Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the image

Abstract

The problem that concerns us here is figuration. Not the image, and not art, even though, of course, these themes are not unrelated to the arguments that follow. My initial hypothesis is that our current understanding of all these phenomena would benefit from our adopting a new perspective, from our yielding neither to an aesthetic line of inquiry, full of preconceptions about the beautiful, the work, and its meaning, nor to the more recent promotion of the incarnated image, which brilliantly summarizes a certain history but appears incapable of dealing with the new images produced during the last century (cinema, for example) and their anthropological, technical, and political stakes. This is why it seems necessary to ask a simple question: What is it that fundamentally drives man to produce images, to leave traces that are not read but seen and that touch us-to produce not signs, but figures? Returning to the act of production-to the compulsion to figurewe can expand our field of analysis beyond the narrow sphere of art and include children's drawings, graffiti, and techniques of image production (photography, video, etc.). We can also depart, historically, from the tradition of the Christian image, of the icon and its incarnational model, so that the Lascaux paintings are as much at issue as Boltanski's installations or Fritz Lang's films. To orient ourselves, let us take as our point of departure a famous image on which Georges Bataille-and not Emmanuel Levinas, who will be the focus here-has extensively commented.2 It is the image