Aesthetics of the Virtual

4 Toward the Image

53 4 toward the Image As has been noted, the concept of simulacrum is dependent on a mimetic structure of the image in which the latter is ontologically dependent on something other than itself. It is always conceived as image of, such that to be image means to resemble some other. If this is so, then the issue becomes that of understanding further the various ways of deferment, similarity or dissimilarity, representation, reference , relation with, to, or of the model. This raises certain questions: Is it true in every case that the image is not to be original? Is it true that “the image is always inseparable from an understanding in terms of parentage?”1 In order to approach the image, to grasp its meaning, must one always implement a cognitive process conducive to the discovery of its origin? Must one do so in order to come to nature, to the idea, to the divine, to all original forms of things that are independent from being known through images, in order, ultimately, to reach the world, be it the hyperuranian, this beautiful family of herbs and animals , or the unconscious, which is unknowable except in its figures? In this case, the image would be a reality that exits itself and becomes other than itself, alters its shape, so to speak. The birth of the image would thus be reduced to a matter of kinship, which may or may not be seen as a distancing and alienation, or as a manifestation of meaning and display of richness; yet, it would remain unavoidably symbolic, the recognition of a unity forever lost. But of course all this must have a cause: Why does the doubling occur, with its inevitable betrayal of both resemblance and difference, through the transcendental, historical , or psychological mechanisms of translation? This and nothing else, 54 Aesthetics of the Virtual that is, the problem of the double, is of course the problem of truth as conformity [adeguazione]: the doubling of reality in the order of the other, which has its origin in the image as representation and in the image as imitation. The question of the image is thus a theological question and regards the meaning of the analogy of being: things resemble God because of their perfection, because every perfection or essence represents-reflects its own paradigm in God, who is the source of all perfections, be the divine an impersonal, ideal place (which a lesser god mimes or expresses in the process of becoming) or a mind as realm of possibilities. The order of perfections reflects and vaguely represents the unity and simplicity of God, but everything, to the extent that it is, is in God’s image. All things—above all, the transcendental unity of multiplicity—represent God. In its transcendental sense as totality of all existents, the world, which transcends totality as mere sum of entities , is an imago dei [an image of God]. The concepts with which we signify God are figures of figures, representations of representations, which mark relations of distance and proximity, lines of truth and holiness , of error and sin, of morals and metaphysics, which for the situated observer split apart, but in reality are a single line. In the grand mimetic strategy, the difference between thing and image is shattered via participation and commonality: if things are images of the divine, then God is present in all things, is really ubiquitous, since God is in things insofar as they participate in being, and the similarity of the image is measured by the way of being of the entity, by the extent of its participation, which is always participation in the act and thereby in the causal efficacy of the divine. The divine exists in things and things exist in God, in the name of the image. In this light, many systems appear similar beyond the immense variability of their mimetism, mechanical rather than genetic or expressive. IMAGe-BoDY AS exPReSSIoN The mimetic structure, which is just the reverse of the participatory or creative dimension, leads to a thinking of the thing-image complex as an inextricable weaving. This is something reminiscent of the monad as conceived by Leibniz. In Leibniz’s grand narrative, a drama that at the climax of the Theodicy becomes the story of a dream,2 the monad is the actualization of a tendency to existence, of a desire to exist, which toward the Image 55...