Discourse, Figure

The Bias of the Figural

3 The Bias of the Figural For the eye “to recognize sound,” as Paul Claudel put it, the visible must be legible, audible, intelligible. The “second logic,” which he opposed to the first—the one that determined the nature and function of words—teaches “the art of fitting [them] together and is practiced before our eyes by nature itself.”1 “There is knowledge of each other, obligation between them, thus relationship between the different parts of the world, as between the parts of speech [discours], so that they may constitute a readable sentence.”2 This book protests: the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness , or rather a difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen; and this difference, and the immobile mobility that reveals it, are what continually fall into oblivion in the process of signification. “A long time ago, in Japan, while going up from Nikko to Chuzenji, I saw, juxtaposed by my line of vision, although at great distance from each other, the green of a maple filling the separating space, in order to answer the appeal of a pine, asking for agreement. These pages are meant to be a commentary on this sylvan text.”3 Limiting ourselves to perception: is it a text, that which speaks only when the eye has located “the point of view,”when my gaze has become the gaze to which things are “owed”?4 A text is not deep sensorially, you do not move in front or inside of it so that its agreement may be fulfilled; if you do, it is metaphorically. But the sensory,5 the sylvan world, would seem to be precisely the absolute referential of all analoga: here we move, searching for composition, constituting the space of the picture, relying on that plastic space where the eye, the head, the body move or swim, buoyed as if in a bath of mercury. It is the juxtaposition by the eye that guarantees the agreement of the pine and the maple, agreement fulfilled because total, a harmony of silhouette, tone, value, and position: desire momentarily satiated. Claudel does not say juxtaposition of pine and maple, but juxtaposition by the line of the bias of the figural 4 vision.The two trees stand “at a great distance from each other,”yet the stem of the gaze skewers and sticks them together on an unspecified background, on any canvas. Very well, but this flattening makes the “picture,”6 not a page covered in writing,which is a kind of table.One does not read or understand a picture. Sitting at the table one identifies and recognizes linguistic units; standing in representation one seeks out plastic events. Libidinal events. That the world remains to be read basically means that an Other, on the other side, transcribes the given objects, and that with the appropriate point of view I could theoretically decipher it. This is still giving objects a lot of credit—a sign of Claudel’s paganism, of which he was well aware: he had no choice but to disassociate poetry and prayer. His entire oeuvre arises from this drama, for a Christian, of being able to achieve a semblance of serenity through the agreement of a pine and a maple, to experience a fervent faith—both desire and pleasure—in the sensory.The road to Chuzenji is the Calvary of an absolution of the sensory. By climbing up to Chuzenji, Claudel wants to catch a glimpse of the flip side of the picture, but from Nikko he wants to take the frontside with him to the other side. Such is the imaginary : to possess both front and back. Such is sin and pride: to have both text and illustration.This ambivalence is that of Christianity itself, the same Christianity in fact that lies at the core of the issues we Westerners have: the audition of the Word, but at the same time a philosophy of creation. Through the first we ask to be delivered from the thickness of the flesh, to close our eyes,to be all ear; through the second we are forced to acknowledge that the objects’ mobility, which constitutes them as world, that their shimmering , that the appearance (and the depth that informs it) be absolved in some way,insofar as they derive from what is all-powerful and all-loving.An ambivalence outlined by the history not only of Western thought but of the painting, born of the Writ and daring to...