Discourse, Figure

Dialectics, Index, Form

23 Dialectics, Index, Form With negation,reflection positions itself at the juncture between two experiences : speaking and seeing. A juncture, because each of these crosses paths: on the one hand the mouth sees—just as Claudel said that the eye listens— otherwise one speaks of nothing, even if one says something, for linguistic reference points to the depth of the visible. On the other hand, how would this depth itself, constituting things in thickness, with a front and a back, be at all possible were there not in human language an arbitrary principle, the self-sufficiency of a system entirely dependent on its internal intervals, and thus capable of provoking and supporting the separation of discourse from its object? Would one see if one did not speak? Negativity is a position that directs two heterogeneous experiences. There is a negation involved in the visible—the distance, the spacing that determines space itself—a negation experienced in variability. The experience of this mobility, which engenders expanse, thickness, and the figure, is for the phenomenologist a privileged object of description: for Husserl, it is the constitutive seeing he tries to locate under its collapse in formed vision ; for Merleau-Ponty, it is the permanent genesis of objective space and body that stirs beneath them in the flesh.To speak of a beneath could suggest that it is unconscious, but this unconsciousness belongs to the order of the transcendental. We are dealing here with an originary ekthesis as Kant and Husserl understand the term: originary so that something may be seen. Its originarity ensures its unconsciousness. Now by unconsciousness I do not want to merely imply that this initial force, which distinguishes and brings into relief, is destined to lodge itself in the dead casing of a language or an academicism (though the chances are high that this is indeed the fate awaiting it, as Merleau-Ponty suspected and Francastel demonstrates). Nevertheless , ekthesis is involved in seeing to the point of not being seen, as that which 24 dialectics, index, form makes visible. This power, on which the visible and the seer are deployed, generates their conjoining precisely because it generates their separation: an unconsciousness, therefore, pervading even the most revolutionary moments of plastic activity. At the moment when Cézanne and Picasso show us how there is to see, how the object comes into relief as we face it in its essential elision of what is visible, they are still showing us this object, drawing upon the same relief-giving power that separates us from the picture and makes it visible to us. No doubt painting is what brings us as near as possible to transcendental activity, insofar as this activity is indeed a disjoining rather than a synthesizing power. What the picture shows is the world in the process of becoming, how objects can emerge, with the help of the eye, from nebulae in the watercolors of the last Cézanne, a line from the adjoining edge-to-edge of a yellow and a blue in Van Gogh, a gaze on either side of the green trickle dividing Matisse’s famous portrait. From this perspective, the picture is the strangest of objects when it fulfills the function assigned to it by modern painting: an object where the becoming-object is made visible—transcendental activity itself. It should be able to stand in for all of philosophy, at least for the philosophy that argues that perception is not an ideology but that it holds the entire secret of being. Indeed, it is this very secret that the painter makes visible: the secret of manifestation, in other words, of depth. However, we—the painter and we beholders—miss this secret precisely because we see it, and because this exposure of becoming, this constitution of the seeing and the seen would be pointless and fall flat if there weren’t a sharp eye to register it,expose it,and constitute it in turn.The picture is such an inefficient trompe l’oeil that it requires the eye to access the truth, and it is, in a sense, nothing more than a call to the eye to be acknowledged. Even if the picture resembles nothing (and it really does resemble nothing, even when it is figurative, since its visible function is to give the given), the eye takes back from it the right it had given up in order to allow the picture to be: the right to believe itself the place from which the...