The Reverse of Images (By Way of an Introduction)

Money—as many of the texts collected in this volume may attest—has often been dramatized, used as a theme, and represented in art. From The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare to Hollywood productions such as The Wolf of Wall Street, money circulates like a quasi-character. Occasionally, it might even become the protagonist of a story, speaking in the first person, as in Charles Gildon's The Golden Spy, which in 1702 became the precursor of the British tradition which lends a narrative voice to inanimate objects. In this work, Gildon makes four coins speak; one of them, the French "Louis d'or", thus says: "I have had such various trans-migrations thro' the great World."¹ Many other stories have followed suit, such as The Adventures of a Silver Penny in 1786, Argentum: or, Adventures of a Shilling in 1794 and Aureus; or The Life and Opinions of a Sovereign, Written by Himself in 1824.

But money is not just a literary object or subject (or a prosopopeia). In its "autobiography" published in 1770,² a bank note bragged about its ability to "coin words". And when authors like Herman Melville or Paul Valéry represent the intrinsically fiduciary dimension of narrative or of language, money tends to become not just a theme or a character among others in literature, but the name of the condition of possibility of literature, that is to say the name of the very texture of the text, the name of what circulates in its textual fabric made of pointers from signifier to signifier or from word to word, without these words ever being converted into a "real value" ("words are insolvent, says Valéry"³). In this sense Jean-Joseph Goux wrote about a "'banking' theory of language," which he thought was first introduced by Saussure: "Saussure's affirmation that linguistic value has no root in things […] correspond[s] faithfully to a conception of language that would make it the homologue of a conventional currency. Nothing anchors linguistic value in a space outside of language. This is why language […] is only a system of pure relations, a relational and differential system[…]."⁴

Robert Bresson's theory of the filmic image is very similar to this "banking logic of language" that Goux inherits from Saussure. He writes: "The value of an image must be, first and foremost, an exchange value."⁵ Or, in his Notes on Cinematography: "Cinematographic film, where images, like the words in a dictionary, have no power and value except through their position and relation." Or again: "No absolute value in an image." The image thus seems to be able to become a cinematic image if and only if it is "shot […] so that it will have first and foremost an exchange value."

Deleuze might have been thinking about Bresson's "banking" theory when, in The Time-Image, he argues the following, turning money into the condition of possibility of the movie image; let us read this sentence first, in its English translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta⁶: "Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film."

Now there is a preliminary problem, a problem of translation. In French, Deleuze writes⁷: "L'argent est l'envers de toutes les images que le cinéma montre et monte à l'endroit, si bien que tous les films sur l'argent sont déjà, quoique implicitement, des films dans le film ou sur le film." Interestingly, this sentence that speaks of a certain reversal, of an inversion, has itself been reversed or inverted. For "l'envers," in French, is the reverse side of "l'endroit": it is the recto of a verso. So that the "obverse" of the English translation should be corrected into a "reverse": "Money is the reverse of all the images[…]."

But where is the "obverse," then? Substituted for the "reverse," the "ob-verse" has been removed, in the English translation, from where it was. For...