewed covers and uncovers itself, that it disappears at every instant, for looking involves a kind of oscillation. These images, however, are not caught in a game of emergence and disappearance. The body is already there without even the faintest glimmer of a possible absence, in the state of radical disillusion; the state of pure presence. (32)

The sublime is guilty of trying to do away with illusion. If obscenity results from the self-multiplication of the human, from the insane drive of consciousness to make all things reveal their truth, then it would seem that the sublime ought to be a resistance to the obscenity of the world. Instead it goes to the other extreme, attempting to reduce consciousness to pure presence, to matter. Obscenity threatens the illusion of the world by annihilating the objects or referents of consciousness, while the sublime threatens illusion from the opposite direction, as it were, by sacrificing consciousness and trying to posit an inhuman world (hence

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the emphasis in the theory of the postmodern sublime falls on what makes thought possible, what gives thought, the other of thought, etc.) Giacometti Sartre’s writings on the Absolute in Giacometti’s sculptures attainment of the absolute resonate with Baudrillard’s reflections on the nature of the hyperreal/virtual. In his discussion of Giacometti’s work, Sartre proposes that images have their own temporal and spatial determinations, which differ in kind from perceptual space and time. Both the time and space of unreal objects are “projected on an object as [its] absolute propert[ies]”(1963b: 187). Sartre argues that insofar as imaginary time and place become interiorized by Giacometti’s sculptures, they attain the absolute. This is why one cannot approach a Giacometti Giacometti expecting it to change on the basis of the position one occupies with respect to it. Sartre calls the experience one of “marking time” (recalling Lyotard’s description of the sublime as the “happening” of time) and praises Giacometti for having annihilated matter by making the point of view of the artist (and of the viewer) coincide with the material i.e. for having passed beyond the relativity of perception, beyond the real. There are two ways of looking at this. Either Giacometti has finally managed to excise the privileged human point of view from his works and to present them in their absolute dimensions, or he has incorporated the human point of view in his statues, making them absolute: the statues are created as situated appearances, as already seen, rather than first existing in order then to be seen i.e., has done away with illusion, inasmuch as illusion is constitutive of perception. In effect, what Giacometti has done is make the perception of his statues absolute, image-like. We do not perceive his statues; we imagine them. Sartre stresses their immateriality, their absolute dimensions, the fact that they are not perceived from a relative point of view but rather the point of view is ‘in’ the statues and determines the distance from which the statues are to be seen. We do not look at the statues, we do not ‘see’ them, because it is not we who determine the distance from which to view them. However, this elimination of our power to dictate the point of view and the distance from which to view them might be interpreted in two ways: either the statues are absolutely immediate (hyperreal) or they are absolutely inaccessible, free of meaning, of subjectivity (fatal). It is difficult to say whether their absolute dimensions (their existence in their own imaginary time and space) render them fatal or hyperreal.

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In other words, it becomes uncertain whether the Absolute belongs to the hyperreal (insofar as the complete actualization of the real collapses the distance between the real and the ideal so that the Absolute, by being attained, is degraded) or the Absolute belongs to the realm of pure perception. The difficulty stems from the fact that both the hyperreal and the pure or the impersonal are characterized by the collapse of the subject/object distinction. What Sartre calls ‘absolute’ is the elimination of human perception as an external, privileged point of view: the statues become themselves points of view. However, the hyperreal, too, presupposes the elimination of the subjective point of view, the suppression of the look: the hyperreal is always already there, already seen, preventing the act of seeing. Thus, “already seen” (obscenity) has two possible, and mutually exclusive, meanings: it signifies either the absolute triumph of subjectivity (the world has been preempted by consciousness, objects are merely extensions or reflections of the subject) or the complete objectivization of the world (everything becomes objective, because what is already seen is, for that very reason, no longer accessible, cannot be manipulated or relativized by the subject but exists independently). Hyperreal time and space are absolutely present to themselves, absolute redundancies. Similarly, the statues of Giacometti have already ‘happened,’ are already seen. In this scenario, what Sartre calls ‘imaginary’ time/space is precisely the hyperreal or the virtual: time and space doubled back upon themselves, identical with themselves. As long as the absolute remains a transcendence it is fatal i.e. unattainable, but once the absolute is realized (as in Giacometti’s works) it degrades itself into the hyperreal. ‘Seduction’ and ‘production’ The difficulty in distinguishing between the Absolute and the hyperreal, between real immediacy and manufactured immediacy, is also manifested in Baudrillard’s slippery distinction between ‘seduction’ and ‘production’. Pornography, Baudrillard asserts, is the opposite of seduction—it “decomposes bodies into their slightest detail” (1988: 43). But is not the reduction of a thing to its quod merely the most extreme case of this decomposition of things? Is not the sheer existence of a thing its ultimate ‘miniaturization’ or reduction, the denial of any possibility for transcendence? Baudrillard still conceives the sublime as a transcendence, a “narrative [that]…comes[s] to metaphorize our presence”(51) and takes us out of the objective world: “What has

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become of seduction today, of passion, of this force which rests the human being from all localization, from all objective definition; what has become of this fatality?”(53-54) The impossibility of true sublimity is due to the disappearance of transcendence into immanence, or the eclipse of ‘seduction’ by ‘production’. Contrary to Bergson, who tried to show, through the notion of the virtual, that the world is immanently transcendent, Baudrillard refuses to part with the metaphysical concept of transcendence, which he still posits beyond this world. ‘Seduction’ designates difference or otherness; thus, a sign that “fall[s] from seduction into interpretation” (61) loses its otherness, its secret, is completely exposed and, once exposed, can be produced over and over again. The distinction between seduction and production (or obscenity) is far from clear since both are a form of immediacy, the only difference between them being that the sign that seduces is immediately undecipherable, whereas the sign that has lost its seductive power is immediately—always already—deciphered. The confusion stems from the fact that both the immediately undecipherable and the immediately pre-deciphered resist us to an equal degree: both appear unknown and inaccessible to us. This point is usually missed, since we assume that overinterpretation and reflexivity are always connected to subjectivity, which has produced them and is now in control of them. However, the products of such self-referential acts eventually separate themselves from the subject, assuming an independent existence. Counterintuitively, the absolute replacement of things with their descriptions does not make the world subjective; on the contrary, the absolute victory of artifice is the very definition of objectivity, whereas the law of nature is precisely obscenity and self-identity. Nature is obscene since it is too obvious, glued to itself, with no mystery, no transcendence, absolutely transparent, more visible than visible. Only illusion can protect things from the obscenity of absolute resemblance to themselves: “There exists a terror, as well as a fascination, of the perpetual engendering of the same by the same. This confusion is exactly that of nature, the natural confusion of things, and only artifice can put an end to it. Only artifice can dispel this lack of differentiation, this coupling of same to same” (1987: 51 my italics). For Baudrillard, nature is always already a threat to the constitutive illusion of the world, which is preserved only through artifice. Just as Deleuze believes that by replacing things with their descriptions we are not losing sight of things but actually restoring them in their original, unreflected purity, in their absolute transcendence

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(see chapter five), Baudrillard, too, suggests that nature is obscene and that it takes the highest levels of artifice (self-referentiality, self-reflexivity) to reveal things as they are, that the more we manipulate things (through artifice), the more they become pure expressions rather than representations. Since nature, insofar as it is the constant engendering of the same by the same, “the natural confusion of things,” is already virtual, artifice is our only resistance against nature’s inherent obscenity. Self-reference or self-consciousness is the most objective aspect of our being. This is why, for example, metafiction is the least subjective kind of fiction despite the fact that it is produced by the most self-conscious authors. The same can be said of language poetry. Metafictioneers and language poets manage to express something other than themselves (whether it is ‘language’ or the genre of fiction as such) precisely by self-consciously denying intentionality. They perform an impossible gesture: they start at the highest point which is ‘supersaturated’ with subjectivity—the self-conscious author who makes the decision not to express himself—only to end up in the extreme opposite point of this subject-object continuum, attaining the greatest degree of objectivity. Sartre understood this when he declared the ego an object for consciousness. The ego is the stage at which reflection begins; self-reflexivity or self-referentiality is namely this process of self-objectification that produces the ego. Just as the ego is an object for consciousness, anything that proceeds from, or belongs to the ego i.e., to reflective consciousness, is object-like. Thus, the act of self-reflection or self-reference does not plunge us deeper into the most intimate spaces of our mental life—as is usually presumed—but, on the contrary, takes us out of ourselves, making us as objective as possible. The confusion over the real nature of self-reflexivity accounts for a number of inconsistencies in Baudrillard’s texts. For instance, Baudrillard’s privileging of ‘seduction’ as the space of “surface and appearance,” of the “giddiness of reversibility,” over ‘production’ as the space of meaning, depth, truth, is surprising in the general context of his critique of simulation and of the infinite proliferation of images, which are characterized precisely by superficiality, lack of referentiality i.e. by their seductiveness. If production is the space of meaning, signification, referentiality and if, on the other hand, obscenity is the threat of losing referential material, why does Baudrillard assure us that “THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO PRO-DUCE” (1988: 64)? If there is nothing to produce, nothing to refer to, then the world is devoid of illusion

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from the very beginning. But this is not what Baudrillard has told us about illusion which, he insisted earlier, is constitutive of the world, and whose disappearance renders the world obscene. This is a fundamental incongruity in Baudrillard’s thought. On one hand, the material illusion of the world makes meaning possible, while simulation seduces us into a world without illusion i.e. meaning is ‘good’ and simulation ‘bad’. On the other hand, the production of meaning is ‘bad’ insofar as it tries to make everything signify, while simulation is ‘good’ because it resists the mad urge to ‘expose’ (represent, signify) all things. In this second sense, seduction is actually identified with illusion: “Seduction is not the locus of desire…but of giddiness, of the eclipse, of appearance and disappearance, of the scintillation of being. It is an art of disappearing, whereas desire is always the desire for death” (66). Accordingly, whereas earlier Baudrillard conceived the image as pure presence, as the death of illusion (32), now he identifies the image with illusion, insofar as illusion is the ability of a thing to appear and disappear. The image is now credited as a source of illusion and thus of the real, which exists only as long as it is seduced or challenged by the image: “All these things [the truth, the real, God] only exist in the brief instant when one challenges them to exist; they exist…precisely through seduction, which opens the sublime abyss before them—the abyss into which they will plunge ceaselessly in a last glimmer of reality” (69). The strategy of the image is absence, not the saturation of the real with itself. Now the image is completely on the side of the material illusion of the world, rather than illustrating its degradation into an obscene proliferation of images. Indeed the entire world, Baudrillard suggests, originally consists of images insofar as things do not coincide with themselves but are infinitely substitutable and reversible (reversibility is the nature of the image, what distinguishes it from a ‘thing’). Almost imperceptibly, Baudrillard has transformed the image from the epitome of obscene selfidentity into a manifestation of originary difference: The principle of reversibility, which is also the one of magic and seduction, requires that all that has been produced must be destroyed. […] Seduction is party to this: it is that which deviates…that which makes the real return to the great game of simulacra, which makes things appear and disappear. It could almost be a sign of an original reversibility of things. One could maintain that before having been produced the world was seduced, that it exists…only by virtue of having been seduced. Strange precession, which hangs over all reality to this day. […] Because

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it has been led astray from the beginning, it is impossible that the world should ever verify or be reconciled with itself. (71-72)

Here the simulacrum is defined as the originary difference of things from themselves and from one another rather than as the obscene, total realization of the real, the annihilation of originary difference. The world turns out to be, originally, a simulacrum but in the good sense of “simulacrum”—continually dissimulating, dissembling, rather than identifying, revealing or verifying itself. In its ‘bad’ sense, the simulacrum is the derealization of the objective world, which has become predetermined, reduced to a mere representation of the subject. Yet, this is a one-sided view of the matter because it rests on the assumption that the subject’s derealization of the world has left the subject itself unchanged. The fact that Baudrillard also uses the term ‘simulacral’ to characterize the constitutive illusion of the world (7172) makes sense only if it is acknowledged that by dispersing itself, by making the world coextensive with itself, the subject, too, has changed: it has objectified itself. Baudrillard’s discourse of the murder of the real is, in fact, a discourse of the subject and its new destiny. The derealization of reality is the destruction of subjectivity but, as Baudrillard notes, the crime is never perfect. If the real is still preserved—as the trace of what has been murdered—the subject also survives in its annihilation or dispersal insofar as the subject’s destiny has passed into the object. If the real exists only as long as a subject exists, and if the subject has now dispersed itself in the objective world, without however disappearing, then the real, too, must be sought in the object into which it has passed. By subjectivizing or derealizing the world, the subject has revealed its ability to appear and disappear (to lose itself in multiplicity) which is, in fact, the strongest proof that there is still a subject: after all, Baudrillard himself defines the constitutive illusion of the world as the possibility of things to appear and disappear. By disappearing, by eliminating itself as a point of view, the subject has proven itself even stronger and more real than Baudrillard might have expected. The subject manipulates the real, so that if there is a deficit of the real, the subject can extract the necessary reassurance in the existence of reality from the world of objects, from beyond the symbolic order (that is, it will pretend to be beyond it). Subjectivity includes its own annihilation, its pseudo-sacrificial self-reduction to an object. The subject dissolves in the world because

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it chooses to, and it can find itself again by ‘generously’ searching for itself (as well as searching for the real, both of which it pretends to believe are in danger of disappearing) in objects or in the quod of its own existence. The subject can lose its power only because it has it in the first place. When it stops representing and stands still, courteously letting things reveal themselves, it still has the power but chooses not to use it. Even this self-renunciation, this sacrifice, is only a sign of the subject’s undiminished power. When Deleuze describes, in Cinema 2, what he calls “the crystalline regime of images,” which has been freed from the subject’s privileged point of view, he identifies the power of representation with reflective consciousness. Accordingly, he believes that once the subject is no longer defined as primarily a reflective consciousness, once this reflective consciousness is dispersed among multiple points of view, the subject must be powerless or dead. But even if the subject is thus reduced, consciousness in its most essential nature—pre-reflective consciousness—cannot be reduced. Even when the world is purged of signification, of subjectivity, when the subject appears and disappears like any other object, consciousness is still there. Therefore, when Baudrillard (or Deleuze, for that matter) talks about ‘pure effects’—effects that are not preceded by or reducible to causes, to meanings—he is discussing only a change that concerns the subject, but does not concern consciousness as such. Only the subject distinguishes causes from effects, because the subject itself belongs to the realm of causality and can be characterized as effectual or ineffectual. However, consciousness as such (pre-reflective consciousness) does not appear to itself. The alleged loss of mastery over representation, of which both Baudrillard and Deleuze speak, ought to be always considered against the background of this essential difference between consciousness and subjectivity. Even when the subject stops representing, consciousness does not automatically dissolve in the world but remains radically different from it. To eliminate subjectivity does not mean to eliminate ‘point of view’, since ‘point of view’ is more originary than the subject: ‘point of view’ belongs to the ontological, not to the ontic realm. Even if it is possible to pass beyond the symbolic order, even if objects are experienced as events, fatal, unintelligible, irreversible, they are still transcendent to consciousness. Pre-reflective consciousness is not the absolute identity of consciousness and world but only the disintegration of the subject/object split.

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To sum up, the simulacrum should be understood not only as the derealization of the world by the subject but, simultaneously, as the subject’s self-objectification. The ‘event’ is not the absolute annihilation of subjectivity, only its modification. The subject cannot disappear, just as the real cannot disappear. The real is a category that belongs to subjectivity, and both are expressions of causality. Causality, however, is not a given, but rather an effect that can be produced only under certain favorable circumstances, which Baudrillard summarizes in terms of speed. Acceleration, slowing down, expansion and contraction, speed: these are all central concepts for Sartre, Bergson and Baudrillard. Our mental life, Bergson thinks, continually expands and contracts, which in turn determines the point of contact with the present, the real. By ‘speed’ Sartre understands the intensity with which one detaches oneself from the real and projects oneself in the future.5 Baudrillard, too, conceives the real as an effect of acceleration: In purely physical terms, we may say that the reality effect exists only in a system of relative speed and continuity. In slower societies—primitive ones, for example—reality does not exist; it does not ‘crystallize’ for want of a sufficient critical mass. There is not enough acceleration for there to be linearity and, hence, for there to be causes and effects. In societies which are over-rapid, like our own, the reality effect becomes hazy: acceleration brings a jostling of causes and effects, linearity gets lost in turbulence, and reality, in its relative continuity, no longer has time to happen. Reality exists, then, only within a certain time-frame at as certain level of acceleration, within a certain window of expanding systems, within a phase of ‘liberation’, a phase in which our modern societies found themselves until now, but which they are currently leaving behind, with reality being lost once again—as the same expanding systems undergo further anamorphosis—in illusion, though this time in virtual illusion. (1996: 45)

Despite the fragility of the real, it can never be completely negated, because negation itself takes place on the foundation of the real. Even in the extreme case that all reality is negated there will remain the memory of that annihilated reality. The paradox of the real, then, is that it is never real enough—never self-sufficient, never a full positivity—but, at the same time, it is never annihilated and remains to haunt the unreal. The real derives its power from its own powerlessness. Something that never was in the first place, remains: this is the real.

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The real and the hyperreal Baudrillard arranges the real, the image, and the hyperreal along a continuum of truthfulness: the real is the material illusion of the world, but it is not false, the image is false but “[t]he false does nothing but intrigue our sense of truth”(1990: 52), whereas the hyperreal seduces us by being “falser than false”(52) since it creates the illusion of the real or the illusion of the illusion of the real, “a second-degree simulacrum”(52). On the other hand, however, the seductiveness of simulacra is contrasted with the obscenity of that which has lost all its dimensions: Looking is never obscene, whatever one says about it. What is obscene…is that which can no longer be looked at, nor, it follows, seduced—everything, animate or inanimate, that can no longer be enveloped by the minimal seduction of the glance and is doomed, naked and with no secret, to immediate devouring. Obscenity is the absolute proximity of the thing seen, the gaze stuck in the screen of vision—hypervision in close-up, a dimension without any distance, the total promiscuity of the look with what it sees. (59-60)

Now Baudrillard shifts the meaning of obscenity. Before it appeared to be an intrinsic characteristic of nature or matter, the lack of differentiation which is overcome by the differentiating human look, whereas now the obscene is not matter (or the in-itself) as such, but our relationship with it: the complete devouring or uncovering of the secret of the world. The object is not obscene by itself; obscene is the coincidence of the subject with the object, which renders reflection impossible. The material world—or what Baudrillard calls “the material illusion of the world”—vanishes when the present is no longer “quasi-instantaneous” but really instantaneous, when things are too close to us, so close that we have always already grasped them, which leaves them, paradoxically, out of reach. If perception is the result of discernment or selection (Bergson), obscenity consists in a lack of discernment, in the purposeless, random, superfluous, total perception of everything at once, the corruption of perception.6 In reality all things exist in imaginary time and space, but in hyperreality the differences between different times and spaces are annihilated. In fact, Baudrillard argues that the real exists only within a certain time frame. For instance, the real does not even constitute itself in primitive societies, in which everything flows so slowly that causes and effects are infinitely distanced from one another. Nothing signifies, but everything

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exists for its own sake. This raises the question: how does a primitive society, in which the real as such does not take place, differ from our post-technological society, in which the real no longer takes place because we are already beyond it, in the hyperreal? Although Hegel’s discussion of classical and romantic art in his Lectures on Aesthetics might not seem immediately relevant, it can provide a tentative answer to this question. Hegel argues that classical art is the highest stage in the historical development of art since it attains the perfect correspondence between the Idea and its manifestation. However, classical art stands lower in the Hegelian hierarchy of arts than romantic art. The reason for this, according to Hegel, is that the union of the Idea and its actualization in classical art is not the result of a conscious effort but rather proceeds from the specific subject matter of that art, the human body, which is the natural (unconscious, accidental, not purposeful) expression of the union of spirit and matter. Only romantic art attains the conscious self-realization of the Idea; however, romantic art is also the beginning of the end of art. Once the Idea is actualized, it is degraded: thus, romantic art is (inevitably) prosaic. Classical art is art without being conscious of itself as art, whereas romantic art realizes the concept of art but is, at the same time, already beyond art, the dissolution of art. It is this Hegelian logic that drives Baudrillard’s discourse of the real and its disappearance. In primitive societies the real has not happened yet, but this is precisely what makes them real from our point of view, whereas modern society is conscious of the real but, at the same time, already beyond it, in the hyperreal. What then is the difference (if any) between the impossibility of time (causality) and thus the non-existence of the real in primitive societies and, on the other hand, the annihilation of temporality that characterizes contemporary hyperreality as the loss of the real? Is there a difference in kind between the impossibility of the real (primitive societies) and the loss of the real (modern society)? If the only difference between the two stages, as Hegel points out, is that the first is not conscious of itself while the second is, and if what happens in between these two stages is the loss of the real, perhaps consciousness exists only as the loss of the real.7 Baudrillard offers conflicting definitions not only of ‘obscenity’—now positing it as intrinsic to nature, now presenting it as the result of the corruption of perception—but also of ‘hyperreality.’ In The Perfect Crime the world becomes hyperreal after the self-annihilation of consciousness. The ideal of hyperreality is

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The Image in French Philosophy [n]ot to be there, but to see. Like God. For God, precisely, does not exist, and this enables him to watch the world in his absence. We too would love, above all, to expunge man from the world in order to see it in its original purity. We glimpse, in this, an inhuman possibility, which would restore the pluperfect form of the world, without the illusion of the mind or even that of the senses. An exact and inhuman hyperreality, where we could at last delight in our absence and the dizzying joys of disincarnation. If I can see the world after the point of my disappearance, that means that I am immortal. (1996: 38)

Here Baudrillard is critical of the subject’s desire to dissolve in the world, to become an eye that sees but is not seen. In his other books, however, he argues precisely for the need to dissolve the subject as a privileged point of view and put it on a par with any other object. On one hand, the self-annihilation of the subject, the drive towards the inhuman, the elimination of the human as a perspective ends in hyperreality, but on the other hand, Baudrillard often describes what he calls “the revenge of the crystal” precisely as the realization of the hyperreal. Thus, he implies that perhaps there isn’t a significant difference between the annihilation of the object and that of the subject. The sacrifice of subjectivity is not a solution: the world will not become more real or ethical if the subject annihilated itself (as if it could). The hyperreal is produced from the desire to see ourselves everywhere, to be God, to disperse ourselves in multiplicity, to be a point of view within every object rather than a single point of view on all objects. The hyperreal was supposed to be a threat to the material illusion of the world but now Baudrillard describes it in the same way he describes ‘the revenge of the crystal’, which is supposed to ‘save’ us from the hyperreal. Thus, the hyperreal signifies both the triumph of subjectivity, which projects itself everywhere, and the triumph (revenge) of the crystal (the fatal object). Perhaps the reason for this ambiguity is that the desire to be everywhere is both narcissistic—it is the desire to reduce the whole world to ourselves—and self-destructive, a desire not to be oneself but to be somewhere or something else. Does the real exist (or happen) only as its own end? This is what both Hegel and Baudrillard seem to suggest; it is also the target of Derrida’s critique of Hegel in The Truth in Painting. Derrida points out that Hegel looks at art from the point of view of its end, as a thing of the past. Similarly, Baudrillard considers the real as a thing of the past, as already sublated in the hyperreal. Surprisingly, although he suggests that

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the real, whose disappearance he laments, emerges only within a certain time frame and depends on the difference between causes and effects, he is also fascinated by events that do not belong to a subject, events that cannot be reduced to causes (cannot be temporalized). The real depends on causality, on the lag between causes and effects, on time as a source of difference; however, the event, which Baudrillard credits with the task of resurrecting the real (the constitutive illusion of the world) is the very elimination of time. It is odd that Baudrillard is fascinated by the event, which is a dramatization of existence as such, of the quod of objects, even though he talks of obscenity in very similar terms. For instance, he expresses his disgust with the ready-made, calling it pornographic for drawing attention to the sheer existence of objects just as pornography draws attention to the sheer nudity or facticity of people. A ready-made claims that because it is already there, already given, existing, it is real. But the event does the same: it claims to return us to the real by drawing attention to its own happening apart from any signification. The event takes the form of “There is red” (or “Red is”) rather than “There is a red object” just like the ready-made proclaims “I exist.” In terms of language, the event can be conceived as equivalent to thinking of everything in terms of nouns only (a noun has the highest signification value since it refers to a real, solid object). Hence, the event is not the red object itself (it is not a quality attributed to a thing) but the quality (redness) as such, the absolute existence of the quality without a thing as a necessary support. This is what Deleuze means by “power-quality” which he distinguishes from “the state of things,” a difference between pure expression and signification, between the quality as an absolute and as an attribute, a mere shadow of the thing. The event is the independent existence of a thing before it is linked by the rules of grammar to other things. From this point of view, the highest degree of reality belongs to that which stands alone, de-linked from other things. The event The real is possible only if nothing is contemporaneous with itself or with other things but the event, which Baudrillard posits as an access to the real after it has been threatened by the hyperreal, is precisely the negation of time, the triumph of simultaneity and hence of hyperreality. Baudrillard describes the hyperreal as a trend to a certain miniaturization of the world. It is as if the universe were collapsing back upon

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itself, as if anti-matter were avenging itself. The slowing down of the speed of light is a corollary of the dematerialization or miniaturization of material reality: This change of scale is discernible everywhere: the human body…seems superfluous in its proper expanse…because everything today is concentrated in the brain and the genetic code, which alone sum up the operational definition of being. The landscape, the immense geographical landscape seems a vast, barren body whose very expanse is unnecessary. […] And what about time, this vast leisure time we are left with, and which engulfs us like an empty terrain; an expanse rendered futile in its unfolding from the moment that the instantaneousness of communication miniaturizes our exchanges into a series of instants. (1988: 18-19)

The postmodern concept of the sublime as an expansion of consciousness or an intensification of the sense of being (Lyotard’s Is it happening?) is only the other side of this process of dematerialization or miniaturization of matter: the more immediate and simultaneous (miniaturized) the material world becomes, the more consciousness has to expand, as if to compensate for that. The miniaturization of time and space is also their increasing immediacy or availability. ‘Ecstasy’ is precisely this proximity to things, to time and space, for which we no longer have to wait but whose immediate effects we can experience at any moment, and at our own bidding: we don’t have to wait, with Bergson, for the sugar cube to dissolve. As with the other key Baudrillard terms, the notion of “event” remains inconsistently theorized across Baudrillard’s works. In The Perfect Crime (1996) he uses ‘event’ to describe simulacra, but earlier, in Fatal Strategies (1990), he calls the work of art an ‘event’ that introduces arbitrariness and senselessness in the overdetermined world of causality and probability. In The Perfect Crime he describes the simulacral as a result of the reversibility of cause and effect, but in Fatal Strategies he praises this reversibility: “We like nothing more than this crazy imbalance of cause and effect—it opens fabulous horizons on our origins and on our potential power” (1990: 155). Furthermore, in The Perfect Crime he describes the tendency to exhaust all signification and fit every signified to a signifier as ‘seduction’, but in Fatal Strategies he uses ‘seduction” in the opposite sense, not as a rational strategy but as a resistance to strategies: “They say seduction is a strategy. Nothing could be more wrong. Seduction is a matter of these unexpected connections

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that any strategy can at best only attempt to reproduce” (1990: 155). As long as he is discussing ecstasy, obscenity, the end of metaphysics, the annihilation of the material illusion of the world, the involution of the real into the hyperreal, Baudrillard suggests that the reason for that deplorable state of things is the murder of illusion i.e. the murder of representation and referentiality, the dematerialization of the world, the scarcity of referential material. However, once he starts analyzing the role of art in the age of simulacra, Baudrillard describes the work of art in exactly the same terms he had used earlier to describe the hyperreal or the virtual. Now he insists that the work of art ought to be an event, ought to free itself from referentiality, from causality. The event is a catastrophe: irreversible. The event is, therefore, opposed to illusion inasmuch as illusion is the appearance and disappearance of a thing, its reversibility. After one realizes that illusion, and thus the real, have been murdered, what remains is the world as event. Does the end of the real automatically transform everything into an event or is the event a rare occurrence in the midst of simulacra? Is the simulacrum itself an event or is the event a resistance to the simulacrum? While it appears that Baudrillard wants to suggest the latter, his writing implies the former as it does not account for any sort of transition from the saturation of the real with itself (the hyperreal) to the principle of Evil defined as the domination of the object (the fatal). How does the subject saturated with itself (the hyperreal) differ from the subject that has disappeared, supplanted by the object (the fatal)? What is the difference between the subject as absolute interiority and the subject as absolutely exterior to itself, stricken by “a completely external destiny which occurs with an absolute surprise” (1987: 99)? Baudrillard leaves these questions unanswered. He cannot decide whether the event is on the ‘good’ side of illusion or on the ‘bad’ side of hyperreality. Insofar as it collapses time and space, the event belongs to the hyperreal or the virtual: in the event, there is no delay, no distance, which are, however, essential to thought. The event epitomizes the obscenity of the immediate and the contemporaneous. It cannot be integrated in our mental life (because it has no beginning and end): it is precisely that which refuses to link (to use Lyotard’s term). Although it might seem at first that the event—a pure shock or a pure effect—must be the epitome of illusion as the possibility of disappearance, in reality the event is the end of illusion: the event cannot appear and disappear precisely because it has no beginning or end.

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On the other side, however, occasionally Baudrillard uses the term “event” to designate the material illusion of the world. The reality of the world is its irreducibility to the real. From this point of view, the instant, by virtue of its simultaneity with itself, would be real time, and thus not real any more since it is beyond the material illusion of the world. Real time, which for Baudrillard is merely hypothetical to begin with, should not have been a threat except that modern technology is capable of producing real time (e.g. live coverage of events in real time). It is thanks to the radical illusion of the world, the originary absence of things from themselves and from other things, that the fiction of the subject/ object distinction exists. The possibility of an objective truth depends on the illusion of the world, on the non-being or non-identity of things (Baudrillard, like Sartre, defines being as self-identity). The world remains (safely) an illusion only to the extent that it is an event, a creation ex nihilo, which is to say to the extent it is unintelligible (the assumption being that only that which can be inscribed in a cause-and-effect sequence, i.e. that which has a history, is intelligible). The unintelligible cannot be annihilated because it can never be realized, fulfilled. Things are illusory to the extent that they appear suddenly and without cause (only the real is caused, has an end, and is intelligible). Since things do not coincide with themselves, it is impossible to grasp their appearing or emerging and their meaning at the same time (1996: 56). It is precisely this gap between the thing as an event and the thing as meaning that Baudrillard calls illusion. The illusion of the world is constitutive of it and does not change even after the world starts to unfold historically: “[T]he level of illusion could neither grow not diminish, since it is coextensive with the world as appearance. The illusion is the world-effect itself” (58). Only the reality of the world may diminish or increase to hyperreality. The illusion of the world is the world as appearance, which also means its possible disappearance. Things are illusory to the extent that nothing precedes them, nothing determines or justifies their appearance, and nothing prevents them or saves them from disappearing. The value of the event lies precisely in this absence of reason, in its absurdity: This suddenness, this emergence from the void, this non-interiority of things to themselves, continues to affect the event of the world at the very heart of its historical unfolding. […] Nothing gives us greater pleasure than what emerges or disappears at a stroke, than emptiness succeeding plenitude. Illusion is made up of

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this magic portion, this accursed share which creates a kind of absolute surplusvalue by substraction of causes or by distortion of effects and causes. (58)

Yet, how are we to reconcile this glorification of the event as a surplusvalue with Baudrillard’s critique of the drive to exhaust all possibilities, a drive that is responsible for the annihilation of all “reserves of uselessness” which are “threatened with intensive exploitation. Insignificance is under threat from an excess of meaning. Banality is threatened with its hour of glory. The supply of floating signifiers has fallen to dangerous levels” (49). Supposedly, the event’s significance derives from its poverty, and its effect of suddenness from its non-anteriority, from a simple that. But is there anything more banal than the fact that something exists? Isn’t the banality of the quod now threatened “with its hour of glory”? Is not the event part of the dangerous drive to “greater visibility, transparency and hypercoincidence” (62)? Does not the event announce the end of surpassing insofar as it declares itself a transcendence, but a transcendence that is immanent to things (including works of art) i.e. their very existence or facticity has become a transcendence? Sartre refers to this belief that transcendence exists as a thing, the belief that something is valuable just because it exists, as “bad faith.” Is transcendence in immanence still a transcendence or is it rather an artificial transcendence similar to that achieved by Andy Warhol’s images, which Baudrillard gives as an example of “the elevation of the image to pure figuration, without the least transfiguration. Not transcendence any longer, but the rise and rose of the sign which, losing all natural signification, shines forth in the void with the full gleam of its artificial light” (76)? If the event as a sublime experience attains the absolute, the distinction between real and ideal, between facticity and transcendence disappears, making negation impossible. Whereas the lack of reality we could at least make up for with utopianism and imagination…there is neither compensation for—nor any alternative to—the excess of reality. No longer any possible negation or surpassing, since we are already beyond. No longer any negative energy arising from the imbalance between the ideal and the real—only a hyperreaction, born out of the superfusion of the ideal and the real, of the total positivity of the real. (64)

From Baudrillard’s point of view, then, the postmodern sublime experience is an excess of being as it partakes of the obsession with immediacy

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he condemns. In the realm of the hyperreal every event has become as inconsequential as a catastrophe: Beyond this point there are only inconsequential events (and inconsequential theories) precisely because they absorb their sense into themselves. They reflect nothing, presage nothing. Beyond this point there are only catastrophes. Perfect is the event or language which assumes its own mode of disappearance, knows how to stage it, and thus reaches the maximal energy of appearances. […] The event without consequence—like Musil’s man without qualities, the body without organs, or time without memory. (1990: 17)

In the event, origin and end coincide, which means that any kind of interpretation can be applied to it without proceeding organically from it or explaining it in any way. The event remains equally indifferent to every interpretation because none ever makes it intelligible. We have seen that this is a good thing for Lyotard, but is it the same for Baudrillard? If temporality is the non-contemporaneity of the world with itself, then the event marks the end of temporality. This non-contemporaneity is also what allows the gap between origins and ends i.e., what makes meaning possible in the first place. The annihilation of time—of noncontemporaneity—is the annihilation of meaning, and both of these can be referred to certain changes in the functioning of light. The illusion of the world relies upon the absolute (constant) speed of light, which makes time possible: When light is captured and swallowed by its own source, then there is a brutal involution of time into the event itself. Catastrophe in the literal sense: the inflection or curve that has its origin and end coincide in one, that makes the end return to the origin and annul it, yielding to an event without precedent and without consequences—pure event. This is also the catastrophe of sense: the event without consequence is signaled by the fact that all causes can be imputed to it indifferently without its being possible to choose among them. Its origin is unintelligible, its destination equally so. You cannot go back against the course of time nor the course of meaning. (1990: 17)

Lyotard interprets the event’s meaninglessness as liberating, stressing not its indifference to various interpretations but rather the fact that it refuses to be explained away (by being made intelligible). Baudrillard,

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however, is more reluctant to give up meaning; instead he laments the inconsequentiality of the event, which he relates to the slowing down of light: If the waves of meaning, if the waves of memory and historical time are receding, if the waves of causality around the effect are fading (and the event today comes at us like a wave…it is a wave indecipherable in terms of language and meaning, decipherable only and instantly in terms of color, tactility, ambiance, in terms of sensory effects), it is because light is slowing down, because somewhere a gravitational effect is forcing the light from the event, the light which carries the event’s meaning beyond itself, bearing messages, to slow to a standstill, and the same is true for political and historical light, which we no longer perceive but feebly, and for the light from bodies, of which we receive only faint simulacra. We must grasp the catastrophe lying in wait for us in the slowing of light—the slower the light is, the less it escapes its source. Things and events have a tendency to no longer allow their meaning to escape, to slow down its emanation, to capture what they formerly refracted and absorb it into a black body. (1990: 18)

This, Baudrillard suggests, is valid not only for televised images but also for perception. It is not only that in the realm of the media the medium coincides with the message, but in perception itself bodies no longer refract the light but capture it within themselves, as a result of which we don’t perceive solid bodies emanating meaning but “only faint simulacra”(18). Interestingly, Baudrillard’s vision of bodies emitting simulacra—“a perfectly ecstatic and obscene universe of pure objects, transparent to each other, which would shatter against each other like pure kernels of truth”(60)—recalls Bergson’s description of “the aggregate of images” (the world before the birth of conscious perception). In Bergson’s account the human body is the center of the material world: as long as images, which are ‘made of’ light, merely refract off of one another’s indifferent surfaces, there is no center of reference that would make images meaningful. Only the human body is able to create a center of reference by reflecting images back upon themselves, thus making them appear to us. Meaning is born in this process of reflection whereby light doubles back upon itself. This is no longer possible in the realm of the hyperreal: because of the slowing down of light, light does not even reach the human body in order to be reflected back upon itself. Images have become for us what they originally are for one another, devoid of meaning. ‘Hyperreal’ means, essentially, ‘meaning-

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less’. One could say, this time reading Bergson through Baudrillard, that originally the material world, an aggregate of images, is already a hyperreal world: everything exists together, in the same place, at the same moment, indifferent to everything else. The real—the material illusion of the world—becomes possible only with the reflection of light from the special image that is the human body. Baudrillard asserts that the origin of meaning and of illusion (or the real) coincide: both are possible thanks to the delay created by the reflection of light, a delay that ‘inserts’ a difference between causes and effects, stimulation and response, a delay that guarantees the fundamental indeterminacy of the world. All of this is threatened by virtuality or hyperreality, which plunges the world back into its original, indifferent kind of existence. The event signals the degradation of the human body as the privileged image around which all other images organize themselves, its transformation into just another image among images. The real escalates to the hyperreal when the speed of light becomes relative: The speed of light is what protects the reality of things because it is what guarantees that the images we have of them are contemporaneous. All plausibility of a causal universe would disappear with a perceptible change of this speed. Everything would interfere, in total disorder, so true is it that this speed is our referent and our God, and serves as a figure of the absolute for us. If light drops to relative speeds, there is no more transcendence, no more God to recognize his own, and the universe lapses into indeterminacy. (1990: 18)

Earlier Baudrillard had argued that it is precisely because things are not identical with themselves that they are real, but now he is suggesting that the fact that we cannot be sure that the star we see still exists threatens our perception not only of far away things but of everything, so that I cannot, for example, be certain that the computer screen I am now looking at is still there and is not just emitting a false light, having become a mere simulacrum of itself: We would then need to generalize from the case of light reaching us from stars that have long ceased to exist—their image is still crossing light-years to get to us. If light was infinitely slower, a lot of things, even the closest ones, would have already suffered the fate of those stars: we would see them, and they’d be here, but they would no longer be there. Wouldn’t this be the case for the real itself:

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something whose image is still coming to us, but which no longer exists? We can make the analogy with mental objects and the mental ether. (19)

If light drops down to ‘human’ speeds” (18), all material objects would become indistinguishable from mental objects. Baudrillard imagines the opposite possibility as well, the possibility of bodies moving faster than the speed of light, as a result of which we would perceive them without being aware that we are perceiving them: Or supposing light were very slow, could bodies approach us faster than their image—then what would happen? They would rub into us without our seeing them coming. We could further imagine, unlike our universe, where slow bodies all move at speeds of light much slower than that of light, a universe where bodies move at prodigious speeds, except light itself, which would be very slow. Total chaos, no longer regulated by the instantaneity of luminous messages. (19)

Both of these alternative universes are based on the assumption that what we perceive are not the things themselves but their images, which reach us either before or after the things themselves. To reconcile the inconsistencies in Baudrillard’s account of light as determining the reality of things, it must be pointed out that originally things are not contemporaneous with their images—this is why, after all, the light from some stars reaches us years after they have died. Thus, we have to correct Baudrillard’s confusing statement that the speed of light protects the reality of things by guaranteeing that the images we have of them are contemporaneous with them: they are not contemporaneous, but the speed of light itself is constant, which means that the original delay between things and images is constant and we perceive everything with the same, constant delay. Baudrillard argues that the reality of the world is guaranteed namely by its non-contemporaneity; therefore, the reality of the world is threatened only because the speed of light becomes relative. It does not slow down to one particular speed—then it would still be a constant and guarantee the reality of the world, although a world existing at a different ‘speed’. Rather, the speed of light drops down to different speeds, relative to human speeds, as a result of which some things reach us before their images and others are preceded by their images. It is not enough, therefore, for the speed of light to change; it is necessary for bodies to start moving at different speeds because light itself has begun moving at various speeds. Baudrillard believes that we have reached the

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stage where light adapts its own speed to that of bodies rather than the other way around. Instead of things emitting images, images determine what things there are. To the extent that we can manipulate images, we can determine the bounds of the real and even manufacture/simulate it. Reading Deleuze through Baudrillard, we would have to conclude that the time-image, in which duration dictates what is happening, rather than events determining time, is already hyperreal. From everything we have said so far, it is clear that Baudrillard approaches the event with suspicion at best. At one point in Fatal Strategies he hints at the essentially schizophrenic nature of the event, emphasizing the sense of instantaneity typical of the schizophrenic experience: The schizo is deprived of all scene, open to all in spite of himself, and in the greatest confusion. […] What characterizes him is less his light-years distance from the real, a radical break, than absolute proximity, the total instantaneousness of things, defenseless, with no retreat; end of interiority and intimacy, overexposure and transparency of the world that traverses him without his being able to interpose any barrier. For he can no longer produce the limits of his own being, and reflect himself; he is only an absorbant screen. (69-70)

This description of the schizophrenic subject lines up with Deleuze’s account of Bergsonian pure perception or, in Deleuze’s own thought, to the idea of a “crystalline regime of images,” in which images exist only for one another, without varying for a human consciousness. Like an object or an image in pure perception, the schizophrenic subject is open on all sides to all things and completely deprived of affect: no discrimination, no choice, no discreteness, no conscious perception to delimit or isolate a part of the world of images. Bergson describes pure perception in very similar terms: in pure perception images are neutral to one another, they do not act on one another, do not appear to one another, but merely reflect one another without exercising any choice, without discriminating among themselves. Deleuze’s time-image is a schizo-image too insofar as it does not reflect a privileged point of view but is dispersed amongst multiple points of views across the aggregate of images. Both the schizo subject and the pure object (or the ‘crystal’) are characterized by their anonymity and impersonality; as Deleuze would say, they are ‘whatever-subjects’ or ‘whatever-objects’. Clearly, Baudrillard would like the subject to preserve its boundaries, not to dissolve in the impersonal objectivity of the world as the schizo

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does, but at the same time he welcomes what he calls “the revenge of the crystal,” which is supposed to overthrow the ‘tyranny’ of subjectivity. Thus, he hypothesizes that it is not we who change the object by constantly questioning it and thus violating it, but rather the object questions us and, in a sense, imagines us. He is surprised that “no other hypothesis is entertained than that of an altered object, submitted to the violence of the means of observation without the possibility of response, or else an object condemned to total simulation...projected into the aleatory form of models. The hypothesis is never entertained, beyond an object’s being distorted, of its active reply to the fact of being questioned, solicited, violated” (1990: 82). Now it appears that the object determines the limits of subjectivity (if it did not, the subject would dissolve in the world like the schizo subject); the object is no longer a mere “detour on the royal road of subjectivity” (111). The only tenable position now is that of the object, which forces the subject to realize its own illusoriness: “The only strategy possible is that of the object. We should understand, by this, not the ‘alienated’ object in the process of de-alienation, the enslaved object claiming its autonomy as a subject, but the object such as it challenges the subject, and pushes it back upon its own impossible position”(113). Nostalgia for the subject At this point, Baudrillard seems to confirm Lyotard’s point that the object has become sublime simply because the subject’s destiny has passed into the object. In the realm of the hyperreal, the object no longer appears to the subject—only its simulacrum does—but the disappearance of the object is inevitably the disappearance of the subject: “The object is what has disappeared on the horizon of the subject, and it is from the depths of this disappearance that it envelopes the subject in its fatal strategy. It is the subject that then disappears from the horizon of the object” (1990: 114). The result of the subject’s disappearance is that “[t]he entire destiny of the subject passes into the object” (114) so that whereas before the subject was the privileged being that was its own cause and end, now the object attains this privileged status of being irreducible to a cause, being sublime insofar as “[a]ny effect is sublime if not reduced to its cause” (114). And yet, is the object really avenging itself on the subject? Is the object really sublime? Even as he laments the tyranny of the subject and the murder of illusion—illusion exists only as long as there is something that the subject has not represented (yet)—Baudrillard remains optimistic that the

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negative (and thus illusion) can be resurrected if we are more hyperreal than hyperreal. It is not clear, however, if the subject is required to ‘beat’ the hyperreal by being itself more hyperreal—the subject must step back and refrain from representing the world—or the subject has nothing to do with this resistance but must merely suffer “the object’s revenge.” Baudrillard does not explain this desired transition from the hyperreal (the subject as the absolute master of representation) to the fatal (the object’s revenge). Why would the subject, who has supposedly already represented everything, ‘step back’ and let itself be reflected or questioned by objects? It can do that only purposefully, consciously. How could it deceive itself that it has lost the power to represent? How could it be purposefully powerless? Is Baudrillard justified in arguing that the subject is no longer the master of representation but instead the object is now imposing on the subject its own random form and discontinuity? Why does he exclude the possibility that this discontinuity is not the object’s discontinuity but a change happening within subjectivity and merely reflected ‘onto’ the object? Isn’t it possible that the object is still the reflection of subjectivity, only of a new kind of subjectivity, not whole and continuous but fragmented (and this is, after all, old news)? The subject is capable of lying to itself that it is no longer the master of representation precisely with a view to increasing its power. Representation and the power over it is not something the object can ‘steal’ from the subject: the subject must give up that power first. But a master who gives up his power does not, because of that, stop being a master. Just because the subject no longer represents the world as a coherent whole made up of distinct, frameable objects it can readily manipulate does not mean that the subject has lost all its representative power or that its power has gone into the object. To renounce mastery over representation, to eliminate oneself as a point of view, to become inhuman—these are still strategies of representation, which means that there is still a subject. The entire philosophy of ‘the crystal image’, ‘the pure object’, or ‘the inhuman’ is based on the very definition of a subject this philosophy claims to challenge—the subject as a unified being imposing a coherent order on the objective world. By analogy, representation, too, is conceived as necessarily unified, total. As soon as the nature of representation changes, it is wrongly assumed that the subject has stopped representing. However, a fragmented, decentered subject (and hence a fragmented representation) is still a subject. The notorious “death of the subject” that

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has been proclaimed on more than one occasion is nothing more than an outburst of melodrama in a philosophical trend—postmodernism—with an obvious predisposition to pseudo-apocalyptic generalizations. Baudrillard envisions a “pure object” taken out of the subject’s orbit: but it is ‘out’ only because the subject let it ‘out’. Through various technological developments the subject has stripped the object of its enigma, meaning, depth—it is the subject who makes the object pure, meaningless, and thus “superconducive of illusion.” The subject creates the conditions under which Deleuze’s ‘crystalline regime of images’ becomes possible. Even such an anti-subjective regime has a meaning only through the subject that it denies. The passage beyond the human is undertaken not for the sake of the objective world, which is by itself meaningless, but for the sake of the subject. The call to stop signifying, to return to pure perception, to let things express themselves is, in the end, meaningful only from the point of view of the subject’s destiny. Even if there was ‘an inhuman’, a pure fatal object, we can only talk of it in human terms: “master,” “power,” “representation,” even “inhuman.” The inhuman is not the end or ‘death’ of the subject, but rather another point of view from which the subject can look at itself: becomingobject, becoming-animal, or becoming-inhuman are all human projects. Nothing can eliminate consciousness underneath these anti-subjective projects, whether the subject disperses itself in a multiplicity of points of view for noble, ethical reasons or just out of boredom. Power, including the power of representation, is absolute: if the subject has this power when it is ‘normally’ representing the world to itself (from its privileged point of view), it wields the same power when it renounces its privileged position and ‘passes’ into a multiplicity of objects. Power is not to be confused with truthfulness: the subject’s power as a mirror, a master of signification, does not consist in the truthfulness of its representation; conversely, the inhuman point of view could not be ‘more’ truthful or objective. After all, why does the subject demand from itself that it stop signifying? Because it assumes (or hopes) that this suppression of itself as a point of view on the world will render the world more authentic or truthful i.e., it hopes to have its own lost authenticity restored to it. The desire to pass beyond the human, beyond subjectivity and representation, exists because there is a consciousness for which this shift would be meaningful. In the final analysis, it does not matter how we envision our relationship to the world—whether we think ourselves as a point of

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view external to things or a point of view within every thing: both of these are ways in which consciousness links to the world. That the sacrifice of subjectivity is not the end of subjectivity but its recuperation becomes particularly clear in Baudrillard’s discussion of the role of the work of art in a hyperreal world. Despite his critique of obscenity, obesity and ecstasy, he recommends that the work of art strive to attain the obscenity of an event: The work of art…should work to deconstruct its own traditional aura, its authority and power of illusion, in order to shine resplendent in the pure obscenity of the commodity. It must annihilate itself as familiar object and become monstrously foreign. […] [I]t glows with a veritable seduction that comes from elsewhere, from having exceeded its own form and become pure object, pure event. (1990: 118)

The work of art must be seductive; it must sacrifice subjectivity in order to be able to recover it. Just as the absolute commodity frees us from commodities, the work of art must present itself in the shape of a “predestined object” in order to free us of all predestination and overdetermination. Baudrillard explains the counterintuitive logic of seduction of the work of art by citing Sartre’s analysis of seduction: ‘In seduction I am not at all trying to expose my subjectivity to the other. To seduce is to assume entirely, and as a risk to be run, my object-ness for the other; it is to put myself before his gaze to be looked at by him; it is to run the risk of being seen to appropriate the other in and by my objectness. I refuse to leave the terrain of my object-ness: it is on this ground that I wish to engage the struggle by making myself into a fascinating object’ (qtd. in Baudrillard, 1990: 120)

One can ‘get rid of’ subjectivity only by overexposing it, by transferring one’s own destiny to the object: “This liquidation of metaphor, this precipitation of the sign into brute, senseless matter, is a thing of murderous efficacy. It is of the same order as the meaningless event, the catastrophe, which is also a blind reply, without metaphor, of the world as object to man as subject” (121-122). Once objects have become signs or metaphors of subjectivity (hyperreality), the only possibility left is to make signs into objects (hyper-hyperreality), since one cannot go back to the stage where signs signified objects (reality). Does this movement from hyperreality to hyper-hyperreality seem familiar? It should, because it is the movement driving both Sartre’s

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and Deleuze’s thought: higher levels of reflexivity, self-referentiality, self-consciousness are supposed to restore some pre-reflective state of authenticity; as Baudrillard puts it, the only way to fight the hyperreal is to beat hyperreality at its own game. The world becomes hyperreal when it loses its reality, when the objective or material existence of things becomes attenuated by the subject’s signifying acts, when objects are reduced to mere reflections of subjectivity. Baudrillard wants to convince us that the hyperreal world can become real again if the signs that have replaced material things are regarded as objects, not as signs. The idea is to reverse the places occupied by “object” and “sign”: instead of treating ‘objects’ as ‘objects’ and ‘signs’ as ‘signs,’ Baudrillard proposes to treat objects as signs and vice versa i.e., he assumes that objects and signs do not belong intrinsically or ‘naturally’ to two radically different orders (reality and representation) but merely occupy two places within a single system of signification. He assumes that they can swap places, exchange functions: an object can function as a sign and vice versa. Baudrillard ‘envelopes’ both objects and signs within a system of representation, purposefully ‘forgetting’ that what he is proposing to treat as objects are no longer objects in the material world but signs. He asks that we surpass representation by making representation, which is already a reflective act, super-representative or superself-reflective. By the principle of ‘double negation results in an affirmation’ he hopes to restore the reality of the world: the real is negated and derealized, but all it takes to recuperate the loss of the real is a higher consciousness, in which this loss will be reflected and thus neutralized. Baudrillard seems to believe that there is no limit to this process, that every particular consciousness is bound to be reflected in a higher consciousness and so on ad infinitum. The strife for greater lucidity or transparency, which is possible only through greater and greater degrees of self-reflexivity, is supposed to restore some pure, pre-reflective state: one can go back (the pure, authentic state is always a priori or in the past) by going too far (by becoming more and more self-reflexive).8 When the subject sacrifices itself—eliminates itself as a privileged point of view—it ‘makes room’ for the object, which now becomes absolutely self-sufficient, self-referential. The object is absolutely autonomous. The paradox is that its absolute autonomy is due to the subject’s self-denial, which presupposes the object’s dependence on the subject. Thus, the pure object is, at the same time, absolutely autonomous and owing its autonomy to the subject’s self-sacrifice. By the very act of giving up mastery over

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representation, the subject passes into the object so that the autonomy of the object is nothing but a metaphor for the sovereignty of the subject: by passing ‘into’ the object the subject has finally fulfilled its own eternal fantasy of being absolutely sovereign i.e. of having no outside. The ambiguities underlying Baudrillard’s thought suggest that what is really at stake in “the murder of the real” is not the ‘oppressed’ object but the subject and the necessity to redefine it in order to save it. In an interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, the editor of Art and Artefact, Baudrillard talks of the vanishing of subjectivity, of the world as consisting of images destined only for themselves, as precisely the kind of world he is interested in as a photographer: [I]f one extricates oneself from metaphysics, from the interpretation of the world and so on, one discovers a sort of delicacy in the non-meaningful, in the domain of the pataphysical. […] one enters a kind of empty space—the delicacy of emptiness and the delicacy of objects which become lost in their own emptiness. They don’t have any centre, they’re not in the process of gravitating towards any centre. (Baudrillard qtd. in Zurbrugg 1997: 41)

Baudrillard’s nostalgia for the lost illusion of the world rests on a theory of imagination resembling Sartre’s, a theory that construes the imaginary as a negation of the real: The illusion which proceeds from the capacity, through the invention of forms, to escape from the real…to pass to the other side of the mirror…is now impossible, because images have passed over into things. They are no longer the mirror of reality, they are living in the heart of reality—aliens, no more reflecting, but haunting reality—and have transformed it into hyperreality, where, from screen to screen, the only destiny of the image is the image itself. The image cannot imagine the real any longer, because it has become the real. It can no longer transcend reality, transfigure it, nor dream it, because it has become its own virtual reality. (Baudrillard 1997: 12)

This nostalgia for the imaginary or for illusion is, in fact, a nostalgia for the real inasmuch as illusion is constitutive of the real. It is as though Bergson’s ontology—reality is made up of images—has come true for Baudrillard. “The only destiny of the image is the image itself,” says Baudrillard, by which he means that the image is no longer destined for a real subject who would attribute meaning to it; rather, all images

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propagate themselves freely, the way Bergson envisions light propagating itself freely, unreflected by anything in its way. Baudrillard provides a truly vertiginous perspective on the world from which it is simply impossible to judge whether the simulacrum is the ultimate triumph of subjectivity or just the opposite, the extreme actualization of the existentialist idea of consciousness as ‘out there’, dispersed among the objects of the world. If the latter is the case, if a simulacral world is one in which subjectivity has been completely objectivized, that simulacral world would be practically indistinguishable from the Bergsonian universe as one huge, limitless, impersonal consciousness. Baudrillard is not as blatantly dualistic as Sartre; instead, he shares with Bergson a predilection for a rhetoric of intensification and relaxation, expansion and contraction. Because of the constitutive ex-centricity of things (not just of consciousness, as Sartre believes) the only direction in which they can move is toward collapsing back upon themselves rather than passing into their opposites. The real, thanks to its distance from itself, is a series of appearances and disappearances. Its death would not be its disappearance (which is still part of its life) but its final identity with itself; even then it would not disappear but simply become redundant, because “something redundant always establishes itself where there is nothing left”(1990: 11). The point at which the real degenerates into the hyperreal marks the end of history and, thus, the end of meaning insofar as meaning exists only as long as there is history, causality, a gap between origins and ends, the interpretation of a thing or event always lagging behind it. Sense is nothing else but this posteriority of things to themselves. Baudrillard’s work describes the disappearance not of the real but of illusion, and of the consequences of that disappearance. Illusion is vital to existence because as long as illusion exists, the real can be verified and affirmed. The surpassing of illusion, however, is the annihilation of surpassing or negation as such. While Lyotard strips the subject of what he sees as its unjustifiable arrogance, treating it as just one “complexifier” among others (rather than as the only source of complexification or representation), Baudrillard believes—and Deleuze would agree with him—that we have finally managed to extinguish ourselves, that we live in a pre-human or non-human reality, that “the subject is no longer at the origin of the process, and no longer anything but the agent, or the operator, of the objective irony of the world. The subject no longer provides the representation of the world (I will be your mirror!) It is the object that

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refracts the subjects” (1997: 14). However, as we shall see in the next chapter, while Deleuze privileges the pure image ( “the time-image”), Baudrillard refuses to attribute to the pure object the status of an aesthetic object, because it has been stripped of any secret or illusion (i.e. of any relation to subjectivity), “elevated to pure figuration, without the least transfiguration [by a subject]. No transcendence any more, but a potentialization of the sign, which, losing all natural signification, shines in the void with all its artificial splendour…an image…without quality, a presence without desire” (16). Baudrillard disparages “pure objects” for not being represented or transfigured by the subject but instead remaining neutral and meaningless. Subjectivity must be sacrificed not because the objective world has to avenge itself, but in order to prove that the subject is still alive. In the end, contrary to what we might have expected, not the object but the subject is the endangered species in Baudrillard’s philosophy. The subject can testify to its existence, to its difference from inanimate things, only by sacrificing itself and thus proving that it is still capable of being affected.9 Rather than the paragon of perfection, the human subject in Baudrillard’s philosophy figures as no more than a kind of virus (one of the agents in The Matrix refers to the human race precisely as a virus) and it is only as a sign of imperfection, a disease, a failure in the system of simulation that the human survives: Our ‘perfect crime’ would have been to produce a fully integrated, flawless version of reality, and withdraw from it as historical subjects without leaving clues that we were once in history. Fortunately or not, we cannot do this, as germs, viruses and catastrophes act as signs of imperfection, and are our ‘signature’ in the simulated world. They ensure that we can imagine we exist. (Horrocks 1999: 49)

The imaginary is no longer a transcendence or a negation of the real, but an imperfection within the real, which has itself degenerated into the hyperreal. While in Sartre’s philosophy to imagine is to transcend the real towards something else, Baudrillard does not even think it necessary to transcend the real: all that is necessary for the production of the imaginary is that the real fail to live up to itself, fail to be real. The real is simulated, which means that the failure of the real—the imaginary as an imperfection within the real—restores some kind of truth that is beyond the real i.e. beyond simulation. However, the imaginary as a failure of the real is not within our control: it is not that we purposefully

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create ‘errors’ or ‘viruses’ to stop the self-reproduction of the real. Both the self-reproduction of the real and the glitches that occur in it happen independently of us. Thus the imaginary—the human—now happens by accident, merely the result of malfunctioning. Is the human really in such bad shape? Is the hyperreal world a dehumanized world? Perhaps not. Robbe-Grillet once observed that what critics of the New Novel referred to as ‘the inhuman’ or ‘dehumanizing’ aspect of modern novels and films is simply a reflection of the growing obsolescence of the individual in the modern world. The ‘inhuman’ or ‘the impersonal’ is not a negation of the human, an attempt to get rid of Man, but rather “a larger consciousness, one that is less anthropocentric” (1965: 29). He was right to draw attention to “a certain fraudulence in this word human” (51) insofar as it presupposes an anthropocentric demand or expectation that all things signify. The ontological significance Bergson, Sartre, Lyotard and Baudrillard attributed to the image was an attempt to circumvent this fraudulent notion of the human by presenting things as superficial and external to us, devoid of any ‘romantic’ (human) depth or significance.10 However, Robbe-Grillet was also aware that total objectivity or impersonality is inconceivable: the suppression or elimination of subjectivity as a point of view is bound to attain only a pseudo-objectivity.

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Endnotes 1



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It would be interesting to read Baudrillard, and especially his idea of the simulacrum as the precession of images over things, alongside Einstein’s theory of relativity, to inquire to what extent the phenomenon of the simulacrum (in general the decline of representation and theories of representation) is due to certain identifiable physical laws, such as the speed of light for instance. In his novel Einstein’s Dreams Alan Lightman imagines the different conceptions of time Einstein might have come up with before he formulated the theory of relativity. See also John Mullarkey’s Bergson and Philosophy for an illuminating comparison between Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and Bergson’s theory of time. Mullarkey distinguishes between Einstein’s partial relativism (in Einstein’s theory the idea of a privileged frame of reference is preserved despite the acknowledgement of other frames of reference) and Bergson’s “full-relativism” (2000: 117), in which all frames of reference—as Deleuze would say, any point-of-view-whatever—are equally valid. This raises the question whether phenomenology considers time subjective or objective. According to Lyotard, phenomenology’s answer to this question is both “yes” and “no”: time is subjective insofar as it has a meaning for us, but it is equally objective because “we do not constitute it through an act of thought that would itself be exempt from it” (1991: 116). In Fear and Trembling/Repetition Kierkeggard argues that repetition has been wrongly called mediation, whereas in fact it is the liberation of the particular from its subsumption under the universal. What is repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but namely the fact that it has been gives the repetition an aspect of novelty. Opposing the Greeks’ idea that all knowledge is recollection (what is has been), Kierkeggard claims instead that being is not immediate or given; rather, things come into existence at all only through repetition—only through repetition can an event detach itself from the original confusion and lack of distinction between things. Without repetition, the mind would be a mere tabula rasa: anything new would be automatically inscribed on it so that the mind would be nothing more than a mere memorial of the past. Repetition is the only way the new can actually appear (but not the false new, which merely parades its shocking value). Repetition has nothing to do with memory; in fact, it is opposed to memory. Repetition is impossible when one seeks it consciously (repetition does not presuppose reflective consciousness i.e. knowledge) because then it inevitably degenerates into recollection. Recollection inscribes events; it is a form of conditioning. Repetition, however, is the coming of things into being. Note the parallel between Baudrillard’s ‘fatal object’ and Sartre’s image-consciousness, which cannot be the object of knowledge either: it appears complete and self-sufficient. However, the subject must not have disappeared completely—as Baudrillard assumes it has—since this meaninglessness still has to appear to someone; if it did not appear, it would not be meaningless (lacking meaning) but would be merely what it is. Sartre recounts that when he was shown several pictures and asked to choose the one that conveyed the greatest feeling of speed, he chose the picture of a motor-

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boat, because “speed is measured not so much by the distance covered in a given time as by the power of uprooting.” The real is measured by the power of detaching oneself from it, the real is real when one derealizes it. To apprehend the real is to apprehend it as a totality, which is possible only from the vantage point of the unreal. The most reassuring and thrilling thing is the menacing disintegration of the real, as Giacometti discovered when he got hit by a car: “Though his leg was twisted, his first feeling…was a kind of joy: ‘Something has happened to me at last!’ […] ’So,’ he thought to himself, ‘I wasn’t meant to be a sculptor, nor even to live. I wasn’t meant for anything’” (Sartre 1964: 232). Recall that Sartre defines perception exactly in terms of its inconclusiveness and incompleteness: the object of perception always overflows perception on all sides. However, it would be wrong to think that the more complete perception becomes, the closer it approximates imagination. Perception is not made up of images whose ‘number’ varies, as it were, so that if there are not enough images perception remains ‘only’ a perception, but if the number of images reaches a certain point, perception is supplanted by imagination. Thus, total perception is not the corruption of perception by imagination: imagination is not the limit of perception. Rather, the corruption of perception is a threat to imagination as well. For Baudrillard, the quod is always opposed to the quid: the world exists only as long as it is indeterminate and we cannot say what it is (it appears and disappears constantly, we cannot determine it). But as soon as the world is determined, described, totalized, attributed a concrete meaning, it stops existing or loses its reality. Baudrillard restates, in his own way, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle i.e. he suggests that we cannot know, at one and the same time, that the real exists and what it is. The knowledge of the quod is always at the expense of the knowledge of the quid, and vice versa. To be in hyperreality is to know what the real is, to be able to describe it, but not to know whether the real actually is. However, as the protagonist of Sartre’s The Age of Reason discovers, the struggle for lucidity in the course of which one attains greater and greater levels of selfreflexiveness, does not make one more authentic but, in fact, has the opposite effect of plunging one into “bad faith.” Many of Dostoevsky’s characters also illustrate the paradoxical nature of lucidity (the impossibility of restoring some originally pure, pre-reflective state precisely by means of exaggerating one’s self-reflection). The protagonist of Notes from the Underground tries in vain to escape the judgments of others by judging himself first even more severely than anyone else would have judged him. This alleged reversibility of moral categories is based on the erroneous assumption that pre-reflective and reflective consciousness are reversible. However, as Sartre himself demonstrates in his philosophical works, this is not the case since the pre-reflective cogito does not presuppose the reflective cogito, while the latter always presupposes the former. See Bill Readings’ Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics for a discussion of the event as ‘affect’, that which cannot be conceptualized or signified. However, there is always the danger of reifying the lack of depth into another intellectual concept, for example “absurdity.” Even the literature of the absurd, argues Robbe-Grillet, is a form of humanism: namely by describing the breakdown

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The Image in French Philosophy of the relationship of communion between man and things, it presupposes—or even posits as a moral necessity—such a communion. See Alain Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction.

Deleuze’s Time-Image: Getting Rid of Ourselves

In Mind-Energy and Matter and Memory Bergson isolates the phenomenon of déjà vu as the most authentic expression of the true nature of our mental life, which consists in the automatic preservation of the past in the present. The past, he argues, far exceeds the limits of our personal past, constituting an ontological (impersonal) rather than a psychological or subjective realm, to which we ‘leap’ through involuntary (pure) recollection, one instance of which is namely the experience of déjà vu. In his writings on cinema Deleuze elaborates further on Bergson’s idea by advancing the hypothesis that the appearance of the ‘time-image’ in post-1945 European cinema revealed the true nature of time as a continuous forking into incompossible presents and ‘false’ (impersonal) pasts. Following Bergson, Deleuze thinks subjectivity as a sort of abridged version of our entire mental life, whose richness and complexity can be restored only by suppressing or surpassing subjectivity. In Cinema 1: the Movement-Image and Cinema 2: the Time-Image he sets out to analyze the new mode of thinking made possible by the ‘time-image’. The ontologization of the film image The majority of critical readings of Deleuze’s work on cinema tend to reduce the film image to thought, glossing over the specificities of the image as an aesthetic phenomenon and subordinating it to an examination of Deleuze’s ontology. For instance, in his Introduction to The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema Gregory Flaxman argues that in the two volumes of Cinema Deleuze uses the image to investigate “the genetic forces of thinking itself” (2000: 13). According to Flaxman, Deleuze regards the film image not simply as a visual phenomenon but, more importantly, as the limit of visibility or of the sensible, as a sort of access to the thinkable:

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The Image in French Philosophy As such, the artistic image is neither a representation of an object nor even a visual impression, the first of which connotes mere recognition and the second a limited sensory bandwidth. Rather, the image is a collection of sensations—a “sensible aggregate”…that we cannot simply re-cognize and that we encounter, as such, at the very limit of the sensible. Sensations possess the capacity to derange the everyday, to short-circuit the mechanism of common sense, and thus to catalyze a different kind of thinking; indeed, sensations are encountered at a threshold we might call the ‘thinkable’. (12)

Flaxman’s reduction of the image to a preliminary stage in the development of a new kind of thinking is not unique by any means. In his article “Of Images and Worlds: Toward a Geology of the Cinema” Jean-Clet Martin also considers the time-image in terms of its philosophical rather than aesthetic or formal qualities: This is how we should envisage a volume and a field for the image: as a place and a perspective without real extension. There is a spiritual or mental milieu—which can neither be seen nor touched—where ideas cross with one another. […] We will call this milieu the world of ideas [which] we have just clarified with the words virtual reality. (2000: 72 my italics).

Similarly, in “Cinema and the Outside” Gregg Lambert suggests that the significance of the time-image lies in the fact that it offers us “a new image of thought” (2000: 282). Martin Schwab’s “Escape from the Image: Deleuze’s Image Ontology” is the only essay in this collection that draws attention to the fact that Deleuze’s “image-ontology remains insensitive to the specificities of cinema” (2000: 109). Schwab underscores the irreconcilable gap between Deleuze’s idea of subjectivity as a force of differentiation and, on the other hand, his privileging of the time-image precisely on account that it restores the original undifferentiated flow of images. How, asks Schwab, can the subject be both an agent of differentiation and de-differentiation or, how can the subject willfully abolish itself and ‘dissolve’ in pure perception? Although Deleuze is generally considered a philosopher of difference, he still clings to the Romantic idea “that our world has fallen and that subjectivity is an alienated condition” (133) and, accordingly, presents the subject as a sort of impurity of which the world has to be cleansed.

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Representation and point of view One should not be surprised that most of Deleuze’s commentators engage in reflections on the usefulness of the image as a preparation for a new way of thinking: after all, in both volumes of Cinema Deleuze, who remains more interested in what the time-image does or can do for thinking rather than in its aesthetic qualities, seems to submit to an almost irresistible tendency to ontologize every philosophical concept or problem. Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 trace the transition from a cinema dominated by movement-images to the modern cinema of the time-image. A decade before the Cinema books appeared, Roland Barthes had already noted, in reference to literature rather than film, the difference between “two systems of reading”: [R]ead fast, in snatches, some modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to happen and nothing does, for what happens to the language does not happen to the discourse: what ‘happens,’ what ‘goes away,’ the seam of the two edges, the interstice of bliss, occurs in the volume of the languages, in the uttering, not in the sequence of utterances: not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover—in order to read today’s writers—the leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers. (1975: 12-13)

In distinguishing between the movement-image and the time-image Deleuze makes a similar point about cinema: in the cinema of the timeimage, ‘nothing happens’, for what happens to the ‘language’ of cinema (time) does not happen to the discourse (the story). Following Bergson, Deleuze bases his analysis on the premise that time is not external to us but instead offers us access to our inner selves. Therefore, the ‘movement-image’—a concept clearly indebted to Bergson’s critique of the spatialization of time—fails to present duration but subordinates it to movement: in the cinema of the movement-image things and events determine psychological duration rather than the other way around. Deleuze then goes on to argue that the ‘time-image’ is the most direct and accurate representation of time, because it is not subjective/representational but instead reveals the “dawn of the world.”1 I shall argue, however, that Deleuze does not ‘get rid’ of subjectivity but simply reformulates the concept of the object by defining it as a mental (pure) image purged of any materiality and no longer subordinated to sensory-motor schemata.

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Deleuze’s argument is based on an implicit, counter-intuitive redefinition of representation. While we tend to assume that representation demonstrates the power of the subject over the object of representation, Deleuze suggests that the most important ‘result’ of representation is the establishment of a being other than the subject (the object of representation) insofar as in representing the world the subject objectifies itself. In order to restore its original nature of a being rather than an object of knowledge (we are back to Sartre), the subject must become more subjective, must constitute itself ‘above’ its own representations: it must create hyper-representations (we are back to Baudrillard). Deleuze privileges the time-image over the movement-image namely because the former constitutes itself outside representation. To reiterate, representation is not a sign of the subject’s autonomy since in representing the world the subject inevitably objectifies itself. The opposite of representation would be a project whereby the subject reaffirms its autonomy, puts itself outside representation, nihilates the world. The subordination of movement to time achieves namely that: when duration dictates what is happening, rather than events determining time, the subject has restored its independence from the world. Whereas the representation of the world still presupposes an essential difference between things and their descriptions, the time-image eliminates this difference, replacing things with their descriptions. The relationship Deleuze establishes between things and their descriptions is similar to the one Baudrillard posits between objects and signs (see chapter 4). Like Baudrillard, Deleuze appears to believe that simply placing the description of a thing in the ‘place’ (this ‘place’ remains within the system of representation) usually occupied by the thing itself, renders the description pure or thing-like, i.e. Deleuze revives Sartre’s fantasy of “natural signification.” All referential material, all objectivity is evacuated from the time-image, but precisely because of that, Deleuze contends, the time-image is not a subjective representation but a thing in itself, a pure expression. This is so because the idea of an object always presupposes the idea of a subject (representation is not only the presentation of the world as a reflection of the subject but also, and to an equal degree, the self-objectification of the subject) so that the end of representation is the annihilation of both subject and object. However, Deleuze fails to take into account that the act which puts an end to representation cannot itself be bracketed out. Something of the subject always remains and it is namely (and only) from the point

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of view of this remainder of subjectivity that the end of subjectivity is posited and, simultaneously, proven impossible.2 To demonstrate the impossibility of eliminating subjectivity as an originary point of view I will take an example from literature. In his 1985 study Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres Bruce Morrissette considers the case of novelist/filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet as an example of the attempt to get rid of a specific, situated point of view and substitute it with a purely “geometric and visual perspective” (1985: 45). Morrissette argues that this project eventually restores, albeit in a slightly modified form, the omniscient (impersonal) narrator: Is it possible to separate point of view in itself, as localization of a camera objective or of an authorial eye, from the reason or internal justification of this same point of view? Does this ‘observer,’ who for Robbe-Grillet…need not be a ‘character’ in the narrative, have the privilege of randomly positioning himself almost anywhere? […] Can he displace himself at will? What will then prevent such an eye of the camera or of the novelist from becoming, once again, an eye ‘everywhere at once,’ if not an eye that is perpetually omniscient and omnipresent like the eye of God? […] Yet if we grant the camera an absolute liberty of movement…an omni-optique system is obviously created, the justification for which seems as difficult or arbitrary as in the case of the omniscient author. (46)

It is necessary, however, to draw a distinction between the objectification of point of view and the alleged ‘dehumanization’ resulting from it. Suppressing or disguising the subjective point of view in cinema or literature never translates into a total elimination of subjectivity,3 as demonstrated by Robbe-Grillet’s novels, in which the apparent objectification of the point of view does not necessarily deprive them of humanism. Robbe-Grillet’s descriptions of objects and events create only the appearance of an impersonal work for they “do not in any way have a ‘photographic’ or naively realistic purpose; they are…rather supports or objective correlatives of a tacit psychology” (93). The most “objective” descriptions and manipulations of the point of view are bound to remain “pseudo-objective” (106). If a film or a novel does not represent psychological interiority, it always does so for a reason. For example, the suppression of first person point of view in The Stranger serves the purpose of suggesting indirectly the protagonist’s alienation.4 Most of Deleuze’s ideas in Cinema 2 repeat, and occasionally elaborate on, Robbe-Grillet’s analysis of the New Novel in a series of essays

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written in the fifties and sixties and collected in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (1965). For example, Deleuze’s definition of the cinema of the time-image as “pure expression” points back to Robbe-Grillet’s distinction between ‘description’ and ‘signification’ in the modern novel and film. Similarly, when Deleuze describes the nature of time in contemporary cinema as “falsification,” he is echoing Robbe-Grillet’s idea of ‘the false’ as that which does not appear ‘natural,’ that which is cut off from signification and thus from verisimilitude (Robbe-Grillet 1965: 163).5 Robbe-Grillet asserts that precisely by refusing to signify and instead drawing attention to the sheer presence of things and human beings (by avoiding the humanization of the world) the modern novel (and film) does not get rid of man but rather achieves the opposite effect: it makes man aware of the very real distance between him and the rest of the world. It is not a question of getting rid of subjectivity but rather of eliminating the inside/outside opposition that has always underlined the idea of subjectivity. For Robbe-Grillet the most subjective (in the traditional sense of the word) novel/film is the most realistic one. The objectification of mental content—for example, the treatment of imagination and memory as physical reality, e.g. in L’Année dernière à Marienbad6—is the ultimate form of realism insofar as it finally acknowledges the reality of what has always been dismissed as a merely “subjective point of view.”7 Unlike Deleuze, Robbe-Grillet is well aware of the impossibility of a “total impersonality of observation” (18), despite the fact that the most common critique of Robbe-Grillet’s novels has been their allegedly “dehumanized” or “neutral” nature: “Even if many objects are presented and are described with great care, there is always, and especially, the eye which sees them, the thought which reexamines them, the passion which distorts them. The objects in our novels never have a presence outside human perception, real or imaginary” (137). Contrary to what critics of the New Novel argue, “the New Novel [and here I add Deleuze’s cinema of the time-image] aims only at a total subjectivity” (138). Deleuze and the fantasy of ‘natural signification’ In Cinema 1 Deleuze argues that Bergson’s critique of cinema in Creative Evolution ought not to be taken seriously because it appeared at a time when cinema had not yet manifested its true potential. He turns Bergson against himself in order to show that even though Bergson professed to see no substantial difference between natural perception

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and cinematographic perception, his image ontology actually described the world as consisting of cinematographic images. Going back to the now familiar rhetoric of ‘natural signification’ Deleuze proposes that we consider cinema as the condition of possibility of signification in general: cinema provides us with access to being because it reconstitutes “the dawn of the world” before the birth of human perception or consciousness. Cinema is not a language and none of the various elements of film can be explained through linguistic analogues.8 Thus, Deleuze insists that the best analogue for the frame in cinema “is to be found in an information system rather than a linguistic one. The elements [within the frame] are the data…which are sometimes very numerous, sometimes of limited number. The frame is therefore inseparable from two tendencies: towards saturation or towards rarefaction” (Deleuze 1986: 12). An information system is pre-human, neutral, pre-linguistic; information or data is ontologically ‘older’ than signification or signs. There is an interesting reversal here: even though information systems are empirically ‘younger’ (we started talking about “information systems” considerably recently) than signification or language, they appear to have already surpassed a certain limit of ‘humanness’ or ‘subjectivity’ to such an extent that they are now projected retrospectively as preceding signification and are characterized as ‘inhuman.’ Of course, such a gesture is necessary from a humanist point of view: since we cannot comprehend how the human has evolved into something so foreign to humanity as pure information, we can only respond to this phenomenon by positing the inhuman as pre-human from which the human has evolved. In this way, we can continue to believe that we still exist in a human universe. Deleuze’s argument that cinema reveals a pre-human state of the world expresses a similar desire to preserve the belief in a human world. He asserts that unlike natural perception, which is grounded in a fixed and privileged point of view—namely, that of the subject—and which is, therefore, limited by our practical interests, cinematographic perception is essentially acentered. Deleuze treats the camera as a kind of consciousness that is more inclusive and disinterested than mere perceptual consciousness. Whereas Bergson thought it necessary to “deduce” natural as well as cinematographic perception from pure perception, Deleuze proposes that, insofar as cinematographic perception “lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon”(58), it has a great advantage over natural perception. Clearly, he wants to argue that the human eye can be eliminated from

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cinematographic perception in order to “to rediscover the matrix or the movement-image as it is in itself, in its acentered purity, in its primary regime of variation, in its heat and its light, while it is still untroubled by any centre of indetermination” (66). However, just as human perception takes time to ‘go around’ an object, so the camera moves around its objects rather than situating the point of view ‘within’ them. In the end, Deleuze himself is forced to recognize that, far from ‘reconstituting’ pure perception, cinema actually ‘constructs’ it i.e. (although he does not put it in these words) simulates it: [The human eye’s] relative immobility as a receptive organ means that all images vary for a single one, in relation to a privileged image. And, if the camera is considered as apparatus for shooting film, it is subject to the same conditioning limitation. But the cinema is not simply the camera: it is montage. And if from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one; it is the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things. Universal variation, universal interaction (modulation) is what Cezanne had already called the world before man, ‘dawn of ourselves, ‘iridescent chaos’, ‘virginity of the world’. It is not surprising that we have to construct it since it is given only to the eye which we do not have. (81 my italics)9

Although montage is a technical procedure, it is still controlled by the subject, by the human eye. To argue that from the point of view of “another eye” (the camera) montage is not subjective or human does not change anything, because “the other eye” is indeed another eye and we can never see the world through it except indirectly: the human eye looks through the non-human eye—the camera—but is not identical with it. This holds true both for the filmmaker and for the film audience. However, what is most striking about this passage is the suggestion that the camera—a piece of technology developed by humans—constitutes a more ‘natural’ or ‘material’ form of perception than human perception i.e,. Deleuze suggests, after Bergson, that matter as an ‘aggregate of images’ is nothing other than “camera consciousness,” that the world unfolds like a film even before the human eye appears. If matter consists of images (which are themselves nothing more than light vibrations) which do not need to be perceived in order to be and which lie somewhere in-between a thing and a representation, then a cinematographic image, insofar as it is exactly such an intermediary

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image—neither a thing nor a representation10—resembles what Bergson calls “pure perception” (perception before the birth of consciousness). Cinematographic consciousness does not illuminate its objects but is within them. It resembles Sartre’s image consciousness, though the latter is a consciousness without an object, while the former is an object without a consciousness or without an external support for it. That is, for Sartre it is important that image consciousness has annihilated its object, while Deleuze’s emphasis is on the image purged of subjectivity. Sartre draws attention to the immateriality of image consciousness (there is no referential material, no real, present object); Deleuze, on the other hand, is interested in the impersonality of the image (there is referential material but there is no agent of representation, no single point of reference). Types of images Deleuze distinguishes three variations of the movement-image—perception-images, affection-images, and action-images—which he arranges according to their degree of objectivity. Perception-images are most objective or material since, following Bergson, perception is ‘in’ matter. Affection refers to our response to images which is not, however, prolonged into action on the images. Action-images are the most subjective of the three as they involve a motor response to images.11 Finally, the time-image goes beyond these three types of images and returns us to pure perception. The difference between the movement-image and the time-image can be overcome through a systematic process of substraction (by analogy with the phenomenological epoché) or a bracketing out of the constitutive elements of the movement-image. The time-image is a purified movement-image: to produce the time-image one does not add anything to the movement-image but instead purifies it of its three constitutive variations (perception, affection, action). Deleuze’s (and Bergson’s) Platonism comes to the fore in his comparison of perception and affection, the former of which he defines as the virtual action of our body on other bodies and the latter as actual action upon the object of perception, which in this case is our own body (Bergson 1991: 57). By defining affection as real action, Bergson reserves himself the right to argue that affection is not unextended (‘internal’ to us, as it were) and thus not merely subjective. Although he draws attention to the fact that all virtual action (perception) is always complicated by real action (affection), he still subordinates the latter to the former, calling it “the

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impurity with which perception is alloyed” and which must be substracted from perception in order “to get the image in its purity”(58). One of the problems with Deleuze’s description of the different kinds of images is that when he speaks of perception-images, affectionimages, action-images and time-images he does not mean specifically cinematographic images. Deleuze merely borrows Bergson’s terms and transposes them, without any explanation, from the discourse of natural perception to that of cinematographic perception. His attempt to explicate the difference between the movement-image and the time-image makes this clear. We encounter the former in the habitual recognition of images (Bergson’s habit memory) and the latter in spontaneous or pure recollection. The movement-image prolongs a perception-image into a sensory-motor response: instead of perceiving for the sake of perceiving, we utilize our perception for some practical purpose at hand, extending the image into a certain action on our part upon the image. Conversely, in the case of the time-image we perceive purely for the sake of perceiving: we do not respond to the image by acting upon it but rather we stop at the perception or, what amounts to the same, we are returned to a kind of perception purged of any sensory-motor necessity. Now, in a movie there are obviously no such distinctions among the images we see on the screen: it is not that some of the images are real things while others we perceive as images. All images on the screen are images. A spectator perceiving an image on the screen obviously does not attempt to act on it as he would act on a real thing. What Deleuze actually wants to argue is that certain images are perceived as if they were real things whereas others are perceived for their own sake. Although such a distinction can certainly be posited, Deleuze fails to explain what is unique in the movement-image and the time-image in cinema, as opposed to these two types of images in everyday, natural perception. A movement-image is impure, by which Deleuze means that we perceive it with an ulterior motive (the intention to act on it). In the movement-image, a thing on the screen appears only as a thing, creating the illusion that we can respond to it in the same way we respond to real, external stimulation. There is an odd reversal here: the thing as such (the movement-image) is a representation or a signification since it refers to some real object which we automatically recognize in it. Deleuze implies that only when we substitute a description of the thing for the thing itself does it become pure expression: the material world as such is always already a sign, whereas the pure mental image we have of it

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(the description with which we replace it) is pure expression. The movement-image belongs to the regime of signification, because it provokes a sensory-motor response from us. According to Deleuze’s logic, then, the body is the ultimate source of signification, contrary to common sense assumptions that signification is something “mental,” something ‘added’ to the body from without. Taking over Bergson’s idea of the body as a special image, Deleuze contends that natural perception is already a kind of signification, that merely by reflecting images back upon themselves and thus making them appear to us, we are representing them. This is a radical shift in the understanding of the nature of signification or representation for Deleuze actually proposes that representation is not a manifestation of a reflective consciousness but, instead, coincides with the birth of perception. Echoing Bergson again, Deleuze concludes that representation is not produced by an act of addition but by an act of dissociation. Given that Deleuze fully embraces this Bergsonian idea, it is really difficult to comprehend what exactly motivates his critique of representation and of the subject as a ‘master’ of representation. Even if we want to continue using the word ‘master’, the preceding should have made it clear that the subject is not consciously representing the world; rather, the world, merely by appearing to the subject, is representing itself because of the limited, finite nature of human perception. Conversely, if we continue to follow the implications of Deleuze’s own argument, when a barrier is erected between the image and the body—when we form a mental image—we ‘return’ to (or coincide with) pure perception, to matter in its original ‘luminosity’. However, it would be wrong to collapse the pure image (time-image) into matter as such, because matter, after all, is devoid of virtuality and thus cannot consist of timeimages. A time-image exists only as the negation or interruption of a movement-image. We can be restored to pure perception only if we have first ‘deviated’ from it, only after it has degraded itself into natural perception. Here lies the irreducible paradox at the core of Deleuze’s definition of the time-image: on one hand, the time-image resembles Sartre’s image-consciousness, a kind of consciousness that lacks any referential material and is absolutely transparent to itself; at the same time, however, Deleuze claims that the time-image restores to us a ‘prehuman’, absolutely opaque material reality. In other words, Deleuze claims that cinematographic perception restores the material world to us only by evacuating it first.

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The time-image: between ontology and history Deleuze wants to attribute to the cinematographic image an ontological significance; nevertheless, his concept of the time-image as a direct presentation of time rests on a historical or empirical analysis. Although in the introduction to Cinema 1 he warns the audience that what he is offering them is not a history of cinema, the central argument of the two volumes—that the cinema of the movement-image has evolved into a cinema of the time-image—is derived from the analysis of a particular historical event and its consequences: World War II and our inability to comprehend or respond adequately to the terror of annihilation.12 It is not surprising, then, that the concept of the time-image is imbued with ethical significance, thus echoing the preoccupation with ethics, from which the whole rhetoric of the ‘impersonal’, the ‘inhuman’, and the ‘virtual’ is derived, I have been tracing in the previous chapters. The purely optical and sound cinematographic image is supposed to make us grasp something intolerable and unbearable. […] It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities. […] In any event something has become too strong in the image. (Deleuze 1989: 18)

Referring to Bergson’s account of perception, Deleuze associates movement-images with a clichéd i.e. metaphorical or representational perception: A cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing. As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving. […] We therefore normally perceive only clichés. But, if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess or horror or beauty. (20)

Thus, on one side, the time-image has a strictly historical origin—it would not have been possible without the war, whose effect was the shattering of sensory-motor schemata—but, on the other side, the timeimage is, allegedly, ontologically superior to the movement-image, which is only a cliché. The superiority of the time-image is the result of a failure—the breaking or jamming of sensory-motor linkages13—which is both a historically specific phenomenon and one that benefits us im-

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mensely as it allows us a more ‘authentic’ or direct access to material reality. Since Deleuze considers the time-image aesthetically and ontologically superior to the movement-image, he seems to suggest that the failure of sensory-motor linkages, which happened at a particular point in history, has to be encouraged, fostered, that it was a serendipitous failure. Only something that traumatic and unspeakable could have changed our idea of what an image is and make us understand that the material world is made of images. Thus, a particular historical event is credited with the utmost ontological significance, just as a particular film ‘movement’ or ‘style’—Italian neo-realism14--is supposed to reveal the inherently cinematic nature of the material world. Deleuze does not explain why the time-image appears only in cinema. Why can’t we experience time directly in everyday perception? The reason, it would seem, is that the ‘I’ who perceives cannot experience non-chronological time because the ‘I’ cannot get rid of itself in normal perception, cannot bracket itself out and become as impersonal and anonymous as the camera. However, on many occasions Deleuze observes that even the camera can be (in fact, should be) conceived as “a camera consciousness.”15 Moreover, if the time-image is an image that exists for its own sake, it ought to be possible to achieve the same effect in everyday perception by simply isolating an image from its connections to other images, and then focusing on that image, perceiving it for its own sake. Since Deleuze admits that even today cinema operates both with time and movement-images, it must be up to the camera to decide whether to select one image and present it as outside of a series—as existing in itself—or to link it to other images. If it is really only a matter of choice, one ought to be able even in natural perception to assume a contemplative attitude toward an image thus making it self-sufficient. It seems natural that the more one focuses on a certain image, to the exclusion of other images, the more one feels as if one were waiting for the image, as if one could feel time itself ‘in’ the image. Deleuze would probably object that natural perception is necessarily subjective i.e. substractive, whereas cinematographic perception is anonymous or “crystalline.” The pure optical or sound image—the time-image—is a de-serialized image that cannot link up with other images. In addition, Deleuze would say, it is de-serialized from no one’s point of view, whereas a natural perception-image is de-serialized (because the nature of perception is framing or de-serialization) from the point of view of the subject.

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Deleuze and Kant Can an image be de-serialized from a non-existent point of view? Can the failure of a pure optical image to link up with other images be established not from a subject’s point of view, but from a no-place or from an any-point-of-view-whatever? The answers to these questions hinge upon what Deleuze means by “point of view.” Point of view generally signifies interest. With the notion of the time-image, therefore, Deleuze is trying to conceive an image that would be perceived in a disinterested manner, as if it were not perceived by us but rather by other images. The notion of disinterestedness is an essential characteristic of the Kantian aesthetic judgment. The Deleuzian time-image is perceived not with a view to action, not as a thing which we could act upon and manipulate; rather, the image is subtilized into a pure mental content, which is absolutely self-sufficient, neither acting nor acted upon. The paradox is that, while this new subjectivity takes us back into the heart of things, it is also “no longer motor or material, but temporal and spiritual” (Deleuze 1989: 47). The time-image strips perception of its natural, subjective character (eliminating the subject/object split) but it also reveals the spiritual character of the object. The time-image, then, fulfills the function Kant attributes to aesthetic judgments: it mediates between mind and matter, between Reason and Nature. (As we saw in chapter one, the concept of the image fulfills a similar mediating function in Bergson’s ontology.) The Kantian undercurrent in Deleuze’s discourse becomes even more obvious when Deleuze (echoing Bergson) specifies that only pure recollection, but not memory-images which are only its bastardized form, can produce this disinterested state. This state—manifested in an expansion of consciousness—is the result of a necessary failure, the failure of attentive recognition. When we fail to remember, the image we perceive does not link up with other images and we perceive it for its own sake. Deleuze’s argument points back to another failure, the failure of the imagination in the Kantian account of the sublime.16 In the Kantian scenario, the imagination cannot apprehend the sheer enormity of the sublime object (neither Kant nor Deleuze differentiate between perception and imagination, both of which signify the faculty of empirical understanding) but we are nevertheless capable of comprehending the object as a totality, which Kant interprets as an indirect sign that we are in possession of a much greater power than imagination, namely Reason.

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Similarly, ‘pure recollection’ refers to the failure of memory-images to capture (exhaust) the virtual. Just as the idea of totality is infinitely greater than what the imagination can apprehend, virtual (pure) recollection (according to both Bergson and Deleuze) is infinitely greater than the memory-images in which it actualizes itself. The relationship between Reason and imagination in Kant parallels that between Pure Recollection and memory-images in Bergson and Deleuze. The pure image is the residue left behind the failure of recognition: the virtual or the sublime cannot be found in a specific image but only in what is still ‘left over’ or ‘apart’ from the image. Lyotard’s “Is it happening?” becomes, with Deleuze, “Is there something more to this image?” or “What is there to see in the image?” The virtual/sublime appears only as that which is not there, which the images imply namely by their failure to express it. The virtual/sublime is a feeling of indetermination, uneasiness and incompleteness. Deleuze’s Kantianism manifests itself again in Deleuze’s surprisingly unbergsonian interpretation of duration. Since he thinks Bergson’s pure memory as an ontological realm, Deleuze substitutes a non-chronological time for Bergsonian duration.17 The virtual, in Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, does not express duration but time as an a priori intuition. In fact, Deleuze argues, “Bergson is much closer to Kant than he himself thinks: Kant defined time as the form of interiority, in the sense that we are internal to time” (Deleuze 1989: 82). Deleuze identifies time with being, eliminates change (chronology) from it, and draws a rather counterintuitive conclusion: “Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual. The actual is always objective, but the virtual is subjective” (82-83). Repeating Bergson’s and Lyotard’s ontologizing gesture, Deleuze conflates Being (Time) with subjectivity, thereby reducing the individual human being to something ‘smaller’ than (rather than coextensive with) subjectivity: paradoxically, the more absent we are from the actual, from the present, or the more we lose ourselves in recollection, the more we expand our original objectivity and become more and more subjective. What is the significance of Deleuze’s reversal of the traditional understanding of the subject/object relationship, according to which the objective extends beyond the limits of the subjective? For one, it liberates us from the bitter resentment or fear of never being objective enough, but it also frees us from postmodernism, which is a valid standpoint only as long as the subject is conceived as a point of view, necessarily limited,

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among many other relative points of view. However, if one starts from Deleuze’s assumption that we are always already objective, subjectivity becomes a retreating horizon, toward which we are able to advance. The objective or the present is now considered a point of view, whereas subjectivity is declared the absolute we have to attain. From this point of view (pun intended), ‘subjectivity’ appears as the most impersonal level consciousness can attain. Put differently, ‘objectivity’ designates the ability to assume different points of view on the world, while subjectivity is the capacity to become something else as a point of view. Once again we are faced with the paradoxical nature of Deleuze’s time-image, which reflects the most ‘saturated’ state of subjectivity while remaining, at the same time, the most impersonal/virtual kind of image. Since the virtual is the preservation of the past in the present, and the past is ontological (see chapter one) the virtual is nothing other than the quod of the image (see chapter three). The difference between the actual and the virtual is that between a thing and its existence, between the quid and the quod. The virtual aspect of an image expresses the fact that it is, and since the quod is not a psychological state, the virtual is not part of subjectivity but of something infinitely larger that Bergson calls “the past in general.” Conversely, the actual expresses the quid, what an image is. The time-image expresses the fact that the being of an image is not at attribute added to the image. The crystal (another term Deleuze uses to designate the time-image) is a perpetual self-distinguishing, a distinction in the process of being produced…’ The putting into abyss [mise-en-abyme] does not redouble the unit, as an external reflection might do; in so far as it is an internal mirroring, it can only ever split it in two,’ and subject it ‘to the infinite relaunch of endlessly new splitting.’ (Bergson qtd. in Deleuze 1989: 82)

Each moment splits into its quod (that it is happening) and its quid (what is happening); the former is preserved while the latter is carried over into the future to link up this image to other images. This conclusion is supported by Deleuze’s idea that the virtual image is irreducible to anything, does not need to be actualized, and is absolutely self-sufficient, all of which are characteristics of Being. Deleuze compares the relationship between past and present to that between theatre and life. In response to his own question “[W]here does life begin?” he answers that the real is created by leaving the crystal,

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leaving the constant splitting of each moment into past and present. The real is the actual aspect of an image, which carries it forward into the future. The real is life, whereas the past is identified with theatre. Insofar as the past expresses the being of a thing and, at the same time, the past is associated with theatre or simulation, ontology is the realm of simulation. Things are to the extent that they simulate their being. However, simulation, in this context, is not a category with ‘negative’ connotations (as it was in Baudrillard’s case: see chapter four); instead, it means ‘falsification’ or ‘modification.’ Deleuze and Baudrillard Surprisingly, the notion of simulation or hyperreality best expresses the meaning of the crystal image as “event.” To illustrate his notion of the time-image as an ‘inhuman event’, Deleuze asks us to imagine an earthly event which is assumed to be transmitted to different planets, one of which will receive it at the same time (at the speed of light), but the second more quickly, and the third less quickly, hence before it happened and after. The latter would not yet have received it, the second would already have received it, the first would be receiving it, in three simultaneous presents bound into the same universe. This would be a sidereal time, a system of relativity, where the characters would be not so much human as planetary. […] It would be a pluralist cosmology, where one and the same event is played out in these different worlds, in incompatible versions. (1989: 102 my italics)

Deleuze’s description of the time-image as a planetary or cosmological image echoes Baudrillard’s description of the subject in hyperreality as an “ex-orbited,” planetary, inhuman subject. Within this framework, Deleuze’s time-image as a direct presentation of time becomes indistinguishable from Baudrillard’s simulated time. However, whereas Baudrillard regards the hyperreal a threat to the reality of the world, to the extent that it makes it possible for us to perceive something which has stopped existing a long time ago but whose virtual image still persists, Deleuze considers the increasing virtualization of the world liberating. The main characteristic of the Deleuzian time-image—the disappearance of the subject as a privileged point of view attributing values to other images—brings us back to Baudrillard’s description of virtual reality as the disappearance of the

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The Image in French Philosophy imaginary. Baudrillard laments the fact that we have been “ejected from a position in space and time where we were able to reflect our events back to ourselves with any endurance, and therefore consequence” (Horrocks 1999: 10). Since all events and all our acts have been reduced to information, we are no longer the source or origin of what we do or what happens to us. Events and acts refer only to other events and acts, not to a subject who produces them and attributes to them their significance. The subject has either vanished completely or has been inscribed in a network of events and acts, which no longer have particular causes and effects. (The very notions of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ rest on the ascription of value to things; however, in a virtual world the question of value can no longer arise.) However, this is precisely what Deleuze celebrates in the idea of a pure image, an image whose value does not come from the subject but which exists on its own.

Thus Deleuze and Baudrillard interpret the implications of the vanishing of subjectivity in mutually exclusive ways. Deleuze views the humbling of the subject to the status of ‘any-point-of-view-whatever’ as the liberation of things (or of other ‘images’) from the necessity to be true or consistent. Images become falsified, no longer reducible to meaning/truth standards. Baudrillard does not think such liberation possible, arguing instead that the old metaphysical idea of Truth has not disappeared but has merely degenerated into the immanent principle of credibility or verifiability: We judge events by their proximity to their code or model, rather than by some metaphysical or humanistic principle. […] Once God and truth cease to be radical illusions and simply objects of belief, belief becomes vulnerable to critique, which later collapses under the tests of credibility, or the ‘convincingness’ of the object or image. (Horrocks 1999: 35-36)

Rather than describing a state where all images are ‘equal’ and none subordinated to a central, privileged image, credibility is the principle of truth gone mad. In the constant search for verification, every image has to be continuously compared to other images since it does not have its own, independent meaning. On a far more optimistic note, Deleuze calls the new cinema (as well as the new fiction) produced by the trend to virtualization “constructivist” or “falsifying” and locates its origin in the major change in our conception of the brain:

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The ‘classical’ conception developed along two axes; on the one hand integration and differentiation, on the other association, through contiguity or similarity. The first axis is the law of the concept: it constitutes movement as continually intergrating itself into a whole whose change it expresses, and as continually differentiating itself in accordance with the objects between which it is established. […] The second axis is the law of the image: similarity and contiguity determine the way in which we pass from one image to another. The two axes cut across each other, according to a principle of attraction, in order to achieve the identity of image and concept. (Deleuze 1989: 210)

Traditionally, the concept has been imagined (or conceived?) as externalizing itself in images: the images associating with one another and becoming integrated into a concept. On this model, montage “is a restoration of the laws of the process of thought” (211). Bergson, however, rethinks the role of the brain: the brain does not store images but is simply an interval between a stimulus and a response. This new conception of the brain eventually gives rise to the idea of acentered systems (since the brain is no longer a privileged center of reference but merely a ‘gap’ between images) and “the discovery of a probabilistic or semi-fortuitous cerebral space”(211). From here there is only one step to Deleuze’s idea of falsification, of incompossible presents and not necessarily true pasts existing simultaneously though at different levels of concentration. The new constructivist cinema (and fiction) no longer relies on the idea of, or belief in, interiority, which constitutes the basis of the theory of association of images. While the association of images presupposes interiority, the new cinema of simulation or falsification produces images that resist linkages. A simulation is an image that exists for itself, referring only to its own existence. Only if images are merely metaphors for an overriding concept to which they are subordinated, can they form a chain. On the contrary, purely denotative images resist linkages and foreground the cuts or the intervals between them: Instead of one image after the other, there is one image plus another. […] [T]his time-image puts thought into contact with an unthought, the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the undecidable, the incommensurable. The outside or the obverse of the images has replaced the whole, at the same time as the interstice or the cut has replaced association. (214)

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At this point, one is tempted to ask: If the image is independent, what is its ‘outside’ or its obverse side, which has now replaced the subordination of the image to the laws of association? How can a pure optical or sound image have an outside? Does meaninglessness have an outside? Would the outside be meaning as an ‘impurity’? As always with Deleuze, one has to keep in mind that he is operating with Bergson’s notions of the actual and the virtual and basing his own theory of the cinematographic image on Bergson’s idea of the virtual as the automatic preservation of the past in the present. The time-image is described as double-sided, as a constant exchange between the real and the unreal, the present and the past, the actual and the virtual—Deleuze uses all these terms synonymously. The confusion stems from the fact that what Deleuze actually means by “present” and “past” is not what we usually mean by these terms. An image that is both present and past at the same time is not a recollection image. Rather, Deleuze uses “past” as synonymous with “unreal” or “imaginary”. That the time-image is not in the present means simply that it is not representational or realistic. Therefore, the obverse side of an image is not its reflection in the past or its recollection, but simply its autonomy. Thus, to the extent that an image is pure and autonomous, it is always already imaginary or spectacular. Deleuze describes the pure optical and sound image in terms of a spectacle. The fact that in modern cinema the situation is not extended into action but remains a purely optical or sound description or inventory of things and characters has the effect of inflating the image or its significance, making it spectacular (self-sufficient) even when it is everyday: “‘The real becomes spectacle or spectacular, and fascinates for being the real thing. […] The everyday is identified with the spectacular” (Barthelmy Amengual qtd. Deleuze 1989: 5). The ‘spectacle’, however, has completely different connotations for Baudrillard and Deleuze: the former identifies the spectacular with the hyperreal whereas for the latter the spectacular is the very nature of the time-image. The spectacle oscillates between the simulacral image and the time-image as the “direct presentation of time.” On one hand, one would think that since the pure optical image does not extend into action, it is subjective (it does not refer to a world ‘outside’ the subject). In fact, the opposite is true: precisely the pure image is independent of subjectivity, because subjectivity is possible only as a relation between the subject and the world, but if that relation is short circuited, if no action takes place, there

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is no subject either. Thus, the replacement of a thing by its description does not signify the triumph of the subject but its disappearance. In fact, Baudrillard reaches a similar conclusion: when a thing is replaced by its image, the image becomes self-sufficient and independent from the subject. The subject exists only as the difference between itself and something else (a world) but as soon as the subject projects its images or descriptions of things on those things, the things underneath disappear, and the difference between subject and object disappears as well. Everywhere it looks, the subject sees only itself, which means that it cannot see itself any more because seeing is possible only as the positing of oneself as different from what one sees. The appearance of the hyperreal signals the disappearance of subjectivity. Thus, at the very moment when the subject’s power seems to have reached the limit—things are replaced with their descriptions or images—the subject annihilates itself: a pure optical image is autonomous, independent of the subject. Paradoxically, by derealizing the world, by making things as references vanish, the subject constructs precisely what it was always lacking as long as it was locked in the system of reference and representation: an absolutely sovereign world, which is not subordinated to the subject but includes it as merely one virtuality among many. Only by making the world virtual can the subject ensure that there is something different from itself, something over which it has no control. Once the real is no longer sufficient (no longer different enough from the subject) but appears as a mere construct of the subject, the only way to save the real is to make it hyperreal, to posit it as the absolutely sovereign being that the subject has always wanted to be but never was/is. True sovereignty is not possible as long as the subject identifies itself as an interiority separate (and thus dependent upon) something outside it. Since subjectivity cannot be abolished completely but there always remains a ‘place’ from which the suppression of subjectivity is announced, and in which ‘place’ subjectivity retreats to preserve itself, what Baudrillard calls “the fatal object” is not an object that exists independently of subjectivity. Rather, the fatal object is the subject having finally attained sovereignty, the subject as absolute exteriority. The impersonal: banal, nauseating or sublime? The time-image is simulacral or spectacular ‘by nature’ because it operates through an inflation of the constitutive banality of things. The very act of isolating an image and focusing on its sheer existence disguises

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its essential banality or ordinariness. Deleuze invokes Leibniz’s idea of “series,” which illuminates the connection between banality and spectacle (simulation): Leibniz…showed that the world is made up of series which are composed and which converge in a very regular way, according to ordinary laws. However, the series and sequences are apparent to us only in small sections, and in a disrupted or mixed up order, so that we believe in breaks, disparities and discrepancies as in things out of the ordinary. […] It is just that we have to admit that, because the linkages of the terms in the series are naturally weak, they are constantly upset and do not appear in order. An ordinary term goes out of sequence, and emerges in the middle of another sequence of ordinary things in relation to which it takes on the appearance of a strong moment, a remarkable or complex point. (1989: 14-15)

The perception of a single “image” is not different from the emergence of an ordinary term from the series in which it is embedded. The world as an aggregate of images, or composed of ordinary series, is essentially banal: what appears to us extraordinary or out of place is such only because of our inability to perceive the whole series. This passage is intriguing because it undermines everything Deleuze wants to say about the time-image. The time-image is a self-referential image which does not extend into a real situation; its effect consists in intensification, not verification or representation. The pure optical or sound image claims to be self-sufficient, taking place outside a series or a sequence. However, as Deleuze suggests in the passage cited above, all terms belong to a series and if they happen to appear exemplary it is only because we cannot see the whole series. It appears then that a pure optical or sound image is inconceivable in the first place, that its self-sufficiency can only be an illusion and that in reality it either links up with other images or extends into a real situation. When an image appears self-sufficient, it is not because it really is so, but only because it has been recontextualized, taken out of the banal sequence of which it was originally a part, and transposed into another, equally banal or ordinary sequence. The pure image draws attention to its purity, to the fact that it does not extend into a real situation. The viewer immediately becomes aware that the image expects him to see it for its own sake. If the film presents events while withholding their explanation, we are aware that “waiting” or “wondering” is the response expected from us. An image that does not extend into a real situation i.e.,

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does not signify, is not, because of that, purged of all signification. The pure image always appears as pure, as de-contextualized or de-serialized, as out of sequence. Pure optical and sound images are, contrary to what Deleuze thinks, essentially banal. They appear shocking or intriguing only because they have been taken out of the series of ‘causality’, for example, and emerge in another series in which they cannot be readily identified as causes or effects. Even if we do not think of images in terms of a series, it is still true that the pure image, the image that exists for its own sake, signifying only its own existence, is the epitome of banality. After all, is there anything more banal than existence itself? Apparently not for Deleuze. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case, as his understanding of time suggests a series of similarities between the concept of the time-image and Lyotard’s concept of the sublime. There is a fundamental way in which the Lyotardian sublime differs from the time-image, despite the fact that both are conceived as experiences of time. As I suggested at the end of chapter three, Lyotard draws a rather strange and disturbing analogy between the sensation of time characteristic of the sublime experience and the mechanism puppets obey. What makes the sublime experience resemble the mechanistic ‘life’ or mode of ‘being’ of the automatic doll is the experience of time not as a synthesis of separate moments, as a series of retentions and protentions, but as the mere happening of time. Or, in Kantian terms, the mind is able to grasp time directly rather than apprehending series of moments and adding totality to them after the fact. According to Lyotard, then, the experience of the sublime is one of “divine automatism” where the human being (or the puppet) is freed from all intentionality—which Lyotard identifies with the “capacity for temporal synthesis” (Lyotard 1988b: 163)—freed from “all diachrony” or from chronological (in Bergson’s terms “spatialized”) time. Lyotard identifies this “divine automatism” with “the self-sufficiency of the Same” (163), stressing that the sublime experience is an experience of the being of time rather than of the passing of time. The postmodern sublime presupposes the suppression of subjectivity inasmuch as subjectivity is defined as intentionality or the capacity for temporal synthesis. Only when the subject has been reduced to a puppet, when it responds automatically to external stimuli, when it has renounced itself completely, when its agency has been eliminated, leaving behind only sensory-motor schemata, can the subject feel time directly, without the necessity of breaking it down into segments and then trying, in vain, to synthesize them.

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Things stand quite differently with Deleuze’s time-image, however. Indeed, the main distinction Deleuze draws between the movement-image and the time-image involves the jamming of sensory-motor schemata in the time-image as a result of which the subject, no longer able or willing to respond automatically to external stimuli, suspends all action and begins perceiving images merely for the sake of perceiving them. The direct experience of time the Deleuzian time-image supposedly grants us is thus very different from the automatism of the postmodern sublime in Lyotard’s scenario. And yet, there is some common ground as well: both Lyotard and Deleuze conceive the direct (authentic) experience of time in opposition to duration or diachrony i.e., the sensation of time in both cases is the sensation of the being of time, not of its passing. In addition, both premise the direct experience of time on the exclusion of agency or subjectivity: Lyotard’s puppet acts purely mechanically, without any subjective intention, while Deleuze stresses both the film character’s failure to act and the film viewer’s failure to respond, the failure to read, to interpret because there is nothing to interpret. Deleuze’s conclusion is premised on the questionable assumption that only ‘action’, by which Deleuze means ‘plot’ or any causally related sequences of events, can be read/interpreted, that random gestures, uneventful or de-narrativized sequences, and shots not immediately relevant to the ‘plot’ do not ‘signify’ and thus cannot be interpreted. Both Lyotard like Deleuze consider time in two senses: on one hand there is chronological time and, on the other hand, there is the quod of time, the fact that time is. Deleuze identifies nonchronological time with duration: duration is that within which everything changes but which itself does not change. He finds the perfect illustration of this nonchronological time in the still lifes in Ozu’s films: “The still life is time, for everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change, it could itself change only in another time, indefinitely” (1989: 17). When the camera stays still on the image of an object, it gives us the duration of the object, a pure and direct image of time. Thus, banality—the pure optical situation that makes time visible—becomes sublime. The still life expresses a certain contemplative attitude towards its object. Deleuze suggests that to assume such an attitude towards an image, to aestheticize its sheer existence, is to extract from it a direct image of time and render the image sublime. However, what produces sublimity for Deleuze provokes only nausea in Sartre. Towards the end of The Psychology of Imagination Sartre points out that assuming an

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aesthetic attitude toward reality does not make it more beautiful but actually more nauseating than it already is, because objects appear as their own analogues or simulations. The passage I am referring to anticipates Deleuze’s account of pure optical images as the result of the breaking of sensory-motor linkages and the replacement of real objects with their pure descriptions. The similarity is striking, especially since Sartre describes the aesthetic contemplation of reality as analogous to paramnesia (a sense of déjà vu) thus anticipating Deleuze’s surprising observation that the image is never in the present but always in the past (not an individual, psychological past, but an ontological, pre-psychological, impersonal one): To say that we ‘assume’ an esthetic attitude to life is to constantly confuse the real and the imaginary. It does happen, however, that we do assume the attitude of esthetic contemplation towards real events or objects. But in such cases everyone of us can feel in himself a sort of recoil in relation to the object contemplated which slips into nothingness so that, from this moment on, it is no longer perceived; it functions as an analogue of itself, that is, that an unreal image of what it is appears to us through its actual presence. This image can be purely and simply the object ‘itself’ neutralized, annihilated [cf. Deleuze’s idea of the thing being annihilated and replaced by its pure visual description] as when I contemplate a beautiful woman or death at a bull fight; it can also be the imperfect and confused appearance of what it could be through what it is. […] The object at once appears to be in back of itself, becomes untouchable, it is beyond our reach; and hence arises a sort of sad disinterest in it. It is in this sense that we may say that great beauty in a woman kills the desire for her [cf. Deleuze on the lack of affection in the time-image: affection stands closer to action than to pure perception). […] To desire her we must forget she is beautiful, because desire is a plunge into the heart of existence. …Esthetic contemplation of real objects is of the same structure as paramnesia, in which the real object functions as analogue of itself in the past. (Sartre 1963b: 281-282 my italics)

Here Sartre distinguishes the imaginary from an aesthetic contemplation of the world which, he argues, cannot produce the imaginary because it does not annihilate the world but merely doubles it back upon itself thereby derealizing it i.e., Sartre posits a difference between negation and derealization. Deleuze, however, describes the time-image precisely as “a real object which functions as an analogue of itself in the past,” both actual and virtual at the same time, both real and imaginary (the

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latter two are indiscernible though not confused). While Sartre believes that aesthetic contemplation (perceiving for the sake of perceiving) renders the real even more vulgar and unreal (an object that has become an analogue of itself, and is merely referring to itself, is a simulation) Deleuze regards pure images as a direct presentation of time, which, insofar as it expresses an excess (too beautiful, too horrible), is sublime rather than nauseating. The falsification of time The upshot of Deleuze’s theory of the time-image is the realization that the annihilation of the human (“getting rid of ourselves”), of the subject as a force of substraction and, by the same token, as that which establishes links between images, is conceivable only as a simulation. This is reflected in his definition of the image as a déjà vu, a disturbance of memory, or a false memory. The most common illusion about the nature of the image, warns Deleuze, is the idea that the image is in the present18: If normal movement subordinates the time of which it gives us an indirect representation, aberrant movement speaks up for an anteriority of time that it presents to us directly, on the basis if the disproportion of scales, the dissipation of centres and the false continuity of the images themselves. What is in question is the obviousness on the basis of which the cinematographic image is in the present, necessarily in the present. […] First, there is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. […] It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image. To film what is before and what is after. (1989: 37-38)

However, this ‘before’ and ‘after’ are not to be confused with preceding and subsequent images, with psychological memory or flashbacks that give us only an indirect representation of time. It is not a question of using recollection images, because they merely refer us back to a former present; rather, to present time directly means “reaching in the past that which conceals itself from memory” (39). Even that which has been forgotten is still inscribed, whereas cinema must recall that which has not been forgotten: it must aim at failing to remember or, put differently, it must simulate forgetting. To recall something that hasn’t actually happened and therefore cannot have been forgotten, and yet something that

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appears to us as if it were a memory: this is precisely the nature of déjà vu. This kind of image is beyond psychology namely because it is beyond individual recollection: the image reveals something that was concealed not from my memory but rather from an impersonal or pure memory. “The undecidable,” “the unexplainable,” the indiscernibility of real and imaginary: these express the indiscernibility of the universal and the particular, of universal and individual memory or of universal and individual being (both Bergson and Deleuze conflate Being with Memory). The time-image recalls something that belongs to being, to pure memory, but at the same time, the image produces this recollection—it produces it, because the recollection is not part of a given consciousness, is not merely buried in its psychological past. The paradoxical implication of this imagistic ontology is precisely the idea of this production of the ground of being, the production of anteriority, an ontological simulation: the time-image produces the effect of anteriority or ground. Is it possible, then, that time itself is a simulation? As we saw in chapter four, Baudrillard explains the birth of the hyperreal from the real in terms of time. For the real to appear in the first place, the material world has to be distended from within, an interval needs to appear, positing and thus separating causes from effects. But if this interval is too big, time begins to ‘fade away’ (causality does not ‘happen’ any more), as a result of which the real (time) disappears too or becomes a simulation: one can then produce the effect of reality, and time, too, becomes merely the effect of time i.e. time becomes spectacular. Baudrillard asserts that if time is not experienced internally, as duration, it is not real. Simulation appears when the internal (subjectivity) disappears. Simulation becomes possible not because the subject has become too strong (as Baudrillard thinks) but namely because once the subject objectifies itself completely, interiority vanishes. Simulation is the production of the real, of time, but time can be produced only because it is no longer experienced organically, internally. Simulation is opposed to duration. Time is not psychological: whenever time is presented as proceeding from a subject, from a body—as, for example, in the movement-image—it is presented indirectly, inauthentically. But if time is, by definition, not psychological but ontological, this means that time is by nature simulacral. Simulation is the death or disappearance of interiority: simulation becomes possible when there is only exteriority. If simulation is pure exteriority, it does not differ from Bergson’s pure

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perception. In pure perception-images vary for one another, acting and reacting on all their sides and at the same time. These images are pure effects irreducible to causes: their actions and reactions are not caused because causality appears only when there is a privileged point of view (the human body as a special image). Simulation, however, is defined in exactly the same terms, namely as effects without causes, or effects attributable to different causes. To repeat, simulation marks the disappearance of interiority. Deleuze illustrates this point in his discussion of characters and action in modern cinema. When characters are stripped of any interiority, their actions can no longer be attributed to them. In fact, the very notion of ‘action’ changes because the idea of character motivation or will no longer makes sense. In modern cinema the camera “takes responsibility for the movement that the subject can no longer or cannot make” (1989: 59). This is a “cinema of enchantment”: it presents “universalized, depersonalized and pronominalized movements” (60). Situations do not move forward the plot but refer back to themselves in a sort of an infinite loop. Characters no longer seem to act; instead, it is as if the world or the camera acts for them, moving them around in a simulation of real action. (Antonioni’s films would provide a fitting illustration of what Deleuze is arguing here.) Action is replaced by sheer movement across space, which does not change anything and does not express the character’s personality: “[I]t is set which replaces situation, and the to-and-fro which replaces action” (67). Following Deleuze’s thought, we have to conclude that insofar as the time-image is the triumph of exteriority, while the vanishing of interiority opens up the realm of simulation, the time-image—the most authentic and direct presentation of time—is simulacral by nature. If simulation ‘takes place’ when an object appears as an analogue of itself, as not really present, as unreal, then self-reference is the very essence of simulation, because an object can refer to itself only if it has already split into two and thus become real and unreal at the same time. The self-referential image—the time-image—both is and is not, because it has always already leaped out of itself in order to point to itself. In Cinema 2 Deleuze distinguishes between two regimes of the image: the ‘organic’ and the ‘crystalline.’ The crystalline regime of images brings with it a new kind of narration, which Deleuze calls ‘falsifying’. This kind of narration is not, however, postmodern. It is not a question of assembling many different points of view on the same content; rather the power of the false “supercedes the form of the true, because it poses

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the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the co-existence of notnecessarily true pasts”(1989: 131). Falsifying narration “is no longer a truthful narration which is linked to real (sensory-motor) descriptions. Description becomes its own object and narration becomes temporal and falsifying at exactly the same time” (132). The development of the time-image in cinema is contemporaneous with the trend to falsification, which results in the identification of temporality with falsification (in the same way, Bergson’s déjà vu or false memory reveals the nature of consciousness as duration, the true essence of time) and with self-referentiality insofar as description and narration do not refer to independent realities but only to themselves. Falsification becomes possible only when the point of view, itself constant, is placed within different objects and presents them in their metamorphosis (143). In this respect, Deleuze’s ‘falsification’ resembles Bergson’s ‘intuition’, which is also described as a point of view within the object rather than an external point of view on the object.19 The transition from the movement-image to the time-image in cinema is symptomatic of the decreasing role of the subject as an agent of representation. The movement-image still belongs to a system of representation, whereas in modern cinema the story or plot is replaced by pure (nonreferential) time-images or pure (nonreferential) language: For the time-image to be born…the actual image must enter into relation with its own virtual image as such; from the outset pure description must divide into two, ‘repeat itself, take itself up again, fork, contradict itself.’ An image which is double–sided, both actual and virtual, must be constituted. We are no longer in the situation of a relationship between the actual image and other virtual images, recollections, or dreams, which thus become actual in turn: this is still a mode of linkage. We are in the situation of an actual image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer any linkage of the real with the imaginary, but indiscernibility of the two, a perpetual exchange. (1989: 273-275 my italics)

By opposing the virtual to representation, Deleuze suggests that the imaginary (which is identical with the virtual) extends beyond the subject. In addition to Bergson’s influence on Deleuze’s idea of time as falsification (through the concept of false memory or déjà vu) we need to note Sartre’s significance with respect to this idea. The imaginary life, argues Sartre, is possible because “it is not only the material of the object that is unreal but all the spatial and temporal determinations to

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which it is subjected participate in this unreality”(1963b: 180). Whereas in perception the spatial determinations of an object depend on those of other objects and are, therefore, variable, the spatial determinations of the image are “interiorized,” turned into absolute, invariable qualities of the object (182). The unreal is self-referential, absolute, falsifying. The self-referentiality of Sartre’s image consists in the indistinguishability of the true and the imaginary within the image. Despite the similarities between Sartre’s and Deleuze’s idea of unreal time, there is an important difference: Deleuze, following Bergson, considers falsification as representing the nature of time in general, while Sartre still differentiates between real and unreal time/space. The unreal space of the image never comes into contact with the real space of the person forming the image, just as the duration of the consciousness of the image differs from the duration of the image itself. Sartre believes that this is true even in extreme cases when the unreal duration of the object and the real duration of consciousness run off parallel, with the same rhythm. I can take ten minutes to imagine a scene that lasted ten minutes. But it would be childish to think that because of this the scene would be more exactly detailed. The time I take to reconstruct it matters little. What matters is the determination of the unreal duration that I give it. (1963b: 186)

The properties Sartre attributes to unreal time are actually the same properties Bergson attributes to consciousness in general: The time of unreal objects is itself unreal. It has no characteristics whatever of perceptual time: it does not run off (as the duration of this piece of sugar which is melting), it can expand or contract at will while remaining the same, it is not irreversible. It is a shadow of time, like the shadow of the object, with its shadow of space. Nothing separates the unreal object from me more surely: the world of imagery is completely isolated. I can enter it only by unrealizing myself in it. (188 italics mine)

Similarly, Bergson speaks of our entire mental life as continually expanding and contracting, never unfolding in one direction only: the present and the future are not determined by the past, and the past can be affected by the present and the future. Time (but not spatialized time, which is always referential and thus measurable) is self-referential in nature: the time-image does not refer to anything outside itself. It does

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not describe a certain state of things but is itself that state of things. Falsification then is synonymous with pure expression: to falsify means not to signify/represent. Falsifying narration is, in Deleuze’s view, beyond metaphysics and beyond postmodernism, whose relativism still rests on the idea of truth. This kind of narration is supposed to restore the original neutrality and meaninglessness of a world without truth. Falsifying narration is meta-narration, and its self-referentiality restores to us the pre-signifying regime of pure images. Thus Deleuze proposes that, counterintuitively, oversignification (self-referentiality being the highest degree of signification) restores us to a pre-signifying state of things. While we expect that the more we suppress referential material and replace it with our description of it, the further away we move from reference, reality, matter, Deleuze argues the opposite is the case: since natural perception is already signification, we need to reach beyond it to meta-perception (the time-image is meta-perception, perception for its own sake) or meta-narration in order to undo what natural perception has done. We must, in other words, denaturalize perception, make it as artificial as possible, in order to restore perception in its original purity. In fact, this paradox is at the root of the sublime, which, as Longinus argues, consists in the simulation of nature: one attains a pure, pre-reflexive state by cultivating it reflectively, purposefully.20 The highest degrees of reflective consciousness—for example, selfreferentiality—restore us to a pre-reflective, immediate consciousness. In this respect, consciousness functions like fiction: just as metafiction or self-referential fiction best reveals the fundamental structures of fiction, so the highest degrees of reflective consciousness reveal consciousness in its pre-reflective purity. This is corroborated by the self-referential nature of the process of dissociation, which, Bergson claims, underlies life as continual self-creation. The connection between dissociation and self-referentiality is hinted at, though never explicitly articulated, by Mullarkey: In a self-referential manner…one part of the motive force of life resides in the tendency to create isolated individuals. As Bergson puts it: life ‘manifests a search for individuality, as if it strove to constitute systems naturally isolated, naturally closed’. Life in part concerns the creation of an inside and an outside and so cannot be explained in terms which take a particular inside and outside for granted. (2000: 73)

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We should be careful, however, not to interpret self-referentiality negatively i.e., not to construe it as inauthentic or unreal on account of its alleged ‘artifice’. Mullarkey’s account of what he calls Bergson’s ‘constructivism’ reminds us why the self-referential is as real and authentic as the pre-reflective or nonself-referential.21 If postmodernism can be generally defined as a kind of thinking about the world that reduces everything to language, Deleuze’s refusal to identify the time-image with a sign reflects his general distaste for postmodernism. Rather than representing the time-image expresses the ‘typical’, but expresses it in a pure singularity, something unique. This is the sign, it is the very function of the sign. But, as long as signs find their material in the movement-image, as long as they form the singular expressional features, from a material in movement, they are in danger of evoking another generality which would lead to their being confused with a language. The representation of time can be extracted from this only by association and generalization, or as concept. […] Such is the ambiguity of the sensory-motor schema, agent of abstraction. It is only when the sign opens directly on to time, when time provides the signaletic material itself, that the type, which has become temporal, coincides with the feature of singularity separated from its motor associations. (1989: 42-43)

This recalls the paradox we encountered in Bergson’s account of memory and the body: the body (in Deleuze, the sensory-motor schema) expresses what is most typical, abstract, general about us, whereas memory individualizes our mental life. In The Creative Mind Bergson explains the origin of general ideas in terms of the body’s similar responses to certain external stimuli. Following Bergson, Deleuze declares the movement-image actually poorer than the time-image, because “it associates with the thing many different things that resemble it on the same plane, in so far as they provoke the same movements” (45). Nevertheless, Deleuze’s conception of the time-image as the subordination of movement to time seems strangely out of place in the general context of his thought about time. It is odd that, having argued so passionately that movement is not added to matter but matter is already movement and thus already image (the movement-image), now he wants to argue that time is separate from movement, in fact, that it is anterior to it. While the conception of matter as image was a blow to metaphysics, the idea of time as an a priori form, separate from matter (and thus

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from movement, because matter is movement) seems like a return to metaphysics. Signification and a-signification Is Deleuze really successful in placing the time-image, along with the new kind of subjectivity that appears with it, outside representation/ signification? This new subjectivity “is no longer motor or material, but temporal and spiritual: that which ‘is added’ to matter, not what distends it; recollection-image, not movement-image” (Cinema 2 47). The movement-image, on the other hand, distends matter, which is originally concentrated. Like Bergson and Baudrillard, Deleuze adopts the rhetoric of ‘distension’ and ‘concentration’ to describe the relationship between matter and mind. As Baudrillard explains in The Perfect Crime, originally the universe is the absolute concentration of matter (heat), absolute self-identity, with no room for negation. At one point it gradually starts cooling off and this cooling off is the birth of time insofar as it creates gaps, spaces, intervals, lags within matter. In contrast to postmodernism, which reduces the real to a mere construct of the subject, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Bergson try to explain illusion and reality through physics: the real is not a construct of the subject but emerges the moment the world is born. As always, the aim is to find a bridge between matter and mind. According to Deleuze, the only difference between the two is that between the movement and the time-image: the former refers (extends into movement) while the latter does not. In the final analysis, then, Deleuze remains a postmodernist as he reduces the difference between matter and mind to a linguistic one (reference). He replaces the question “Is there an objective reality?” with the question “How can images exist in two regimes at the same time, a referential and a non-referential one?” Assuming the existence of objects (non-referential images) and subjects (referential images, whose reference is always already self-reference), he thinks his only task is to distinguish between them. He does not ask “How is knowledge possible?” but only “What kinds of knowledge exist and how can we avoid confusing them?” Although the only criterion for distinguishing the movement-image from the time-image is the referentiality of the former and the self-referentiality of the latter, Deleuze still believes that the cinematographic image as such is what he calls “signaletic material,” i.e. that it is presignifying. In fact, the relationship Deleuze establishes between cinema

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and signification is very similar to that Sartre posits between image and consciousness. Just as image-consciousness reveals the nature of consciousness as negation, cinema brings to light an intelligible content which is like a presupposition, a condition, a necessary correlate through which language constructs its own ‘objects’. […] But this correlate, though inseparable, is specific: it consists of movements and thought processes (pre-linguistic images), and of points of view on these movements and processes (pre-signifying signs). […] Or rather, it is the first signifiable, anterior to all significance. (Deleuze 1989: 262)

Following Sartre’s assertion that unreflected consciousness does not need to be reflected in order to be, Deleuze claims that cinema does not need to signify because it is the very condition of possibility of signification. Accordingly, to free the image from its usual subordination to the concept, it is necessary to show that images do not need to signify through montage but can be significant (by not signifying) on their own, as pure images. The pure image is literal but precisely by being strictly denotative it opens up an abyss of readability. The less it refers to an outside world, the more “readable” it becomes, but also the less human. Deleuze suggests that the human ought to be defined as a certain limit of signification, which the pure time-image of modern cinema has transgressed. That which does not signify is not yet human, but, on the other hand, an excess of signification—an excess of readability—also signals the surpassing of the human. Getting rid of ourselves? The breaking down of sensory-motor linkages in the time-image is not the beginning of the end of subjectivity as a point of view. The recognition of “incompossible presents” and “not necessarily true pasts” is not the death verdict of the subject but simply its redefinition. This new subject still interprets images and events but no longer interprets them as ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’ i.e., subjectivity can no longer be limited by the idea of truth. All of this actually follows from Deleuze’s own understanding of ‘truth’. He argues, for instance, that to ‘be’ a point of view on the world means that one is able to judge the truthfulness of the world. Such judgments are, in turn, rooted in action: the subject’s capacity to judge the truthfulness of the world depends on its ability to act upon it. The only thing the theory of the time-image demonstrates is

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that the concept of the subject has to be redefined (broadened) because the subject is not exhausted by its ability to act upon the world i.e., by its ability to judge how true or real the world is. Deleuze’s answer to his own question—“How can we abolish ourselves?”—should have been: “We cannot.”

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Endnotes 1



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Yvette Biró makes a similar argument in Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema, where she suggests that cinema restores a kind of primitive, childthought. She calls it ‘film-thought’. Using Beckett’s Film, Martin Schwab demonstrates the inconsistencies in Deleuze’s concept of annihilated subjectivity: “The imbrication of de-subjectivization and subject-based agency in O [the protagonist in Film] poses for Deleuze the general problem of how subjectivity can be simultaneously a form of differentiation qua diminished freedom of energy, as well as a force that pushes toward se-differentiation” (2000: 123). See Bruce Morrissette’s Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres on the novel-film controversy, which centered around the question which of the two arts—cinema or the novel—could become truly objective. See the chapters “Modes of ‘Point of View’” and “The Alienated ‘I’” in Novel and Film, where Morrissette analyzes the paradoxical effect of the first person point of view (in Robbe-Grillet’s novels it obstructs rather than fosters the reader’s self-identification with the protagonist) and of the third person point of view (in Dostoevsky’s works, it has the opposite effect of ensuring self-identification even with morally objectionable characters). On the idea of the ‘false’ in the modern novel, see Alain Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, especially pp. 157-168 on the role of “the false” in overthrowing the realistic illusion. For an interesting discussion of the Bergsonian aspect of Robbe-Grillet’s objectification of his characters’ psychology see John Ward’s “L’Année dernière à Marienbad” in Alain Resnais or the Theme of Time. In this respect, Robbe-Grillet’s approach to writing agrees with Sartre’s understanding of consciousness as always already ‘out there’, in the midst of things. For Robbe-Grillet “the only way to approach concepts is through physical objects and not, as most people would say, through consciousness. Consciousness for him is a highly suspect construction upon the sensible world. Memory and imagination are improbable devices that help us to live and satisfy our ego” (Ward 1968: 43). In Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema Christian Metz describes cinema as a sort of natural signification. Cinema can be seen as a kind of language but never as a particular language system, because it lacks “the second articulation” essential to any language system: since the image is both the signifier and the signified, it does not need to be translated (articulated). [Metz does admit that there is a sort of specifically filmic articulation, which, however, is not necessarily encoded, with the exception of images that become encoded through long use (either deteriorating into film clichés or constituting a genre.] By contrast, any kind of meaning in the verbal arts “is grafted, not onto any genuine prior expressiveness, but onto a conventional signification—that of language—which is generally inexpressive” (1974: 77). In this, the film image resembles “perception with its psychosociological and cultural conditionings” (213): perception and the film image are always already expressive or meaningful, without however obeying any system of codified rules of meaning-production. For a detailed discussion of the differences between expres-

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sion (the image) and signification, and between the homogeneity of denotation and connotation in cinema and their heterogeneity in the verbal arts, see especially pp. 75-91. See Francois Zourabichvili’s “The Eye of Montage: Dziga Vertov and Bergsonian Materialism” in The Brain Is the Screen. According to Zourabichvili, what Deleuze actually wants to argue is that the only nonhuman eye is montage whereas merely pointing the camera at objects “is still human, all too human” (2000: 146). Real movement—movement which exists for itself—can be presented only through montage, especially through false continuity which “has an objective effect: that of opening the image onto a point of view that is not its own, and in so far as it is not its own. Each image thus interacts with other images, instead of organizing itself according to the conditions of the centering of ‘natural’—that is, subjective—perception”(147). Deleuze notes that cinema does not give us the photogramme as such but only an intermediary image which is already movement (1986: 2). It must be clear by now that neither Bergson nor Deleuze distinguish between image as perception or the thing perceived, on one hand, and our response to it, i.e. the act of perception. This is why they call perception (the object of perception) and the act of perception by the same name: “perception-image.” Both the act of perception and the object of perception are images. See Andras Balint Kovacs’ “The Film History of Thought,” trans. Sandor Hervey in The Brain Is the Screen. Kovacs examines some of the problems in Deleuze’s historical definition of film images. According to Kovacs, the “cinema books are by definition written from the point of view of…modern [cinema]”(2000: 156) insofar as Deleuze views the time-image as “the incarnation of a goal (telos) in the broad cinematographic evolution, the point at which cinema arrives at its own consciousness and discovers its ‘essence’”(156). The uniqueness of Deleuze’s approach to cinema is “that the definition of a cinematographic sign is not given independently of the history of cinema. In other words, films and their constitutive signs have no definition outside of film history” (157). Mullarkey’s explanation of the relationship between movement and image in Bergson helps us understand how indebted Deleuze’s idea of the time-image is to Bergson’s notion of Pure Memory: “When there is a disturbance in our present activity, when…our recognition fails, the ensuing embellishment of our perception with recollections is less a result of our need than an opportunity for pure memory to fulfil its need. […] A movement’s fullness, then, drives away the image, while its lack or interruption contributes to its approach from the past” (2000: 52). Deleuze defines the time-image in the same way: as the interruption or impossibility of movement. See Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. Italian neo-realism anticipates the cinema of the time-image in terms of the following: the representation of subjective mental states through purely external means (composition, color, camera angles, etc.); de-narrativization; the use of ‘dead time’; characters are treated as if they were objects i.e., their place in the composition of each shot is as important as the place of objects, while objects are treated as independent from any functional human purpose; poetically free narrative without

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The Image in French Philosophy a clear beginning and end; the privileging of long tracking shots over montage; emphasis on the autonomy of the individual image, which is treated on analogy with a poetic image. On the “emancipation of the camera” see Biró 47-53. See Gregg Lambert’s “Cinema and the Outside” in The Brain Is the Screen for a reading of Deleuze’s time-image as a reinterpretation of the Kantian sublime. According to Lambert, Deleuze “reconfigures [the Kantian sublime] by resolving the impasse of the imagination no longer in terms of a principle of representation (as Kant did) but in terms of the Bergsonian definition of the brain as a pure interval (or ‘gap’), opening onto a ‘virtual whole” (2000: 261). Lambert contrasts “the automatic [and thus potentially ideological] character of the movement-image” with the time-image as a “force which causes the subject to think” (276-277). Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime proposes a connection between Bergson’s conception of time and the technological sublime. Like Deleuze, Gilbert-Rolfe reads Bergson as a Kantian, i.e. he presents Bergsonian duration as nonchronological and identifies it with instantaneity or simultaneity (hence the comparison with information, which is also instantly available but not spatially represented) rather than with change. Gilbert-Rolfe underscrores Bergson’s relevance to the postmodern sublime by linking Bergsonian simultaneity to the postmodern presentation of the unpresentable through the figure of “blankness.” Whereas in the past blankness has been covered up or ignored, argues GilbertRolfe, “in contemporary objects blankness has come to be associated with the (perhaps Bergsonian) simultaneity through and with which the electronic proposes to replace the diachronic articulation of the mechanical—in image as in deed. In this, blankness has moved from an earlier association with the idea of process as potentiality which can be visually articulated or manifested—withholding and, therefore, promising; absent and, therefore, capable of becoming present—to become instead the signifier of an idea of process as present but unpresentable, invisible because unimaginable in spatial terms (i.e., as visual, and particularly as visibly a matter of inside and outside and the concealed and revealed)” (1999: 116). See “The Brain Is the Screen,” trans. Marie Therese Guirgis in The Brain Is the Screen. In this interview Deleuze tries to explain what this means: “What the image ‘represents’ is in the present, but not the image itself. The image itself is an ensemble of time relations from the present which merely flows, either as a common multiple, or as the smallest divisor. Relations of time are never seen in ordinary perception, but they are seen in the image, as long as it is a creative one. […] The relation of time is the coexistence of durations in the image, which has nothing to do with the present, that is, what the image represents” (2000: 371). See Jeffrey S. Librett’s “Positing the Sublime: Reading Heidegger Reading Kant” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question. There is a striking resemblance between Librett’s rendition of sensus communis (“to think in the place of every other”) and Deleuze’s description of the dissolution of subjectivity and the emerging of an acentered regime of images, in which every image varies for every other image: “Not only is [aesthetic] reflection disinterested…but insofar as it means thinking in the place of every other it means thinking in the place of every other thinking in the

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place of every other. […] It follows that to be in the place of the other is to be where he or she is not, for he or she is elsewhere, in the place of every other. To think in the place of the other is each time then to think in the place of a singular nothingness or absent place which is filled by a heterogeneous plurality—a dispositional network—of the others in turn. Again, such thought…does not involve merely the positional activity of a self-affecting subject, but the dispositional and displaced activity-passivity of a neither subjective nor objective overlaying, montage, or collage of positions”(1993: 218). See Michel Deguy’s “The Discourse of Exaltation: Contribution to a Rereading of Pseudo-Longinus” in Of the Sublime. “It is a matter of acquiring the innate…. It is a matter of retaining the ground, of raising up and carrying away—what? Culture…leads back to nature…on condition that nature…is conceived as a movement of self-surmounting” (1993: 16). “Simply because the explanation of the present with the possible is born in part through a retroactive agency, it does not follow that it is wholly unreal. Actions are prior to the things that act. Hence, Bergson can argue that the self, for instance, is a construct—a ‘creation of self by self’—but that that is precisely what makes it real. Bergson’s ‘constructivism’…has a positive ontological basis rather than a negative one reliant on scepticism, that is, a construct is a reality simply because it is a construct. But note that it is a reality; it is not the whole truth, but a part of the truth” (Mullarkey 2000: 173-174, my italics).

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Imaginary Time

Prolegomena to a ‘metaphysical’ cinema Throughout this study I have been arguing that the philosophy of the impersonal, of which the work of the five thinkers considered here is representative, is not a critique of metaphysics but its revival, inasmuch as metaphysics is “a thinking pertaining to [impersonal] forces much more than to the subject” (Lyotard 1988b: 6). The impersonal force ‘hovering above’ the philosophy of Bergson, Sartre, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Deleuze is, of course, Time. Their nuanced and confusing distinctions between mind and matter, perception and memory, imagination and images, memory and memory-images, the for-itself and the in-itself, the fatal and the hyperreal, the time-image and the movement-image, are premised on the idea that philosophy has forgotten the question of time, that time has been subordinated to space, and that only by challenging the ‘spatialization of time’ (which is implicitly identified with ‘metaphysics’) can we redeem or recover a more ‘authentic’, more direct way of knowing ourselves and the world. It is enough to consider the privileged terms in the work of the five philosophers discussed here to recognize how closely affiliated they are with this project of ‘redeeming’ time: Bergson’s Pure Memory (distinguished from spatialized and discrete memory-images), Sartre’s image-consciousness (a kind of consciousness from which the last traces of anything extended, material, or spatial have been expelled), Lyotard’s sublime (described as ‘a sensation of Time’, or a sensation of the being of Time), Baudrillard’s fatal object (defined as a necessary delay between images i.e. as their non-contemporaneity), Deleuze’s time-image (contrasted with the movement-image, which is conceived in spatial terms). The attempt to redeem time from its subordination to space by traditional metaphysics is not the end of metaphysics but the beginning of a new kind of metaphysics, the metaphysics of immanence. The

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privileged concept in the metaphysics of immanence—Time—is just as ‘impersonal’, if not ‘more impersonal’ (for lack of a better word), than the denigrated concept of Space (and its affiliated discourse of vision, visuality, visibility, representation, imaging). We have seen that in one way or another Bergson, Sartre, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Deleuze cast time in the position of the Absolute, the pure, the inexpressible, the unpresentable, the most ontologically anterior, the most nebulous and indefinite ‘force’ or ‘realm’. Time seems to be always already beyond the limits of comprehension and imagination: it is not even limited by the very category of ‘limit’ (itself a spatial category). So far I have been mainly concerned with foregrounding the multiple inconsistencies, incongruities and aporias in this new metaphysics, its general failure to explain how the universal particularizes or individualizes itself: how perception dissociates itself from the ‘aggregate of images’ (matter) or how Pure Memory ‘inserts’ itself in the sensorymotor apparatus (Bergson); what motivates image-consciousness, which is absolutely empty or constitutively unmotivated, to produce itself spontaneously, become ‘bastardized’ into an ego and even ‘assume’ a body (Sartre); how consciousness can reduce itself to the bare existence of a material point and still be aware of its own being (Lyotard); how the objective illusion of the world i.e. the ‘good’ aspect of the simulacrum degrades itself into the hyperreal i.e. the ‘bad’ aspect of the simulacrum (Baudrillard); how a movement-image becomes pregnant with time or how a point of view (subjectivity) can erase itself (Deleuze). All these ‘failures’ aside—it is precisely such ‘failures’ and aporias that make the work of these philosophers, and philosophy in general, engaging—this new metaphysics deserves the critical attention I have given it here because it is by no means an isolated phenomenon or an obscure way of thinking about familiar philosophical problems. The intriguing, eccentric and often ‘mind-blowing’ connections these philosophers draw between ‘time’ and ‘the real’, in particular their emphasis on derealization, hyperrealization and virtualization—for example, the derealizing power of both Pure Memory and image-consciousness, the idea that the real ‘exists’ only within a certain time-frame, that one can have a physical sensation of time (of its being, not of its passing), or that one can recall events that do not necessarily belong to one’s personal past—all of this brings this new metaphysics within the orbit of a particular ‘genre’ of contemporary films I shall designate as ‘metaphysical cinema’ due to its proximity to meta-physical or meta-fictional (self-referential) fiction:

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when the transcendent is transformed into the immanent, the result is self-reference. As I have tried to demonstrate in the previous chapters, although the metaphysics of immanence declares itself ‘objectivist’ (insofar as it identifies the ‘impersonal’ with material reality untainted by subjectivity) it also suggests that, paradoxically, only through the attainment of the highest degrees of self-reflexivity (i.e. by inflating the subject) can subjectivity/reflexivity be bypassed or put under erasure, that material reality can be ‘restored’ only by being completely ‘replaced’ by the subject’s representations of it. Image-consciousness (Sartre), the virtual (Bergson), the sublime (Lyotard), the fatal object (Baudrillard) and the time-image (Deleuze) represent different attempts to restore the material reality of the world by going to the opposite extreme i.e. by inflating self-consciousness. For example, Lyotard’s sublime, as objectivist as it claims to be, rests on the premise that one can eclipse signification (the work of art should not signify or represent) by signifying existence as such (the work is sublime in the sense that it just ‘is’ and it also allows us to ‘be’). Self-reference becomes, or at least is claimed to be, a way to get rid of referentiality; super-signification (signifying that one is not signifying) allegedly bypasses signification. Similarly, Deleuze contends that by replacing an image with its description, by attaining the highest degree of meta-narration, we gain access to other durations and to a “regime of images” corresponding to Bergson’s regime of pure perception. It is naïve to believe that signification happens in a vacuum and that one can go ‘outside’ it in order to go back to some hypothetical pure state of things ‘before’ signification. Rather, this pure state can be restored only, and precisely, by intensifying the state into which it has degenerated: by inflating, supersaturating, falsifying the world, we can restore its pure, pre-reflective, inhuman objectiveness/objectness. Detective fiction is inherently metafictional inasmuch as ‘detection’ refers not to a particular occupation but to the nature of thought as such: the private eye is a metaphor for the postmodern I thrust amidst a multiplicity of codes he struggles to decipher in vain.1 Metafictional detective fiction has been credited with a significant role in the transition from realistic to increasingly de-psychologized2, anti-realistic and antinaturalistic modes of representation. In this respect, it is related to other anti-forms such as anti-theatre/theatre of the absurd (Ionesco, Beckett) and the anti-novel/the new novel (Robbe-Grillet), in which the old dialectic of visible/invisible (surface/depth), objective/subjective or real/

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unreal does not hold any more. Metafictional or metaphysical detective fiction refuses to provide the closure characteristic of classical detective fiction and instead multiplies the possible ‘solutions’ of the case, reducing the plot to infinite regress; in other words, it demonstrates that human thought is infinitely recursive. The dictionary definition of the verb ‘to detect’ already suggests the inherently self-reflexive, recursive i.e. infinite nature of ‘detection’: ‘to detect’ means to discover or determine the existence, presence, or fact of.” The inherent instability and inconclusiveness of ‘evidence’ and ‘clue’ is reflected in their dictionary definitions: ‘evidence’ is “an outward sign of” and a ‘clue’ is “a piece of evidence that leads one to the solution of a problem.” Evidence is a clue and a clue is a piece of evidence: one defines the other and is defined by it in turn. The mere uncovering of evidence, therefore, is not sufficient to solve a case: “Interpretation means that evidence tells us everything but how to read it” (Copjec 1993: 179). Even after all evidence has been collected, one still needs clues as to how to interpret it. Copjec uses Frege’s theory of numeration to illuminate the central question of detective fiction (the ‘locked-room paradox’): “where has the body come from?”(1993: 172). She argues (referencing Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter”) that “those who consider concealment to be simply a matter of depth, those who think that that which lies hidden must lie underneath something else, subscribe to ‘too immutable a notion of the real’, since what is concealed may just as well lie on the surface”(173). On the contrary, the hidden lies on the surface and the body can never come from a locked room: “The room cannot be locked because its details can never be completely enumerated; their list is never countable” (177). For counting (or detecting) to be possible “the set of numbers must register one category under which no objects fall. The category is that of the ‘not-identical-to-itself’ (173). And what is this mysterious and lonely category devoid of any objects? It is the subject who counts and whom Frege excludes from the set of numbers. Detective fiction is possible precisely because of the lack of a referent or of a final signifier that will close off the chain of signification i.e., it is possible only on the condition that the detective exclude himself from countable objects, an exclusion which, however, automatically renders suspect—infinite—the act of counting/detecting/thinking. It is precisely the infinity of human thought, its failure to validate itself in any absolute fashion—to translate all signs (characterized by “artificiality, arbitrariness, and conventionality”) into symptoms (characterized by “naturality,

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non-arbitrariness, and motivation”)—that makes detection a form of “simulation, that is, [a] voluntary production of symptoms”(Carpettini 1983: 138). In the history of the various transformations of the concept of metaphysical or metafictional detective fiction, from ‘ethical romance,’ through ‘postmodern mystery,’ to ‘post-nouveau roman detective novel’, ‘analytic detective fiction’, ‘ontological detective story’ and (the somewhat misleading) ‘anti-detective fiction’, writers like Poe, Borges, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, Eco and Auster figure prominently. Most of the scholarship, however, is limited to literature despite the evidence of an increasing number of films, such as Memento, Following, The Spanish Prisoner, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Open Your Eyes (and its remake Vanilla Sky), Mulholland Drive, Run, Lola, Run, which share with metafictional/metaphysical detective fiction an obsessive interest in questions of temporality and point of view. The impersonal, the infinite and the virtual Errol Morris’ documentary A Brief History of Time (1991), based on Stephen Hawking’s book, follows the attempts of Hawking and his colleagues to explain the origin of the universe. Towards the end of the film the hypothesis is put forward that the universe should not be conceived as originating from a singular point because the laws of physics break down when one tries to explain the universe in terms of singularity. The concept of imaginary time is introduced as a means of avoiding the problem of singularity. In this new model, which excludes any notion of a creation event, the universe is smooth and self-contained; visually, its existence in imaginary time is represented by an elliptical form with no edge, no boundary, no beginning. Not only is the universe not created by God, but it is equally incorrect to say that it is created from nothing: there is no ‘nothing’ in the midst of which the universe suddenly springs forth or, as one of Hawking’s colleagues puts it, the use of verb tenses is no longer appropriate. Hawking’s theory of ‘imaginary time’, of an infinite universe, bears a striking resemblance to Bergson’s idea of pure memory developed in Matter and Memory. As we saw in chapter one, Bergson envisions our mental life, and the universe, as having no beginning but, instead, being infinitely stretched out ‘towards’ or ‘into’ pure memory. Déjà vu is a privileged experience insofar as it reveals the true nature of our mental life: its infinity or, what amounts to the same, the infinity of time. In déjà

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vu we remember something we cannot attribute to our own past, because it appears to come from some anonymous, impersonal past. Preoccupied with meeting the demands of the present, we suppress those memories that are not immediately relevant to our present. If it were not for this narrowing down of our mental life, we would be constantly experiencing déjà vu, reliving an impersonal past. In other words, Bergson believes that everything has already happened an infinite number of times and that if we were able to expand our mental life to its true proportions, we would see that time is infinite, that our lives have been repeating themselves infinitely, without beginning or end, and that it is namely because of this infinite repetition that we exist at all. The infinity of time or consciousness is independent of our realization of it: it is not because we experience déjà vu that time is infinite; rather, we experience déjà vu because time (and consciousness) is infinite. Time’s infinity does not need a material proof such as a particular déjà vu experience, but a déjà vu experience always presupposes (and reveals) the infinity of time and consciousness. This is exactly the kind of relationship Sartre posits between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness: the former does not need to be reflected in a higher consciousness, but the latter always presupposes (and reveals) a pre-reflective cogito. In this sense, we can think of reflective consciousness as repetition rendering manifest the pre-reflective aspect of consciousness, which usually remains hidden but which is the condition of possibility of reflective consciousness. Memory occupies an ambivalent position in this model.3 On one hand, memory is the standard on the basis of which the real is distinguished from the unreal. In Christopher Nolan’s Memento the past ceases to be automatically preserved in the present, as a result of which it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish events that have really happened from those that have not happened: the film makes visible the power of memory to separate real from unreal events.4 On the other hand, given time’s infinity even that which one fails to remember could have just as well taken place, indeed it must have taken place, because in an infinite universe everything has always already happened. In this respect, memory affirms the compossibility of the real and the unreal. Thus, films like The Spanish Prisoner, The Princess and the Warrior and Run, Lola, Run emphasize the difficulty of distinguishing events that have been planned or even destined from events that are purely accidental. The virtual—a term I am borrowing from Bergson but which

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I understand differently, as will become clear in the following pages—is precisely this indistinguishability or compossibility of the real and the unreal, neither of which ever supplants the other. The virtual in cinema exists on the level of cinematography and on the level of point of view. A good example of virtual cinematography is The Matrix (1999) which employs, in the scenes of Neo and the agents dodging bullets, a technique known as ‘bullet-time photography’. To suggest the incredible speed of the characters’ movements in these scenes, the cinematographer either superimposes several images of the body in different positions or slows down to an incredible degree the bodies’ movements. In both cases, speed is suggested not, as might be expected, by means of increasing the frequency of movements or the abruptness of change from one position of the body to the next, but just the opposite, by slowing down the movement as much as possible, in fact by presenting the body as almost immobile. The more easily perceptible or the slower the movement, the easier it is to divide it into segments, whereas the faster and the more imperceptible the movement, the better it is represented by intensifying or saturating the image. In this respect, the slowing down of an image to represent speed is analogous to a close-up of a face to suggest strong emotion. Included in the DVD release of The Matrix is a short documentary explaining the idea of bullet time photography, using the dodging bullets scene as an example. Single photographs of the different stages or points in the movement of the body (Neo falling down as he tries to dodge the bullets) are taken and then scanned into a computer. Once provided with this series of stills, the computer generates in-between drawings (‘interpollations’) which create the impression of movement from one still to the next. Thus, the exceptionally fast movement we see on the screen is a combination of real frames and computer generated frames. The movement can then be stretched out or compressed depending on the way in which one alternates real with computer generated frames, making the moments in-between the captured frames longer or shorter. As one of the special effects specialists working on The Matrix points out, thanks to the introduction of computers in cinematography the camera has been dissociated or liberated from its subject matter: the reproduction of movement no longer depends on the real movement of bodies since the camera can now create movement and even combine it with real movement i.e., the camera has become virtual. Cinema no

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longer represents only real movement—which is itself an illusion—but the illusion of movement or, rather, the illusion of an illusion: virtual movement. Thus, The Matrix poses a challenge to Christian Metz’s argument that movement creates the impression of reality in cinema5 insofar as “the spectator always sees movement as being present”(1974: 8). For Metz, movement is the paramount guarantee of the sense of reality in cinema precisely because movement is intangible: Movement is insubstantial. We see it, but it cannot be touched, which is why it cannot encompass two degrees of phenomenal reality, the ‘real’ and the copy. […] The strict distinction between object and copy…dissolves on the threshold of motion. Because movement is never material but is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality. […] In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of the impression, the real presence of motion. (8-9)

The movement represented by bullet time photography is still insubstantial and visual. The question, however, is whether there is a difference between the visual nature of real movement and the visual nature of computer generated movement. Real movement is always perceived as present, but is this also true of movement reconstituted from a series of real and computer simulated frames? From Metz’s point of view, it would seem that the more technologically advanced cinema becomes, the more it alienates itself from its own ‘nature’ and the more closely it begins resembling photography, whose major characteristic is that it presents only the trace of past movements. However, this kind of thinking still assumes presence as the criterion for establishing the real, an assumption that the films discussed below put into question. The second level on which the virtual functions is a film’s point of view. A point of view is virtual if it confuses the real and the unreal. However, it is not that the real is ‘mistaken’ for the unreal (or the other way around); rather, the origin of the unreal cannot be situated in real time. An unreliable, unreal or virtual point of view (regardless of whether the unreliability of the point of view is the result of a protagonist’s deception or self-deception) creates the impression that the film does not have a clear beginning, although it usually has a clear end (when the deception or self-deception is revealed). Films like Memento, Following, The Spanish Prisoner, The Sixth Sense, Open Your Eyes (and its remake Vanilla Sky) and Fight Club employ a virtual point of view (the point of

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view belongs to an imaginary character, or to a dead character, or to a character who has either been deceived by others or who has deceived himself) which manifests itself most clearly in an incongruity between the visual and the narrative aspects of the films. Even if the film reveals the source of deception/self-deception, either the distinction between the real and the unreal is preserved on the level of narrative but not on the level of images, or the two are distinguished visually but confused narratively. Some of these films tell a story refracted through a mixture of memory and imagination, while others tell a story whose untruthfulness or unreality is later exposed. In this respect, the significance of memory (and, accordingly, of the flashback) cannot be overestimated. This fascination with presenting events as reconstructed or remembered rather than as taking place in the present confirms Metz’s belief that memory is the key to understanding the phenomenology of narrative (film narrative in particular). Since “an event must in some way have ended before its narration can begin” (1974: 23), every account of events must, by necessity, be already a product of memory: “Reality does not tell stories, but memory, because it is an account, is entirely imaginative” (23). Memory is the condition of possibility for any narrative act, including a film. Films that present events as remembered or reconstructed could be seen as the film equivalent of metafiction or self-referential fiction, since they draw attention to the phenomenology of film narrative as such, to the fact that memory is the very condition of possibility of any kind of narrative. Thus, films in which memory plays a significant role—both as a subject matter and as a strategy for telling the story—problematize the possibility of narrative, the relationship between events and the account of events. Is it really necessary for an event to end before its narration can begin? Could the narration of an event precede the event itself? How does one determine the end of an event i.e., how does one distinguish the memory of an event (its imaginative reconstruction) from the real event? Could the narration of an event begin before the event has ended, in the middle of it, as it were? The films I am going to discuss here all pose these questions in one form or another. Their relevance to my discussion of imaginary (infinite) time lies in the fact that they all deal with the theme of deception or self-deception, demonstrating that the question of time—of the relationship between events and their narration, between the present and the past—is indistinguishable from the question of the relationship between the real and the unreal. The point of view in these

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films is virtual insofar as it is either impossible to situate the origin of unreal events on a real timeline (even if such is present in the film) or the representation of events relies on an inverted hierarchy of causes and effects, where effects are represented as preceding rather than following causes. Whatever the particular deception, dream or unreality these films represent, its eventual revelation on the level of plot always fails to distinguish, even retrospectively, between the real and the unreal, which have been conflated visually. The knowledge that certain events in the film have been mistakenly assumed real is never sufficient to establish the precise point at which the real was compromised. Time and point of view Everything in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) hinges on the question from whose point of view the story is told. When we watch the film for the first time we assume the story is told from the point of view of Edward Norton’s character, even though we never learn his name (we only know some of his made up names—Cornelius, Rupert—under which he attends the meetings of various support groups). At the end of the film, we find out that Tyler Durton—played by Brad Pitt—is, in fact, another side of ‘Cornelius’, a hallucinatory representation of the kind of man Cornelius wants to be but is afraid to be. Norton’s character does not suffer from a split personality disorder (this is not a movie about schizophrenia, pathology); he is simply in ‘bad faith’ (Sartre): he is afraid to admit that he is not only Cornelius the conscientious office worker, Ikea boy, insomniac but also Tyler Durton, a free man. We expect the story to be told from the point of view of Cornelius, who gradually realizes he is Tyler. Indeed, the film opens with Cornelius, who then meets Tyler (played by a different actor) and it ends with Cornelius realizing he is Tyler. At least this is what we see on the screen. However, the voiceover represents a completely different point of view: the voiceover belongs to Tyler i.e., to Cornelius after he has realized that he is Tyler. Thus, the images and the voiceover (the visual and the narrative elements of the film) represent two different and, in fact, opposed points of view. This is because the film must find a way to address the paradox that on one hand Cornelius is always already Tyler (from the moment Tyler appears as a separate character) while, on the other hand, the film wants to trace the history of Cornelius’ realization that he is Tyler. The story cannot be told from Cornelius’ point of view because it would not make sense psychologically in retrospect: the unity of the

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character’s consciousness would not have been established if from the very beginning it was split into two separate consciousnesses. The only way the unity of the protagonist’s consciousness can be preserved is to tell the story from the point of view of Tyler, because Tyler represents the reflective consciousness, the consciousness that ‘knows’ that it is Cornelius who has suppresses his identity with Tyler. However, visually this would have made no sense: from the very beginning we would have been shown only one character i.e., Cornelius’ alter-ego would not have been embodied in a separate character. Thus, the two limitations or conditions the film has to deal with are: how to combine psychological authenticity (unity of consciousness) on one hand, with the necessity of presenting the history of the character’s transformation, on the other hand or, put differently, how to represent consciousness in the act of changing (expanding). The only way to do this is precisely by splitting the point of view between the two major elements of the film: the images and the voiceover. The point of view is not split between the two different actors representing the two sides of the protagonist; rather, it is split only in terms of the structural elements of the film itself: visually the story is told from Cornelius’ point of view while the voiceover represents Tyler’s point of view. The images represent pre-reflective consciousness, the voiceover reflective consciousness. Although we assume that the voiceover expresses the thoughts of the character we see on the screen (Norton’s character), in reality the voiceover is not contemporaneous with the character, but represents Tyler’s retrospective point of view. The voiceover determines the kinds of images we are going to see: the images simply illustrate the story told by the voiceover. We don’t see any irrelevant images, images that are not within the control of the voiceover. The voiceover is privileged over the visual aspect of the film because the voiceover represents a higher, reflective consciousness, which is now trying to reconstruct the sequence of events which led up to the realization of the identity of Cornelius with Tyler. The subordinate role of the images is such that it does not even matter if the events the voiceover is recounting really happened or not. Whatever the voice says must be ‘demonstrated’ through images, including events that never actually took place: at one point Cornelius wishes for a plane crash and although the plane does not crash, his wish is dramatized visually. The film deliberately blurs the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical: it treats the metaphorical literally and the literal

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metaphorically. For instance, when Cornelius is advised to “step into his cave” (a metaphor for getting to know oneself, purposefully isolating oneself from the world) the camera actually shows us Cornelius, dressed in exactly the same suit he is wearing in real life, stepping inside an iced over cave. Conversely, later on, when he and Marla are having a conversation that threatens to precipitate Cornelius’s realization that he is Tyler, Tyler (Brad Pitt) interrupts the conversation, addressing Cornelius from the basement: the unconscious, which is spatially envisioned as a realm under consciousness is thus represented literally as a space under the house. Another instance of this tendency to treat the literal and the metaphorical as interchangeable is the director’s choice to use a different actor to play the part of the imaginary Tyler. By making this decision, the director does not have to deal with the difficulty of using the same actor as two different people in one and the same shot (which would require a lot of editing). Instead, he treats the imaginary Tyler as just another image, as real as any other image. Conversely, when the imaginary Tyler ‘dies’ at the end of the film, he dies like a real person (we see the bullet make a hole in the back of his head). At the same time, however, the realistically depicted death of the imaginary Tyler remains metaphorical since Cornelius himself survives. The splitting of the point of view produces a splitting of film time as well. Time flows in two opposite directions: visually it flows forward (from Cornelius’ ignorance of his own identity to his realization that he is Tyler) but narratively (on the level of the voiceover) time flows backwards (tracing retrospectively Cornelius’ process of self-discovery). It is because the voiceover expresses reflective consciousness (time flowing backwards) that long before Tyler appears as a separate character we have already seen what appear to be subliminal images of him. These images (the first one flashes briefly on the screen when Cornelius goes to see a doctor about his insomnia, another one appears after Cornelius meets Marla for the first time) could be just Tyler’s jokes (since he is telling the story and since he works as a projectionist, whose hobby is to insert precisely such subliminal pornographic images in family films), or they could function as an odd kind of foreshadowing, marking the moment(s) at which Cornelius invents Tyler. They appear and disappear so fast, barely visible, because they represent Cornelius’ unconscious. The different exposure of images (in terms of how long they remain on the screen) becomes a way to represent different levels of consciousness:

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well-exposed images suggest a well-developed consciousness, while the unconscious is expressed through short exposure. The more successful Cornelius is at suppressing his identity with Tyler, the more physically conspicuous (on the screen) Tyler becomes. On the other hand, as soon as Cornelius begins having doubts about his identity, Tyler becomes cinematographically invisible. Even from a retrospective point of view it is impossible to situate in time the moment when the real starts producing the unreal, the moment when Cornelius invents Tyler Durton. At first, it seems it must be the moment when Cornelius meets Tyler on the plane. However, the incident with the vibrating suitcase casts doubt on this hypothesis. Cornelius is stopped by airport security because of a suspicion that his suitcase might contain a bomb. It is irrelevant whether this is indeed Cornelius’s suitcase or he and Tyler switched cases, because we know that they are the same person, hence there is only one suitcase. If there are indeed explosives in the suitcase Cornelius must have been producing explosives from soap well before we see him meet Tyler on the plane. In another instance, Cornelius is surprised when Marla calls him at the house on Paper street, but she tells him that he had given her the number himself. He gave her the number while he was still going to support groups, and before he met Tyler on the plane, before he blew up his own condo, which means that he must have been living in that house before he blew up his apartment. This lack of correspondence between the visual story and the voiceover is necessitated by the point of view of the film. Thus, there is a delay between the moment Cornelius’ imagination externalizes Tyler as a separate human being and the actual moment when the split of Cornelius into two personalities takes place. Regardless of what moment in the film the director chooses to dramatize the appearance of Tyler (the split), Tyler will have always already appeared. The split cannot happen at exactly the moment in which we see it happen, because that would presuppose that Cornelius is conscious of it. The only way to suggest that something has happened of which Cornelius is yet unaware, is precisely to present it as something that has already happened. Only if Cornelius is already Tyler before Tyler actually appears will the film make psychological sense, and it will make psychological sense only retrospectively. This psychological justification of the film is in accordance with Sartre’s identification of the unconscious with the past, the given, the unself-conscious, that which already and simply is. The only

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way to present Tyler as Cornelius’ alter-ego, of which Cornelius remains unconscious, is to present it as Cornelius’ past, as something Cornelius already is, but to which he cannot be reduced. It remains unclear, however, at what point the history of Cornelius’ transformation from Cornelius into Tyler (history being a forward movement) slips into the retrospective account of this same transformation. What happens in the apparently linear sequence of events does not coincide with what must have happened retrospectively, since the invention of Tyler must always precede the visual dramatization of that invention. It is impossible to determine the point at which time flowing forward meets time flowing backwards, the point at which history (events as they happen) becomes a story (events as they are said to have happened, the projection or recording of events) and the present coincides with the past or, put in yet another way, when an event is no longer an event but its own commentary on or interpretation of itself. The difficulty in differentiating between what is happening and what will have happened, between the naïve point of view of Cornelius and the self-conscious point of view of Cornelius = Tyler, whose flashback includes Cornelius’s naïve point of view, is structurally similar to the difficulty in distinguishing an original from a forgery. Umberto Eco observes that exactly the same verification procedures are used to establish the validity of both originals and forgeries. Not only do we have to establish that there exists somewhere an original, of which the forgery is an imitation, but we also have to establish that the original is indeed the original i.e., we have to prove that the original is not itself a forgery, which leads to infinite regress (1990: 174-202). The difference between an original and its forgery might be compared to that between an objective and a subjective account of an event. Films like Fight Club and Mulholland Drive suggest that the difference between “what happened” and “what must have happened” can no longer be reduced to the neat opposition between “subjective” and “objective.” We believe what we see are the events as Cornelius perceives them; at the end we find out that what we saw was Tyler’s version of what must have happened. It is not a matter of confusing the objective with the subjective but of confusing two different levels of subjectivity: within the subjective, we confuse pre-reflective (Cornelius) with reflective consciousness (Tyler = Cornelius). In Mulholland Drive we believe we see events from Camilla’s point of view and later we find out that what

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we saw was a mixture of Betsy’s memories, nightmares and dreams: we confuse one subjective point of view with another. Like Flight Club, Wim Wenders’ The Million Dollar Hotel (2001) splits the point of view between the point of view of the protagonist as a character in the film—a character, therefore, subject to the limitations of narrative time—and that of the voiceover, which is also the point of view of the already dead protagonist. Once again, the visual aspect of the film does not correspond to the narrative aspect (the voiceover in which the point of view is embodied). We observe Tom-Tom (the protagonist) engage in the sort of activities typically associated with retarded people, but the voiceover does not belong to a retarded man: it is a sophisticated, self-aware voice capable of ironic asides (when Tom meets agent Skinner for the first time, the voiceover comments that Skinner realized pretty fast that Tom was a little slow in the head). The point of view is split not so much between the past, when Tom was alive, and the present, when he is dead (whose present is it if he himself is no longer present?); rather, the necessity of the split is dictated by the different functions of the protagonist’s point of view: whenever the point of view has to establish certain facts or provide some necessary information to the viewer the voiceover sounds rational, coherent, selfconscious, and whenever the focus is shifted to character development, the point of view becomes that of an awkward retarded man. Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001) provides another instance of the purposeful incongruity between the visual element of the film and the point of view from which the story is told (the voiceover). The images in the film intentionally lag behind the story so that events we see later in the film have actually happened earlier. Interestingly, the malfunctioning of the protagonist’s memory is not used as an excuse for the film not to concern itself with consistency. In fact, precisely because there are no time anchors and events are fairly indeterminable, the film is extremely precise in the ordering of scenes. The kind of foreshadowing used in Memento recalls that in Fight Club: the subliminal images of Tyler (which retrospectively suggest the beginning of the splitting of the point of view) are here matched by the equally subliminal substitution of the image of Sammy in the psychiatric asylum with the image of Leonard (which foreshadows the discovery that Leonard has confused his own life with Sammy’s). As in the case of Tyler’s double consciousness—on one level he knows he has invented Tyler but on

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another level he believes Tyler is a real person—Memento’s Leonard also lies to himself unconsciously. The film unfolds forward (despite the backward presentation of events) so that Leonard does not know (and we do not know either) the truth, but retrospectively we have to assume that Leonard knew and at the same time did not know the truth from the very beginning. While the purposeful reversibility of time in Memento may, at first, appear to violate the inner duration of things (for Bergson the spatialization of time consists precisely in such reversibility, which presupposes the division of time into units) “precisely because of and despite the fact that elements torn from their contexts and formerly far removed from one another are now placed side by side, the sharp cutting off of the external continuity of surface events establishes a deeper inner continuity: the autonomous order of thought” (Biró 1982: 118-119). In this sense, montage (which is inevitable in a film like Memento) is not a degradation of time: insofar as it ignores the real chronology of events and instead orders them on the basis of their dramatic significance, montage is a direct expression of time rather than its ‘spatialization’.6 In a less complicated film, the story usually starts out disordered and moves toward greater clarity, toward a single point that would retrospectively make sense of everything that has happened. It is important to notice that although this traditional type of narrative seems to rely on the most common notion of time as flowing forward, the truth is that in such a film time flows backwards insofar as all events are governed by the same telos that will account for them retrospectively. The epiphany only appears to come at the end of the film, whereas in reality it has always already happened but is artificially delayed so that we can witness how the events led up to it. Time flows backwards, from a point in the future (the end of the film, the epiphany) back toward the past, imbuing events with their predetermined significance. Conversely, in a film that explicitly places its end in the beginning (as in Memento) the direction of time is reversed so that, counterintuitively, time flows forward. Moving the end to the beginning of the film has the effect of liberating the rest of the film from the need to follow a certain predetermined course. Thus, although it might seem natural to view time in the traditional film as a form of discovery—a movement from ignorance to knowledge—and, conversely, to regard time in the other kind of film (the film that starts from the end) as a reconstruction, in fact these two interpretations should be reversed: whenever the story moves forward,

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it is in fact reconstructing events in light of a predetermined end, and whenever the story moves backwards, it is in fact taking the form of discovery or exploration.7 Placing the end at the beginning does not make the film predictable but in fact liberates it from predictability. When time unfolds forward in a film, the elements of the story that will be retrospectively important have to be given additional emphasis at the moment in which they are presented. Thus, even though while we are watching the film we are not supposed to know what is going to happen the next moment, we must nevertheless notice certain elements rather than others in order to understand the end of the film. The film must create the false impression that anything could be important (that the end cannot be known until we actually get to the end) but at the same time it must make sure that certain things are more important and more plausible than others (otherwise the film’s end would seem arbitrary). On the contrary, a film that starts from the end does not have to show how all events contribute to the ending; cause and effect relationships are loosened up. This is particularly evident in Memento. Given the foreknowledge of the end, one would expect the rest of the film to present clear cut causal relationships between events, but this is not what happens: although each sequence of scenes is clearly framed by beginning and end (the beginning of one sequence is the end of the previous one), what happens in-between these two invariable points is not always comprehensible and justifiable in terms of causes and effects. The tricky nature of Memento lies precisely in the obvious way in which it flaunts its structure, seducing us into believing that once we have figured out the structure of the film we know everything and the only thing we can expect from the rest of the film is the backward unfolding of events until a beginning is reached. However, the point of view complicates things significantly. In the film’s final scene, Leonard is driving down the road, thinking to himself: “I have to believe in a world outside my mind. I have to believe that when I close my eyes, the world is still there. Is it still there? Yeah.” Leonard has been living, and will continue to live, in a world he has himself fabricated. His epiphany—the realization that he has been lying to himself—takes only a few seconds, during which he consciously decides to continue lying to himself, a decision he immediately forgets as he does everything else. Although the film tries to represent events exactly as Leonard experiences them—the film purposefully deprives itself of short-term memory

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to approximate its protagonist’s condition—in reality this technique is inappropriate as it actually presupposes an exceptionally good memory. With every single scene recollected, Leonard has to ‘leap’ further and further back into the past in order to reconstruct the whole scene leading up to the beginning of the previous scene. This means that he has to ‘leap’ twice: once from the present into the past and the second time from a moment even further back in the past back to the first moment in the past. Although visually the film’s epiphany occurs at the end, on the level of narrative it happens in the beginning or rather in the middle insofar as the film has the structure of an infinite loop, without beginning or end. If the film were just an ordinary flashback, the epiphany would merely coincide with the origin. However, such an origin is inconceivable given that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator: deprived of short-term memory, he cannot tell (and neither can we) at what point he must have started lying to himself. Since there are two levels of consciousness in the film—Leonard’s pre-reflective knowledge of what really happened, and, on the other hand, his ignorance/forgetfulness of what really happened—and since the former can exist independently of the latter (as Sartre argues), it is impossible to determine the point at which the two consciousnesses diverge from each other i.e., Leonard cannot remember the moment when he started lying to himself (which would be the real beginning of the film). He cannot be conscious of the moment when he started forgetting (when he chose to forget) and lying to himself—if he were conscious, he would not have forgotten it. Memory is both the essential standard for distinguishing the real from the unreal and, at the same time, the least reliable standard for such a distinction. On one hand, memory is selective and thus subjective but on the other hand, if one does not remember having done something, he is as likely to have done it as he is not to have done it, just as he could have done it five minutes or five years ago. Thus, when memory functions properly, it is an unrealizing (selective, imaginative force) but when it malfunctions, the distinction between real and unreal is suppressed (which implies, paradoxically, that this distinction had always been precisely the work of memory). Memento is structured like a flashback but it is not clear who is trying to remember what happened. Leonard’s ‘condition’ places the film in an impossible situation: if Leonard has forgotten that he has already killed his wife’s attacker, what is there to guarantee that he remembers

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killing Teddy? Since the events we see unfolding before us have already happened—Leonard has already killed Teddy—he must have already forgotten about it. But then whose flashback structures the film? Who remembers Teddy’s murder and the events that led up to it, if it is not Leonard? It is not that Leonard, having killed Teddy in the first scene, is trying to reconstruct the series of events that led up to that murder. Leonard is merely trying to find his wife’s killer; it is only ‘the film itself’ that is trying to ‘remember’ how he got to the point of killing Teddy. The point of view is split between Leonard’s pre-reflective and reflective consciousness (in the same way it is split in Fight Club): it cannot be determined whether the story is told from the point of view of Leonard, who does not yet know that he will have killed Teddy, or from the point of view of Leonard who has already doubted himself for a moment after Teddy has told him the truth. Visually, Leonard’s realization comes at the end, which suggests that the entire story must have been told from the naïve (pre-reflective) Leonard’s point of view, but since from the very beginning of the film we already know that Teddy will have been killed, and since we have to follow the logic of the film (events happen backwards), the epiphany must be situated in the beginning, which would suggest that the whole story is told from the point of view of Leonard who knows (at least for a moment) that he has suppressed the memory of having killed his wife’s killer and the memory of his wife’s suicide. Following, the film Christopher Nolan made before the more popular Memento, also employs the flashback technique (the protagonist is telling his story to a detective) accompanied by a voiceover, which problematizes the film’s point of view. The point of view is, once again, split between the two visibly distinct personas adopted by the protagonist (he changes his appearance to look less like a thief, but at what point in time that happens remains unclear). Like Fight Club, Memento, The Spanish Prisoner, and Open Your Eyes, Following pursues a purposeful incongruity, which is not self-evident but reveals itself only retrospectively, between the visual and the narrative aspect of the film. The film opens with the protagonist wandering in the streets and following different people, while the voiceover explains his reasons for doing so (boredom, loneliness). However, the end of the film makes it clear that the man the protagonist is following in the opening scenes has actually been following him and, having gradually won his trust, has used him as a decoy to cover up his own criminal deeds. The subject matter of all these films

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justifies and perhaps even demands such a rift between images and story, insofar as all of these films deal with different forms of deception and self-deception. It might seem, at first, that the narrative element of these films (whether or not it is embodied in a voiceover) is privileged over the visual element, which is eventually declared a source of deception. One might be led to believe that the narrative corrects the illusions created by the images, that truth is revealed exclusively by language (by the story). However, much more is demanded of the images than of the linguistic element of these films. Since each of these films must both deceive in a convincing fashion and reveal the deception in an equally convincing fashion, the visual representation of events must be so carefully orchestrated, so ambiguous—yet without seeming unconvincing—that when the film is seen prospectively the images would coincide with the story, but when seen retrospectively, the images would diverge from the original story and coincide with a different one (with the truth). In a sense, the images are expected to offer us two different films at the same time: even after the deception has been revealed at the end, the revelation of the truth should not invalidate, retrospectively, the untruthful story the images have told. The point of view in Following is as unreliable as that in the other films discussed here. The story is told as a flashback but it is intermingled with memories the protagonist must have imagined, since he could not have witnessed them. (For example, he ‘remembers’ a conversation between two characters at which he was not present.) As in Fight Club and Memento, in which it cannot be established whether or not the story is told from the point of view of the protagonist who has already become aware of his deception, in Following it appears at first that at the time he tells the story to the detective the protagonist (Bill) does not know that he has been deceived. The lack of chronology in the recounting of past events suggests that the person recounting them cannot yet make sense of them. However, by the end of the film it has become obvious that the protagonist already knows quite a lot (although he is still unaware of the final twist, the murder of the woman he loves, he already knows that he has been deceived). As he is telling the story, Bill has already realized his deception, which means that the only purpose of the flashback is to reconstruct his way to that realization. The events are already ordered in a meaningful sequence in his mind but now he deconstructs their order to see how exactly he must have pieced them together. However, this

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becomes clear only retrospectively: while we are watching the film, we assume that the flashback is from the naïve, unknowing point of view. As in Time Regained, memory here works by leaps from one memory to another rather than by always going back to the present in order to leap into a particular moment in the past. One remembers always from within the past, not from a stable reference point in the present, which is why recollected events are never chronological: one can leap into an earlier memory and from there ‘remember’ an event that happened much later (remembering forward). Following (and, as we shall see, The Spanish Prisoner as well) deals with deception, hence with representing the play between the different levels of knowledge among characters. In both films, once it becomes clear that events have been unfolding according to a plan (of which the protagonists were unaware) we are faced with the difficulty of distinguishing events that are part of the plan from those that are merely accidental. (For example, how could Carl have predicted that Bill would call him to ask for advice about weapons, specifically about a hammer? Or why does the woman, who is supposedly working for Carl, tell Bill about the missing earring, raising his suspicion when he does not find it where it is supposed to be?) The discrepancies between the protagonist’s knowledge (with which we identify) and the knowledge of other characters have the effect of surrounding every event with the mysterious aura of self-sufficiency or inexplicability. The non-chronological representation of events creates the impression that every event we see has been preceded by another, very significant event that could explain it, but to which we are denied access. The focus is not on what happens but, rather, on what could have or must have happened before it: something happens means, first of all, that something else happened before it. For instance, we see Bill hiding a hammer under his coat, but we do not know why he is doing this until several scenes later. The film is structurally similar to Memento in the way it presents the effects of events before their causes. Events are either delayed or represented prematurely, in advance of our ability to comprehend them. And although Bill, unlike Leonard, has not lost his short term-memory, there is something amnesiac in the film’s recounting of events: we never know what happened right before the particular event we see represented, as if Bill’s short term memory had been erased. Although it may appear counterintuitive, the purposeful withholding of the causes of events serves to emphasize the fact that events are never accidental.

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The treatment of time in Fight Club and Memento is intricately connected with the subject matter of both films, self-deception, and thus with point of view. All temporal complications and confusions result from the representation of two levels of consciousness—pre-reflective and reflective—and the various degrees of delay or coincidence possible between them. Although David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner (1998) is concerned with deception rather than with self-deception, it still poses some of the same questions the other two films deal with. In particular, it dramatizes the impossibility of determining the origin of a sequence of events even when, contrary to common sense, that sequence turns out to have been predetermined, as is the case with the confidence game called ‘The Spanish Prisoner’. The difficulty of distinguishing the real from the unreal in this film is already inherent in the misleading title. Although the film provides a definition of “The Spanish Prisoner” confidence game, the protagonist does not fall victim to it but to an entirely different (and anonymous) confidence name. The protagonist is first tricked into believing that what he sees and experiences is real (his business trip to an exotic island where he unveils a secret “process” he has been working on). Later, he is led to believe that he has been tricked by means of an old confidence game, but his conmen lie to him that he has been tricked in order to trick him further into believing that they are going to protect him from the person who supposedly swindled him. They need him to believe that he has been conned so that they can con him. The film establishes something as real, then questions its reality, declares it unreal, and finally reaffirms its reality, without ever offering a stable reference point. For example, in the beginning of the film the protagonist meets a woman who jokes that she is an FBI agent, implying that she is not. However, later he discovers (he is tricked into believing) that she is indeed an FBI agent. Finally, it turns out that she is not an FBI agent but merely pretends to be one (along with an entire fake FBI team). Thus, the protagonist is most successfully tricked by being led to believe that when someone is lying they are actually telling the truth. In The Spanish Prisoner (as well as in Open Your Eyes, The Sixth Sense and Run, Lola, Run) it is difficult to determine the point at which the confidence game begins, the point after which, retrospectively, we will have to assume that everything was part of a plan. Even if we acknowledge the cleverness of the conmen, it is hard to believe that everything that happens in the beginning of the film (on the island) has been planned. It seems incredible, for instance, that when the protago-

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nist is leaving the island, his conmen know for certain that he will look back and see the “FBI agent” give his secretary her card, or that he will remember that the secretary made an album with memorabilia from the island and, further, remember that the FBI agent’s card is in that album. On one hand, there are some carefully planted clues (the book, the flowers, etc.) that appear to be part of the confidence game since the conmen draw the protagonist’s attention to them in a very obvious way but, on the other hand, it is precisely these details that end up raising the protagonist’s suspicion. The film is structured as a confidence game within a confidence game, to which the false climax attests: the protagonist must be tricked into believing that he was tricked, he must become self-aware in order for his self-awareness to be put to sleep. He must believe that someone is lying to him, so that he can really be lied to. By drawing attention to itself, a lie does not simply uncover itself as a lie but in fact gains credibility. Even the end of the film, though seemingly solving the puzzle, cannot help us determine retrospectively the origin of the lie, the point at which it started diverging from the truth. That the whole series of events turns out to have been planned in advance makes it not less but actually more difficult to distinguish retrospectively chance events from events that happen because they were planned. There is so much pressure to explain how every single detail was part of the plan, to make it fit into a strict causal relationship with every other detail in the story, that the more strongly the film insists that events were planned, the harder it is to reduce them to such a plan. It is not so uncommon for a character in a film to realize that what he thought was real is, in fact, unreal. A film can get away with the wildest of dreams, fantasies, unrealities as long as there is still a point of view rooted in the real, even if it is not the dominant point of view in the film. In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, however, such a real point of view is lacking. The entire film unfolds (retrospectively) from an unreal point of view—at the end of the film the protagonist discovers that all that time he has been dead—and it dramatizes the process by which the unreal becomes aware of its own unreality. The only source of the real in the film is the mere realization that nothing of what we have seen has really happened, that it has been the imaginary experience of a dead man who refuses to believe he is dead. Though the events take up almost two hours of film time to unfold, in reality they are just the dream or hallucination of a man seconds before he dies. The real emerges only as

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its own self-negation, circumscribed on all sides by the unreal, just as in The Spanish Prisoner an unreal (fake) confidence game is framed by the ‘real’ confidence game. The uncovering of the unreal (the inner or fake confidence game) refers us only to something equally duplicitous (the outer or real confidence game). In both films the real is the result of the unreal flaunting its unreality: attaining self-awareness the unreal becomes real, just as a lie, by drawing attention to itself, passes for truth. The real remains suspect, nevertheless, since the unreal is not supposed to ‘know’ that it is unreal, while a lie is supposed to disguise itself rather than uncover itself purposefully. The premise of The Sixth Sense is similar to that of Fight Club: the story is told from the point of view of an imaginary character, in this case a dead man, and revolves around the protagonist’s ‘realization’ that he is dead. The film’s irony lies in the fact that the dead man is a psychologist trying to help a little boy, whose psychological problem consists precisely in his claim that he sees dead people. A year before the action in the film begins, the psychologist has been shot by a former patient of his, whom he treated when the latter was a little boy but whom he failed to cure. The boy, now a grown up man, returns to avenge himself on the psychologist. A year after he has been shot, the psychologist begins treating another boy, whose case is remarkably similar to the earlier one. This is the intriguing part: since the man who shot the psychologist was, twenty years ago (when he was the psychologist’s patient) suffering from the same psychological disorder as the new boy—he, too, saw dead people—it is conceivable that even at that time, twenty years ago, the psychologist was already dead. Of course, this is not what the film has tried to have us believe: at the end of the film, the psychologist realizes that he was shot and killed only a year ago, not twenty years ago. And yet, at one point in the film, while listening to a recording of the man who shot him, a recording dating back to the time when the man, still a child, was his patient, the psychologist hears for the first time the boy complaining that he is cold. Since the boy in the present (the second boy) also complains of being cold, it makes sense to suppose that if both boys respond in the same way to the psychologist and exhibit the same symptoms, then in both cases the psychologist must have been already dead. The film forces us to suspend all disbelief and believe not only that the present story (the second boy) is a dream recounted by a dead man, but to suspend all disbelief about the past as well and never to be

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certain whether the point of view character (the psychologist) was ever actually alive (real). It is difficult to say whether the film achieves this level of indeterminacy of the point of view accidentally—that what I have pointed out here are just inconsistencies in the storyline—or the film purposefully refuses to establish the reality of the point of view. If the latter is true, the protagonist’s epiphany would be a doubly false epiphany: not only does the protagonist realize that he is dead, but he ascribes his death to the wrong moment in time since he must have been dead for twenty years, not for one. In The Sixth Sense what would generally be considered an abnormal and unreliable point of view—that of a psychologically troubled child who claims to see dead people—establishes the reality or unreality of another character’s point of view (the psychologist’s), whose reliability and reality we simply take for granted. And vice versa: the fact that the psychologist has been dead for a long time confirms the reality or authenticity of the boy’s visions, which would have otherwise remained groundless. Thus, two aspects of the unreal derive their reality simply from their interdependence: the psychologist must be dead because the boy sees him and, conversely, because the psychologist is dead, the boy must really see him i.e., the boy is not hallucinating. There is not a single point of reference, within the real, against which to evaluate the unreal: although the psychologist realizes he is dead, his epiphany does not take us out of the unreal, does not return us to another, real world. That the psychologist eventually becomes conscious of his own death does not alter the fact that he is just a vision in the mind of a troubled boy or a voice in his wife’s dream. Could the epiphany of an unreal character (unreal in the double sense of being dead and being a mere vision in a child’s mind) be real? Even when the unreal is recognized as unreal (or perhaps precisely when it is recognized) it is impossible to trace its emergence in real time. Thus, since the unreal remains temporally indeterminate, it is as though the unreal has always already happened. In The Sixth Sense (as in all the films considered here) the point in time at which the unreal appears (i.e. the psychologist dies, turning into a vision in the boy’s mind) remains unknown: it could have happened a year ago or twenty years ago. In fact, the only ‘evidence’ we have of this man having existed at all is the wedding ring on his unreal/dead finger. Insofar as time fails to serve as a criterion on the basis of which we can distinguish the real from the unreal—the unreal does not have a beginning or end—time itself

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becomes unrealized. Metz correctly posits unrealization (irréalization) as constitutive of every narrative act: regardless of how realistic a film is, “because it is perceived as narrated [it has] already been unrealized” (1974: 21). Alejandro Amenabar’s Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes, 1997) provides another instance of the derealization of time. The protagonist, like Memento’s Leonard, is suspected of having concocted a story (feigning madness) to hide what he actually did (murdering his girlfriend). As with Memento and Fight Club, the moment when the real slips into the unreal is difficult to determine: just as Leonard cannot remember the moment when he chose to forget the truth, Cesar cannot remember the moment of “the splice” by means of which his life has been prolonged into a waking dream, a virtual existence. The story is told (as in the other two films) as a flashback, or at least it seems that way: Cesar is in a psychiatric asylum in the presence of a psychiatrist who is trying to help him remember the events that led to his facial surgery and to his imprisonment. Retrospectively, the framework of the film is unreal since at the end of the film it turns out that the psychiatrist himself is just a part of Cesar’s waking dream. Cesar’s attempts to remember what really happened remain always framed by this unreality. Within this waking dream (the conversations with the invented psychiatrist) Cesar dreams of what really happened. There is a complete reversal of the usual hierarchy of living and dreaming: Cesar is living a dream and dreaming about his real life. Like the protagonist of The Sixth Sense, who realizes he has been dead for an entire year, the dreaming Cesar realizes he has been dead for 150 years. A recurring motif in the films considered here is the dream—supernatural (The Sixth Sense), futuristic (artificial perception or digital self: Open Your Eyes, The Matrix) or psychologically abnormal (Fight Club, Memento)—from which the protagonist must wake up. The real resurfaces in Cesar’s consciousness whenever there are unpredictable errors in the waking dream program. Both in Open Your Eyes and in The Matrix such errors are manifested in repetition: Neo suspects that something in the matrix has been changed when he has a déjà vu; similarly, Cesar becomes aware of the malfunctioning of the computer program when the psychiatrist starts repeating words that Cesar has said in real life, before the accident. While the waking dream program does everything possible to conceal from Cesar the fact that he is living a dream, Cesar’s unconscious is, from the very beginning, trying to become conscious

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by means of inventing the figure of the psychiatrist. By inventing the psychiatrist (Cesar did not kill his girlfriend, who simply died in the car accident; there is no murder and no trial and there is no reason for him to be in a psychiatric penitentiary) Cesar’s unconscious incriminates itself insofar as the presence of such a figure presupposes that the person is hiding something from himself. Thus, by an odd gesture of doubling—the dream points to its own unreality by inventing the typical framework (psychiatrist—patient) within which dreams are analyzed—the unreal manages to reconstruct imaginatively the moment of its own appearance, the moment when Cesar was made to forget that he is dead. Although the film takes the form of a flashback—Cesar recounting his memories to the psychiatrist—it is only an imaginary flashback since in reality Cesar is not in a penitentiary and there is no psychiatrist. However, since the contract he signs with Life Extension (LE) offers him the opportunity to write the script for his own life, we must assume that everything that happens in the film must have been his choice, including the imaginary flashback he has in the presence of the imaginary psychiatrist. Thus, he is dreaming but at the same time he knows, perhaps pre-reflectively, that he is dreaming, and from the very beginning of the film he wants to wake up from the dream, which is why he invents the person most likely to help him wake up, a psychiatrist. Since all events must have been invented by Cesar, it is as though Cesar has unconsciously planned his awakening from the dream. Just as the unveiling of the confidence game in The Spanish Prisoner makes it difficult to distinguish between events that were part of the plan and absolutely chance events, because there are no criteria for determining the reliability or success rate of the Life Extension program we have to assume that whatever happens to Cesar happens because it was part of the plan. Cesar begins breaking through the waking dream when one day (in the penitentiary, which is also a part of the waking dream) he happens to see a TV show on the topic of cryonics. The show triggers his memory—which is his only connection to the real—and eventually he is able to return to the LE office, where he is finally told the truth. Of course, since at that point he is still dreaming, the LE office must itself be part of his dream: the dream informs the dreamer that he has been dreaming. Since Cesar is in control of his virtual life, he must have chosen (planned) to hear that particular TV show: it is no accident but yet another unconscious attempt on his part to wake up.

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From the very beginning, then, Cesar has been doing two mutually exclusive things at the same time: he has been dreaming his life the way he wants it to be, but he has been, at the same time, creating all the necessary conditions for his eventual awakening. Although he has absolute freedom—he is dreaming his life—he is unable to take advantage of it, because he does not know that he is in control of what he dreams. He can invent his life only at the cost of forgetting that he is inventing it: consciousness has the absolute power of manipulating reality only at the cost of remaining unconscious of its absolute power. The virtual can supplant the real completely only at the cost of collapsing the difference between the real and the virtual: the subject can never be aware that the virtual has supplanted the real. However, Open Your Eyes suggests that as long as there is a subject, absolute simulation (the complete supplanting of the real by the virtual) is impossible: the real ends up reclaiming its territory. Even while he is still dreaming, Cesar already feels somewhat unreal, as if he instinctively knows that he is dreaming. Although the point at which the dream begins is specified—‘the splice’, Cesar learns at the end of the film, was made at the moment he wakes up in the street—the distinction between the real and the unreal is not at all clear visually. Thus, we cannot say that all the scenes before the moment of the splice represent real events, while all those following that moment represent Cesar’s virtual life. The scenes with the (imaginary) psychiatrist appear early in the film and, in fact, claim to be the reference point for all of Cesar’s flashbacks. Even though we know, retrospectively, when the splice occurred, we are still unable to distinguish clearly the real from the unreal, because the whole film is determined by Cesar’s point of view—a virtual point of view, since he is living a dream. That the origin of the unreal can be situated temporally (by determining the moment of the splice) means that it is still possible to subordinate the unreal to the real (to real time), but this does not change the fact that the whole story is told from a virtual point of view (the point of view of the waking dream, which has always already begun). It is inconceivable that the real can be (re)created from the virtual, that the waking dream can, by its own effort, lift itself up, a la Baron Munchausen, becoming aware of its own unreality. Despite the differences between Memento and Open Your Eyes—the protagonist of the former realizes just for a moment that he has been living in a dream only to return to that dream, whereas the protagonist of the latter chooses to end his virtual life—in

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both films the distinction between the real and the unreal is established (and immediately compromised) from within the unreal. The divergence of the real from the unreal within the unreal is analogous to the way in which recollection functions. To recollect one does not need to situate oneself in the present and ‘leap’ back into the past until one ‘hits’ the right moment in time; rather, one always leaps from one memory to another, without necessarily leaping back to the present. Because time is infinite, recollection is not tied to a stable reference point in the present. Two very different films demonstrate this point well: Raoul Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999) and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995). Rather than starting from a stable point of view in the present (Marcel on his dying bed) and then leaping back to different moments in the past, the protagonist of Time Regained leaps from one recollection into another, moving forward and backward in time, which deliberately produces such temporal inconsistencies or absurdities (but only from the point of view of a linear time) as, for instance, having an earlier memory serve as a point of reference for a later memory. For example, in one scene the adult Marcel is reading a letter from Gilberte, in which she tells him about the war. On the screen we see both the adult Marcel and the young boy Marcel standing behind a film camera, projecting a film about the war which, from the boy’s point of view, has not happened yet: the child Marcel is remembering forward. Since the camera moves from one memory to another, without going back to the present, the point of view is multiplied indefinitely i.e., there is not a single privileged point of view from which recollection begins. The point of view of each memory is simply the point of view of the memory that came before it, and since the order of memories is never predetermined, there is never a point of view to which all memories are subordinated. The lack of a privileged point of view is further reinforced by the superimposition of images representing different memories. If a certain recollection lacks clarity, the camera does not attempt to ‘correct’ it by returning to the present in order to go back to that memory again; instead, those parts of the recollection that appear incoherent are rendered ‘readable’ by means of reconstructing older memories, thereby creating a context against which the problematic memory is then repeated (usually different parts of it). In other words, one recollects better by expanding the field of recollection behind the particular memory, exploring older recollections, and then moving from those older recollections

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to the original one. The past can be understood only through the past, not through the present. The revitalizing power of memory manifests itself cinematographically. The scenes representing Marcel’s recollections are suffused with light flowing from the back of the scene, making the contours of the recollected human figures stand out. By contrast, every time the camera returns to the present, to the room in which the old Marcel lies dying, there is barely any light, and Marcel himself is hardly visible lying on the bed. In general, the older the memory, the more light there is in its visual representation. The use of light could be seen as supporting the idea that a certain memory is better understood, and more clearly recalled, by throwing more light on memories that are even older than it rather than by throwing more light on the present. Further, flashbacks are embedded in one another rather than proceeding in an ordered sequence from the present. The mutual embeddedness of multiple and various recollections is illustrated by their visual coexistence on the screen. For example, we see the adult Marcel walking in the street, then freezing in his steps as the little boy Marcel, accompanied by his mother, pass by. The two Marcels, obviously belonging to two different recollections, go to church where a third Marcel, emerged from yet another memory, observes them. Recollection is not an act by which a certain definite subject communicates with his past, which is somehow outside him, but a process in which multiple recollections communicate with one another. If the subject is defined as a certain unity persisting in real time, a time whose direction is determined by the difference between past and future, then the time of memory is imaginary time. Whereas in real time the present is the privileged point of view determining all other points of view, in imaginary time the point of view can be anywhere. Because of this flexibility of the point of view in recollection, recollections appear imprecise or distorted. It is a common belief that our memories are partly recollected and partly imagined. Imagination is typically associated with untruth or falsity. However, our recollections are ‘imagined’ not in the sense that they are distorted versions of what actually happened; rather, since our recollections are not dominated by a certain point of view, they allow time to flow in any direction. ‘Truth’ is a notion derived from one privileged dimension of time, the present, and is therefore applicable only to the present. A memory cannot be ‘true’ or false’ in the traditional sense of these terms. The imaginary time of recollection is not a false

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or unreal time: it is as real as the time by which we live our life in the present, but it accommodates things and events that would be considered ‘incompossible’ or ‘false’ in what we call ‘real time’. That recollection takes place from within the past, not from a point in the present, reveals the self-referentiality, self-reflexivity8 or self-sufficiency of events in imaginary time. An event that happens in imaginary time does not need to be referred to some outside point of reference that would ascribe credibility or meaning to it; the event creates its own time and is meaningful in itself. When recollecting, one is always already in the past. Films like Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, The Spanish Prisoner, Open Your Eyes, Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Following are well aware of this, which is why they necessarily fail to locate the specific point in time (in the film) when the real and the unreal, or the present and the past, begin diverging from each other. In a sense, these films do not have a beginning or they begin, following Aristotle’s advice, in media res. Such a strategy remains faithful both to the real and the unreal, refusing to reduce either one to the other. The unreal is not simply decreated from the real, but neither is the real a mere side effect of the unreal. The two do not originate in some common source; rather, their difference is always already there, which also guarantees their coexistence. Marcel’s reflections on the atemporal nature of memory can serve to clarify the difference between imaginary time and real time. Contrary to common sense, Marcel observes, memory does not open up the gates of time but carries us beyond time. Marcel is not afraid of death because, he explains, the moment he recalls the taste of the madeleine he has already become extra-temporal. The past is preserved not within the subject, who is himself a temporal being, but in a realm beyond subjectivity, hence beyond time. It is misleading to speak of infinity as a characteristic of time, as if to produce infinity all we had to do is ‘stretch out’ time. Infinity is not just ‘a longer time’: time and infinity differ in kind. 12 Monkeys, like Time Regained, demonstrates the intertextuality/ infinity of time and memory. James (the protagonist) is sent from the future back to 1990 and 1996 with the mission of tracing the path of a virus that has already wiped out almost the entire human race. From James’ point of view, the present (to which he is sent back) has already happened and he is reliving the past (which for the people of 1990 and 1996 is the present). James’ experience of the past differs significantly from that of the people of 1990 and 1996 as becomes clear when he is

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sent, by mistake, to the wrong year, finding himself in the trenches of World War I. From the point of view of someone for whom 1996 is the present, WW I would be the past, but from the point of view of James who possesses foreknowledge, the past is shaped by the future. His presence in the trenches changes the past and is figured in the historical books and photographs of that period. In a lecture delivered in 1996, James’ photograph appears in a slide from World War I. Had he not been sent back to the wrong year by mistake, he would have never appeared in the historical records of that period. His sudden appearance therein suggests that the future actually determines what part of the past will have become as important as to be believed to have happened at all. Thus, while attempting to argue that the past is not dead but is constantly shaped and reshaped by the future, the film continues to rely on the universal assumption that the present is more real than the past. On several occasions, James observes that the human mind is not meant to exist in two dimensions (the present and the past) simultaneously, because then it cannot tell the real from the unreal. But since James himself exists simultaneously in the present and in the past, it cannot be established with certainty that he is indeed a man sent back from the future or simply a madman. While he can certainly predict events, because from his point of view they have always already happened, he often wonders whether he is dreaming or imagining that he has been sent from the future, whether he is really insane and the people who supposedly sent him back to the past are just figments of his mad imagination. Compared to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the story of 12 Monkeys appears as simple and transparent as can be. Only towards the end of Lynch’s film do we realize that the events in the film are, in fact, the invention of a mad woman. The temporal discontinuity of events is mainly due to the fact that the film purposefully does not distinguish between several different psychological experiences: dream, memory and wishful thinking or imagination. While wishful thinking is usually directed towards the future, memory is always directed towards the past (a dream can be directed either towards the future or towards the past). To treat them as equivalent means to treat the future and the past as equivalent. For instance, when we see Camilla almost killed, we do not know whether Diane (the protagonist) is remembering or imagining (wishing) this. Since Diane’s point of view is not anchored in the present, the past or the future, she could be (1) imagining Camilla’s death, (2) remembering how she was imagining it, (3) remembering it

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now, in the present, (4) wishing for it from the past, (5) wishing for it from the present, and so on. The film starts with Diane’s memory/dream and ends with an account of the real events that occasioned Diane’s dream. Since Diane’s death happens within the dream and the dream equivalent of Diane, Betty, survives it—the dream continues—Diane’s suicide at the end does not seem that final or convincing: we do not know that it is the real death of the real Diane or just another psychotic episode, a memory or a dream. Many of the events and characters that we have seen in the dream part of the film reappear in the reality part and vice versa. For example, we see Diane dead in her dream/memory, and we eventually see her commit suicide in reality. Another instance of this doubling, of the same event happening in two worlds, is the car ride with which the film opens (but this repetition becomes obvious only retrospectively, after the second time it happens). The first car ride is Diane’s dream: she imagines/dreams about Camilla’s murder, which later will turn out to have been planned by Diane herself. The second car ride, which we see in the realistic part of the film, is a memory of what actually happened one night, a memory after which the dream car ride is obviously modeled. The failure of Diane’s plan starts the dream, whose purpose is to explain (by confusing us) how we got to that point, what in reality motivated Diane to want to kill Camilla. The real question is: when does Diane’s dream begin? From a logical point of view, she cannot start dreaming it before she meets the gunman, for example, and yet we see the dream long before that. As in Open Your Eyes, where the dream has always already begun (even before the splice has occurred), here too the dream visually precedes its place on the temporal storyline. The nature of the dream demands that it be impossible to determine the origin of the dream since if that were possible, the person would no longer be dreaming but would wake up. Because Diane cannot be conscious of the fact that she is hallucinating or dreaming, the film cannot be aware of it either and has to disguise the point at which the dream begins. The distinction between subjective and objective vanishes: We run in fact into a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask….already, when Robbe-Grillet provides his great theory

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The neo-realist description achieves a vision which is purely optical. […] The event is no longer confused with the space which serves as its place, nor with the actual present which is passing. …[A] time is revealed inside the event, which is made of the simultaneity of these three implicated presents, from these de-actualized peaks of present. […] An accident is about to happen, it happens, it has happened; but equally it is at the same time that it will take place, has already taken place and is in the process of taking place; so that, before taking place, it has not taken place, and, taking place, will not take place…etc. (1986: 100)

By ‘purely optical vision’ Deleuze means the representation of an event as absolutely self-sufficient, unburdened by context i.e. by other events that serve as causes or effects. These are the characteristics of Deleuze’s time-image (or the mental image), the image that exists for its own sake only, not to further the plot or as a necessary part of characterization. Such an image, devoid of any purpose or end, can no longer be classed as ‘real’ or ‘unreal’ since it is both: the event it represents could have happened but it could have just as well not happened. It is in this sense that Deleuze argues that the event will take place, has taken place, and is taking place, all at the same time. Mulholland Drive is a perfect example of “purely optical vision”: because events are decontextualized, presented without any explanation, what will take place precedes what has taken place, or what will take place precedes what is taking place. What makes the films discussed so far interesting is that they tell two stories simultaneously, usually two stories opposed to each other: either the images tell one story and the voiceover tells a different story or, if there is no voiceover, at a certain point in the film there is a sudden shift in the point of view or a sudden revelation of the real nature of the point of view. However, the discrepancy between the purely visual and the narrative aspect of the film and the sudden changes in the point of view

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never have a corrective function. Even when the particular discrepancy is explained, it does not retroactively negate that which has caused the discrepancy i.e., images are not less ‘true’ than the story they contradict nor is the story less ‘true’ than the images it contradicts. Thus, even what might be considered ‘gimmicky’ films (such as Memento) leave us with a sense of indeterminacy (indeterminacy in both time and of point of view). While also concerned with the theme of time—particularly with the distinction between accident and destiny, repetition and singularity— Tom Tykwer’s films tend to affirm the singular or the absolute nature of events. An event is absolute if it is absolutely determined or carrying the highest degree of significance/destiny. Sissi, the protagonist of The Princess and the Warrior (2001) wants to find out if what happens to her—she is hit by a truck but a stranger saves her life—is merely an accident or destiny. The film represents events as destined not in the sense of predetermined by the filmmaker but destined in a quasi-mythic or even metaphysical way. Thus, at a crucial moment in the film, Sissi tells another character (a bank guard who is about to shoot the stranger who saved her life): “You can’t shoot now. This is not part of the plan.” Sissi appears to be addressing the filmmaker himself, commanding him not to ‘make’ the bank guard shoot because this would not be part of the destiny she believes she is uncovering. At that moment, the film’s subject matter (Sissi’s belief in destiny) seems to determine what will happen: the protagonist appears to be writing the film herself. Of course, even this impression of the protagonist’s absolute freedom has been planned: it is namely because the subject matter of the film is destiny that the protagonist can create the impression that even the film itself is part of that quasi-mythic destiny. Destiny works on two levels simultaneously: as subject matter and as meta-narrative (a comment on the making of the film, on the purposeful representation of events as destined). Tykwer’s 1999 hit Run, Lola, Run opens with the following quotations: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” (T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”)

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The first quotation is concerned with the idea of habituation and defamiliarization: the first time we are involved in something we do not yet fully realize the significance of that involvement because we do not yet know ourselves. On one hand, then, the quotation is about acquiring reflective knowledge: at the end of the process we know something about ourselves that we didn’t know before. On the other hand, however, we can acquire that knowledge only by returning to our starting point. The quote implies that what matters most in our search for an answer to the question we have asked is to know what made us ask the question in the first place (“knowing the place for the first time”). The film presents three versions of the same storyline—Lola trying to find money for her boyfriend in 20 minutes—a technique both Bergsonian and anti-Bergsonian. On one side, the specific kind of repetition foregrounded in the film illustrates the existence of something like ‘pockets’ of virtuality, from which are released infinite variations of the storyline, depending on the point in time we select. However, the division of the 20 minutes that each loop takes up into specific points, which act as origins for the variations, is un-Bergsonian in nature. The film portrays time as the continuous creation of the new but at the same time it attributes each variation to a specific moment in time. For instance, the first time Lola runs into the woman pushing a stroller, we see the woman’s life in a sequence of snapshots, but the second time she runs into her (at a different moment since the repetition, as we shall see, is delayed) we see the woman’s life in a different sequence of snapshots. From a Bergsonian point of view, this technique seems to reduce the new to a specific origin. After all, if a certain sequence of events is possible only at one particular moment and impossible at any other moment (at another moment a different kind of variation is possible) the new can be predicted: as long as we know at what moment Lola will run into the woman, we already know the kind of life the woman will have had (in fact, we can rewind the tape as many times as we like, and every time we will see the exact same sequence at that particular moment). The second quotation with which the film opens—“After the game is before the game”—further complicates the problem of the new. The quotation implies that there is no qualitative difference between the end of an event and its beginning, that everything that happens after the

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event has, in a sense, already ‘happened’ before the event, the event being merely the externalization or realization of what was already given. In Bergson’s terminology, the event is regarded as a mere possibility, which is then actualized, rather than as a virtuality, which can never be given in advance. This quotation posits that what we know after the game, we already knew before the game: the game itself was possible precisely because we knew what the game would bring, though it was a kind of unreflected knowledge. Thus, the only difference between before and after the game is the level of reflective knowledge attributable to them: these are not two different moments but the second moment merely manifests what was already latent in the first moment. This kind of model—the model of the possible as what exists first in order to be manifested or actualized later—does not leave place for the new (if we follow Bergson). In fact, the first quotation suggests something very similar as it situates the new not at the end of an event but at the beginning, a beginning to which we return: again, it is a matter of acquiring higher degrees of reflective knowledge. Run, Lola, Run suggests that the new does not happen before (or unless) it is repeated. Hence a definition: the event is that which happens twice. This view of repetition is not entirely without precedent. In Repetition Kierkegaard argues that our entire life must be brought before us so that we attain the elasticity of “a genuine repetition...recollected forward” (1983: 131). Repetition is not the reification of existence but its condition of possibility: “When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says: actuality, which has been, now comes into existence” (149). Life precedes itself: it is actual but it is not really ‘noticed’; it is not ‘lived’ unless it is repeated. Life appears by withdrawing from itself, repeating itself. The new cannot appear before it is repeated and then it appears precisely because it is repeated, “for the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new” (149). The idea that an event really happens only after we have become conscious that it happens—i.e., after it has been repeated—presupposes that we can distinguish, within the structure of the event, two ‘stages’ or ‘modes’ of the event: the mere happening of the event (the quod) and the what actually happens (the quid, or our reflective consciousness of the event, its significance for us). Thus, the meaning implicit in the two quotations introducing Run, Lola, Run is: admittedly, things

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happen independently of us, but, at the same time, nothing happens unless we know that it happens. The difference between two moments in time—for example, between the beginning and the end of an event—is ‘measured’ in terms of the level of reflective consciousness we attain. The more reflectively conscious we are of an event, the more real it is. It is almost as though time is possible at all only because we are never conscious of events the first time around. If we were always already conscious that something is happening, time would not exist for time is precisely the difference or delay between pure event or pre-reflective consciousness and reflective consciousness. Put differently, the existence of time ‘proves’ indirectly the reality of pre-reflective consciousness, the non-coincidence of events with our reflective consciousness of them. It is important to clarify that the argument that what makes time possible is the difference between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness does not suggest that time is merely subjective. Time is neither a subjective creation, nor an absolutely objective realm independent of us; it ‘consists’ of pure events (pre-reflective consciousnesses) and their repetitions (reflective consciousnesses, causes and effects). When Lola runs into different people, we witness repetition. Despite the fact that she is always following the same route and running into the same people, in the same order, this is not a repetition of the same, because every time she is a little bit late. This slight delay is reflected in the different kinds of lives we see attributed to the people she runs into three times. Her meetings with these people constitute a paradoxical combination of pure accident and destiny. On one hand, the kind of life (presented as a super-fast sequence of snapshots that are almost incomprehensible unless watched in slow motion) unfolding in the case of each person she meets appears absolutely accidental (one variation seems no more necessary than the others) but, at the same time, it is precisely because Lola runs into a person at a specific moment that only one of their infinite possible lives is represented. Anything could happen (time as infinity, the unpredictability of variations) but, at the same time, at a particular point in time only one thing happens. Had there been no delay, had Lola run into other characters at the exact same moment every time, the fact that every time we see different sequences of snapshots would have to mean that at each particular moment in time there is an infinite number of possibilities, of which only one is realized. However, the idea that each moment ‘contains’ infinite variations fails to explain why one of these possibilities is actualized rather than any of the others.

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On the other hand, the introduction of a delay in the repetition allows for a more radical notion of freedom. It is not true that anything is possible at any moment. “Now” is not indeterminate: what happens ‘now’ is no longer possible at another moment. We are used to thinking of repetition as superimposing itself exactly over what has already happened once. Paradoxically, the only way to show that repetition is never the exact repetition of the same but in fact the production of the new is to introduce a slight delay while still keeping the structure of repetition. Run, Lola, Run is not concerned with enumerating possibilities. In this, the film is faithful to Bergson’s distinction between the possible and the virtual. The possible precedes and is exhausted by the real in which it is actualized. The model of time according to which moments are made up of infinite variations expresses best the idea of the possible: the possible is never absolute because anything else could have happened in its place. On the contrary, the virtual is what will have been possible but which is never already given. We cannot predict the differences that will ‘result’ from the fact that Lola is a little late every time. These differences (the different snapshot sequences) are not already given as possibilities for each of the secondary characters; rather, each character’s life differs from itself. To say that a moment contains multiple possibilities is merely to stretch out the moment while still positing its identity with itself. The new is not produced from multiple (even infinite) possibilities. At first, the extremely fast, carefully edited sequence of snapshots (accompanied by the unmistakable sound of a photo camera) may seem as a severe disturbance of the inner continuity of Bergsonian time. However, the editing together of a series of photographs, although seemingly dividing time into frozen frames, remains faithful to the Bergsonian notion of consciousness as existing at various levels of condensation (contraction) and dilation (expansion). It is impossible to tell which of the snapshots of the woman with the stroller belong to her future and which to her past: some of them seem to explain how she stole the child, while others appear to refer to her future (the shot of the social workers taking away the child). The question is whether these are the memories and fearful anticipations of the woman herself (which would justify the visual condensation technique as the best approximation to the condensation work of memory), or they do not reveal the woman’s consciousness but only that of the camera. It is necessary to present the different lives of these secondary characters because they illustrate the different outcomes of Lola’s run as a

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result of her delay. The only difference between Lola and the other characters is that the film has bestowed upon her the privileged status of a protagonist. Nevertheless, one can very well imagine condensing Lola’s three runs into three snapshot sequences and expanding the condensed three versions of the secondary characters’ lives into an entire movie. Since every time Lola runs into one of these characters nothing else changes (except the sequence of snapshots), and since the delay each time is so insignificant, we can assume that even if we were to carry this experiment to its logical conclusion—shrink the delay to zero, which would mean that Lola will run into the woman with the stroller every time at the same moment—the moment she runs into the woman every time would be different. The delay is necessary not to demonstrate that different things happen at different times, but that each moment differs from itself. Difference does not happen between moments; rather, each moment differs from itself. The only difference between the snapshot sequences of the secondary characters’ lives, on one side and the different scenarios of Lola’s meeting with her father and his lover, on the other side, seems to be that whereas the possible lives of the secondary characters are maximally condensed, her meetings with her father are dramatized, elaborated, expanded, in general treated cinematically, as a story within a story, whereas the lives of the secondary characters never become narratives but remain only a series of photographs. However, there is another, more essential difference between these expansions and condensations of the characters’ lives in time. There is no reason to believe that it is because Lola runs into the people in the street at different points in time that we are presented with different possible scenarios of their future and past lives i.e., Lola’s delay does not cause the differences in their futures/ pasts. Thus, we have to read these incidents metaphorically or symbolically. We are faced then with two possible (and opposite) interpretations: either these incidents suggest, in an intentionally exaggerated manner, that the smallest accident has the gravest significance (destiny) or, on the contrary, that everything that happens is purely accidental (in that case, the incidents undercut their most obvious meaning, the assumption that there is a causal relationship between all of them). The film never really demonstrates a preference for one of these two alternatives but oscillates between fate (only one event is possible at a given moment in time) and pure chance (any event is possible at any given moment in time). This is not the case with Lola’s meetings with her father, however,

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whose purpose is to affirm the reality of fate. It is precisely because Lola arrives at the bank a little later every time, thus interrupting the conversation between her father and his lover at different moments, that she ends up with different pieces of information on the basis of which to act (significantly, the last time she is so late that she is ‘lucky’ enough to miss her father and is thus spared the painful discoveries of the previous two meetings: that her father is not her real father and that he is thinking of leaving his family to marry his lover). Thus, this aspect of the storyline suggests that at a specific moment in time only one outcome is possible. The transition scenes between the first and the second, and between the second and the third run, might be a clue that these two runs that seem to end tragically are not real (perhaps they are the worst case scenarios Lola imagines before she even starts running) and that they have mostly a symbolic meaning (a sort of a test of Lola’s relationship with Mani). However, the third run is not structurally different from the other two and does not seem more necessary or real as an outcome. In fact, the third run seems the most unlikely or the most accidental in its happy outcome: the only reason Mani is able to pay the drug dealers on time is that the blind woman standing in front of the phone booth tells him to wait, and it is exactly at that moment that he sees the bum with the bag of money pass him on a bike. Even the way in which this third time Lola finally gets the money—by winning at a casino—stresses the accidental nature of the happy ending. That the third run might be just a clever manipulation of the story so as to produce the desired happy ending is clear from what seems to be the film’s deliberate failure to take into account the delay from the first and second run and the necessary changes that ought to have resulted, in the third run, from that delay. Although some of the secondary characters are treated consistently—e.g. we see yet another possible life of the woman with the baby stroller—the stories invented for others characters are clearly manipulated so as to produce the desired happy outcome: the man on the bike ‘accidentally’ meets the bum who still has the bag with the money; the bum buys the bike from the man; the blind woman waiting in front of the phone booth tells Mani, who is about to leave, to wait, thus giving him a chance to notice the bum riding the bike past them. And most important of all, the problem with Lola’s father is solved because she misses him and never finds out that he is not her father or that he has a lover. The father himself is spared his lover’s

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confession that she is pregnant with someone else’s child, because just when she is about to confess, he gets a phone call and has to leave. There is an obvious temporal inconsistency between the third happy version of the story and the previous two. The first time the conversation between the father and his lover is interrupted when she tells him she is pregnant. The second time it is interrupted a little later (since Lola is running late, which delays all other incidents as well), when she admits that she is pregnant with someone else’s child and a fight between them ensues. The third time the conversation should have been interrupted still a little later, perhaps during the fight or after it, but instead the scene is moved back in time and Lola’s father does not even hear that his lover is pregnant with another man’s child. Thanks to this manipulation of time, Lola arrives at the bank too late and ‘luckily’ misses her father (even though the previous two times she was on time despite the fact that she was running late). The red ambulance sequence is manipulated in a similar way. The first time the red ambulance stops abruptly in front of a huge sheet of glass a few workers are carrying across the street; the second time, since Lola is running late, the ambulance fails to stop and goes through the glass; the third time, the event is moved back in time and the ambulance never goes through the glass. Instead, Lola gets in the car and magically saves the life of the dying man lying inside. The problems caused by the delay during the second run are solved by the purposeful manipulation of what was supposed to happen in the third run. It is only when we become aware of this manipulation of time that the first two runs, which seemed to us completely accidental and random, appear retrospectively to have been governed by fate. By contrast, precisely the clever manipulation of events in the third run, and the presence, however vague, of a desire to get things right this time (the desire of the characters, but also the desire of the film itself, as if it felt the pressure of the fairy-tale form, which relies precisely on repetition and final resolution of the conflict the third time around) reduces events to sheer accidents. At first, it might seem that such manipulation of time is sure to compromise the reality of what happens. Indeed, it is tempting to argue that the first two runs, precisely because they appeared fated and have tragic consequences, are more realistic than the third run, whose representation tampers with time so blatantly. However, the opposite is true: as soon as we realize that “realistic” is not necessarily the same as “real,” that in fact they are opposed to each other, we understand that if fate is realistic, accidents are real, and they are real

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namely because they involve an active subject, who is always driven by a certain end and works against obstacles to attain that end. There is no room for subjectivity in the first and second run, because everything is destined and so is the subject: if Lola arrives at a specific point late, there is only one thing that can happen; if she is early, the same holds true. The only moment during these two runs that fate is overcome is at their respective ends, when first she and then Mani decide they do not want to die (which is what makes possible the second and the third run). The third run, however, introduces an element of inconsistency, unpredictability, unjustifiability, contingency i.e., it introduces Lola as a free subject. If Lola is early, events unfold as if she were late, and if she is late, everything happens as if she were early. Only the last run shows what it means to be “on time.” One cannot be on time in a simulated i.e., destined/fated world: time as such does not exist in such a world. Time can be manipulated only if there is chance. Lola can arrive on time with the 10 000 marks only if it is impossible to predict whether she will be on time or not. In For a New Novel Robbe-Grillet observes that, contrary to the prevalent critical opinion, time does not play a significant role in the modern narrative, because “time seems to be cut off from its temporality. It no longer passes.” (1965: 155) In the films discussed here, time seems to pass, or at least it appears possible or conceivable that behind the confused order of events there is a coherent chronology of events that could be reconstructed. However, the impossibility of locating the origin of unreal time (and of unreal events) on a real timeline of events creates the impression of an atemporal or impersonal, infinite present. Given the important place of fiction or imagination in phenomenology (for example, Husserl’s idea of “imaginary variation” as a method for revealing the essence of things) perhaps we could conceive the relationship between the unreal and the real according to the same model (the model provided by the analogy I drew in the beginning of this chapter, an analogy between repetition or déjà vu, on one hand, and the two aspects of consciousness, on the other hand). The nature of time is falsification, the rendering of beings/things/events as impersonal, infinite, or unrecognizable. The unreal, then, would be precisely the infinity of time, the infinity or indeterminability of pre-reflective consciousness. To conceive the relationship of the unreal to the real as analogous to that of the pre-reflective to the reflective would suggest that the unreal does not need to be reflected or realized (made real), whereas the real

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always presupposes an unreal. This, however, does not mean that the real is merely simulated: to argue that the real is produced or dissociated from the unreal does not in any way threaten the validity or truthfulness of the real (just as reflective consciousness is not less authentic or more artificial than pre-reflective consciousness). Perhaps the most important implication of the idea of an infinite universe and of an infinite mental life is the lack of criteria for distinguishing the real from the unreal. The concept of infinity is incommensurable with the idea of determination or delimitation, on which the real depends.

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Endnotes 1



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Dennis Porter observes that “the detective story gave the postmodernists a structural principle comparable to the one that myth had given the early modernists” (1981: 247). See also Michael Holquist’s article “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction” in The Poetics of Murder. In the metaphysical detective story “the game relationship displaces the referential background. This does not mean, however, that detective fiction is not representational. It refers less to the ‘real world’ than to an intertextual—or infratextual—set of rules” (Sirvent 1999: 161). Given the increasingly important place of memory in contemporary cinema, one wonders what the implications of this trend could be for the old “Montage-or-Bust” controversy (whether montage is essential to cinema or not). Does the interest in the workings of memory demand a revival of montage? For a discussion of montage as a form of simulation versus “naturalism” or representational cinema, see Metz 31-91. Although Metz’s position is that cinema “is language, above and beyond any particular effect of montage” (47) we need to examine more carefully the nature of memory: is memory a form of pure expression i.e., is it denotative, or does it rather belong to signification (hence it presupposes and demands montage)? Patrick Fuery, for instance, believes that “[s]igns of time and memory usually have connotative values of reliable or unreliable” (2000: 155), as in Last Year at Marienbad. According to Bruce Morrissette, the modern novel owes its increasing self-sufficiency to its use of various forms of the mise en abyme such as “reintegrated repetitions, reflections, duplications” (1985: 156). The imaginative work of memory in films like Memento or Following could also be approached as a kind of mise en abyme that reaffirms the film’s self-sufficiency and autonomy. In a passage reminiscent of Baudrillard’s argument of the nature of the real—the real, Baudrillard believes, takes place only within a certain interval, at a certain speed of light, which makes possible the separation of causes from effects—Metz places film in-between theatre and photography, a sort of “optimal point…on either side of which the impression of reality produced by the fiction tends to decrease” (1974: 13). On the reality (not realism) constitutive of cinema, see Metz 3-15. On the other hand, Biró stresses the similarity of film to dreams insofar as film creates a virtual present capable of moving forward and backward in time, as in dreams. See Biró 102-104. Also see Patrick Fuery 123-128 on “the reality effect” in cinema: he identifies the sense of reality created in cinema with the hyperreal i.e. with simulation. The reversibility of mental operations develops beyond the flashback technique, attaining its highest point, according to Biró, in the reversibility of reality, imagination, and recollection in films like Last Year at Marienbad. See Biró 115-121. According to Anna Botta, one of the most interesting ways in which metaphysical detective fiction challenges classical detective fiction is that it “uncover[s] the essential impasse of a hermeneutical project founded on a traditional concept of time” (1999: 222) and substitutes for it “a hermeneutics of spatial detection” (224). The most straightforward example of the latter is found in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. Botta attributes metaphysical detective fiction’s pronounced

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The Image in French Philosophy interest in “architectural and geometrical imagery [which] gives rise to an excessive determination of exterior space”(225) to writers’ dissatisfaction with the linear (causal) structure of narrative leading to an inevitable (and predictable) closure. She assumes that the temporal arrangement of events is always hierarchical—there is a privileged point of view, that of the narrative’s end by virtue of which the rest is recovered—whereas the spatial arrangement of events is somehow inherently more ‘democratic’ and open, structuring events in terms of “proximity rather than continuity” (226). In other words, a detective story constructed in accordance with the classical temporal model, in which detection consists in the (temporal) reconstruction of events, tends to produce (or reproduce) a stable, positivistic view of the world, a belief that order can be restored by the superior mind of the detective. On the other hand, a story built on the model of spatial detection prohibits artificial (deceptive) closure because it “refuses stable determinations and requires constant repositioning” (228). Films like Memento and Following present a serious challenge to Botta’s assumption: in these films detection is overtly, indeed obsessively, temporalized yet the evidence collected by the protagonist-detective requires “constant repositioning” and falls into infinite circularity and recursiveness. Patrick Fuery analyzes instances of excessive self-reflexivity in cinema—those ­elements of a film, which belong both inside and outside the cinematic frame— ­using the Derridean model of the parergon (borrowed from Derrida’s The Truth in Painting). See Fuery 152-157. One of the examples of the parergon Fuery provides—what he calls “excesses of time of the film” (2000: 155)—is an appropriate description of Deleuze’s time-image. The parergonal model could prove useful in studying time and point of view paradoxes in the films discussed in this chapter. In fact, Fuery claims that “all elements of cinema…can be imbued with the quality of the frame, and hence parergon and liminality” (157).

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Peeters, and Perec’ in Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (eds). Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press: 157-178. The Sixth Sense. 1999. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Buena Vista Pictures. The Spanish Prisoner. 1997. Dir. David Mamet. Sony Pictures Classics. Stephen, Karin. 1922. The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc. Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé). 1999. Dir. Raoul Ruiz. Kino International. Wahl, Jean. 1965. ‘The Roots of Existentialism’ in Baskin, Wade (ed.) The Philosophy of Existentialism. New York: Philosophical Library: 3-31. Walker, Jeremy. 1969. ‘Imagination and the Passions’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 29 (4): 575-588. Ward, John. 1968. Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Warnock, Mary. 1976. Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Alan R. 1990. The Language of Imagination. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Williams, James. 1998. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Willis, Anne-Marrie. 1997. ‘After the Afterimage of Jean Baudrillard: Photography, the Object, Ecology and Design’ in Zurbrugg, Nicholas (ed.) Art and Artefact. London: SAGE Publications: 136-148. Zourabichvilli, Francois. 2000. ‘The Eye of Montage: Dziga Vertov and Bergsonian Materialism’ in Flaxman, Gregory (ed.) The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 141-149. Zurbrugg, Nicholas. 1997. ‘The Ecstasy of Photography’ in Zurbrugg, Nicholas (ed.) Art and Artefact. London: SAGE Publications: 32-42.

Index

A Brief History of Time, 265 Adorno, Theodor, 133-134 affect, affected, affective, affectivity 16, 33, 55, 106, 116, 125, 127, 131, 140, 149, 151, 156, 158, 160-165, 168-169, 180, 202, 208, 216, 219, 229-230, 245, 250, 259 Antliff, Mark, 31, 45, 308 associationism, 42-46, 93-94, 120 Bachelard, Gaston, 11-13, 45, 120, 123, 131 Badiou, Alain, 22 Barthes, Roland, 223 Baudrillard, Jean, 9-10, 14, 16-17, 21-23, 81, 115, 117, 122, 124-126, 140, 163, 171, 219, 224, 237-241, 247, 253, 261-263, 305 Behler, Constantin, 131 Benda, Julien, 28 Benjamin, Andrew, 20 Bergson, Henri, 9-10, 13-18, 22-23, 25-61, 63-68, 70-75, 80-123, 129, 134, 146, 153-154, 160-162, 167, 172-174, 176-183, 190, 195-196, 200, 205-208, 214-215, 217-218, 221-223, 226-236, 239-240, 243, 247-253, 256-259, 261-266, 276, 297-299 Biró, Yvette, 256, 258, 276, 305 Bondanella, Peter, 257 Botta, Anna, 305-306 Bradley, F.H., 27-28 Browning, Gary, 162, 170 Burwick, Frederick, 33

Busch, Thomas, 67, 73, 118 Butler, Rex, 21 Carpettini, Gian Paolo, 265 Caws, Peter, 74, 115, 119 Chevalier, Jacques, 44-45, 61 consciousness, 9-16, 19, 22, 26, 28, 35-37, 39-63, 122-131, 137-143, 149-156, 160-165, 174-176, 181-191, 194, 220, 227-236, 247-257, 261-266, 271-282, 286-288, 297-304 Copjec, Joan, 264-265 Coulter-Smith, Graham, 171 Danto, Arthur, 118 Deguy, Michel, 259 déjà vu, 10, 53-59, 146, 221, 245-249, 265-266, 286, 303 Deleuze, Gilles, 9-10, 14-17, 22-23, 31-36, 59, 72, 81, 88, 113, 117, 125, 148, 152, 154, 158, 163, 165, 167, 172, 190, 194, 199, 208, 211, 213, 215-216, 221-255, 261-263, 293-294 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 133-134, 168, 198, 306 Descombes, Vincent, 66 detective fiction, 263-265, 305 difference between image and sign, 94-95, 104-105 between perception and imagination, 96-104 between consciounsess and image, 107-111

314

The Image in French Philosophy

dualism, 9, 25-36, 45, 53, 61, 65-67, 80-83, 118-119 Durham, Scott, 171-172 Eco, Umberto, 274 education of the senses, 59-60, 165 Elliot, Hugh, 29-30, 61 event, 10-16, 22, 55, 58, 86, 88, 100, 104-106, 123-131, 135-156, 160-170, 175-186, 194-195, 199-208, 212, 215, 218-219, 223-245, 254, 262, 265-270 false, the, 57-60, 171, 184, 196-197, 221, 226, 246-254, 256 Farrar, Roxanne Clair, 19 fatal, the, 9-11, 14, 16, 23, 184-189, 194, 198, 201, 209-211, 218, 241, 261, 263 Fight Club, 265, 268, 270, 274-275, 279-280, 282, 284, 286, 291 Flaxman, Gregory, 221-222 Following, 265, 268, 279-281, 291, 305, 306 Fourny, Jean-Francois, 18 Fuery, Patrick, 305, 306 Gane, Mike, 21 Gasché, Rodolphe, 21 Genosko, Gary, 21, 82 Giacometti, 188-189, 219 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, 169, 258 Gutting, Gary, 118 habit memory, 25, 37-38, 46-54, 87, 182, 230 Harvey, Robert, 20 Hegel, G.W.F., 26, 132-133, 197-198 Hegelian, 118, 121, 148, 197 Hollier, Dennis, 67, 96, 127 Holquist, Michael, 305 Horrocks, Christopher, 216, 238 Husserl, Edmund, 68, 73-81, 88, 95, 102, 109, 118-121, 160-170, 303 hyperreal, the, 14, 23, 115, 174-181, 185-189, 196-219, 237-241, 247, 261-262, 305 illusion, 39, 70, 95, 100, 103, 111, 173-216, 230, 253, 262, 268

image-consciousness, 9-10, 14, 16, 46, 49, 63-64, 66, 70, 75, 77, 97, 101, 107-111, 113, 114, 116, 125, 176, 185, 231, 254, 261-263 imaginary time, 23, 174, 188-189, 196, 265-267, 290-291 impersonal, the, 9-16, 26, 33, 36, 41, 44, 46, 53-60, 63-65, 70, 73-75, 81-88, 91-93, 99-100, 112-117, 123,129-131, 142, 160-161, 183-185, 189, 208-209, 216-217, 221, 223-227, 228-229, 232-233, 235-237, 241-246, 261-267 inhuman, the, 9, 11, 14, 36, 116-117, 139-140, 184, 198, 200-217, 227, 232-233, 237-238, 263 Kamber, Richard, 19 Kant, Immanuel, 19-20, 22, 25-26, 73, 131-146, 149-151, 155-156, 159-161, 234-237, 243 Kantian sublime, the, 20, 128-169, 258 Kearney, Richard, 68-69, 80, 119-122 Kierkegaard, Sören, 297 Kovacs, Andras, 257 Küchler, Susanne, 120 Lambert, Greg, 222, 258 language, 11-13, 54, 71-74, 120, 159, 166, 191, 199, 204, 205, 223, 227, 249, 252, 254, 256, 280, 305 Librett, Jeffrey, 258 Lightman, Alan, 218 Llewelyn, John, 19 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 9-17, 20, 22, 61, 69, 81, 117, 118, 123-170, 180, 184, 187-188, 200-201, 204, 209, 215, 217-219, 235, 243-244, 261-263 Martin, Jean-Clet, 222, 256 Matrix, The, 216, 267-268, 286 Matthews, Eric, 13, 26, 73-74, 88 matter, 10, 12, 14, 25-26, 28-61, 64-82, 89-95, 111-117, 120-125, 129-130, 137-140, 151-168, 173-189, 196, 200, 212, 228-229, 231, 234, 251-253, 261-266 McCulloch, Gregory, 19

Index memory-image, 9, 14-15, 25, 26, 31-32, 37, 42-43, 46-53, 57, 75, 89, 92-93, 95, 99, 112, 116, 179, 234-235, 261 Merleau-Ponty, 19, 70-71, 119-120, 166 Memento, 265, 266, 268, 275-282, 286, 288, 291, 295, 305, 306 metaphysics, 9-13, 26-30, 67-68, 111, 123-124, 178, 184-185, 201, 214, 251-253, 261-263 Metz, Christian, 256, 268-269, 286, 305 Million Dollar Hotel, The, 275, 289 12 Monkeys, 291-292 Morrissette, Bruce, 225, 256, 305 Motherwell, Robert, 169 movement-image, 223-224, 228-234, 244, 247-253, 258, 261-262 Mulholland Drive, 265, 274, 291, 292, 294 Mullarkey, John, 17-18, 30-31, 61, 122, 218, 251-252, 257, 259 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 169 Natanson, Maurice, 73 nausea, 72, 111, 113, 125-128, 175, 241-246 negation, 26, 49, 63-64, 69-70, 80, 107-113, 119, 141, 145, 162, 168, 177, 195, 199, 203, 213-217, 231, 245, 253-254, 284 Newman, Barnett, 128, 137-138, 147-158, 164, 168-169 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 27, 171 ontology, 17-25, 64-73, 87, 118, 123-125, 150, 168, 172, 214, 221-222, 227, 232-234, 237, 247 Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos), 265, 268, 279, 282, 286-289, 291, 293 Pearson, Keith Ansell, 17, 22 phenomenology, 13, 15, 17-18, 63-69, 73-93, 113, 118-120, 123, 130, 166, 168, 218, 269, 303 Pisters, Patricia, 22 point of view, 223, 238, 249, 254, 256-257, 262, 265, 267-306 postmodern sublime, the, 10, 14, 17, 20, 125-170, 187-188, 203, 243-244, 258

315

Princess and the Warrior, 266, 295 pure memory, 9, 11, 14, 17, 25-26, 31, 34-36, 45-46, 48-49, 53-60, 63-64, 74, 84-88, 112-113, 116, 183, 235, 247, 261-263, 265 Readings, Bill, 60, 162-163, 165-170, 219 real, the, 9, 13, 21, 42, 59, 72, 88, 97, 100, 102-103, 108-122, 128, 131, 171-217, 219, 236-237, 240-241, 245-255, 262, 264-304 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 217, 219-220, 225-226, 256, 263, 265, 293, 303 Run, Lola, Run, 265, 266, 282, 295-303 Russell, Bertrand, 30-33, 61, 94, 308 Sallis, John, 14, 15, 121 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18-19, 45-50, 63-117, 123, 125-128, 174-176, 188-189,229, 244-246, 261-263, 266, 273 Scharfstein, Ben-Ami, 33 Schiller, Friedrich, 164, 170 Schwab, Martin, 222, 256 seduction, 189-196, 200, 212 signification, 70-73, 148, 164-167, 179-180, 187, 191-195, 199, 211, 226-229, 253-255 Sim, Stuart, 20 simulacrum, 76-77, 171-172, 180, 185-188, 193-199, 201, 214-215 Sirvent, Michel, 305 Sixth Sense, The, 265, 268, 282-286, 291 Spanish Prisoner, The, 265, 266, 268, 279, 281, 282-284, 287, 291 Stephen, Karin, 28-29, 45 subjectivity, 209-217, 240-241 time falsification of, 59, 88, 113, 226, 236-237, 239-240, 246-253, 254-255, 303-304 sensation of, 137, 148-151, 160-161 spatialization of, 15, 32, 43-46, 223, 261, 276

316

The Image in French Philosophy

time-image, 9-10, 14-16, 72, 148, 152, 154, 158, 163, 208, 216, 221-255, 257-258, 261, 263, 294, 306 Time Regained, 281, 289-291 virtual, the, 34-35, 40-42, 67-68, 91-93, 102, 176-183 Wahl, Jean, 66, 67, 118 Walker, Jeremy, 119 Ward, John, 256 White, Alan, 14-15, 61 Williams, James, 20-21 Willis, Anne-Marie, 172 Zourabichvilli, Francois, 257 Zurbrugg, Nicholas, 214