The ‘other’ image

Another day, full of dread. Nothing to be done other than watch episodes of Friends and lose myself in the pages of The Space of Literature.

The image is a copy, is it not? Secondary to an original? Derivative? But what if it is not derivative? What if there is an experience in which the ‘image’ of the thing indicates something ‘behind’ the thing? Such is suggested by the pages on the ‘other’ image Blanchot provides towards the end of The Space of Literature, in which he focuses on a phenomenology of the corpse.

The corpse, is, what Blanchot calls an image. The image of something, on our ordinary conception, is second to the thing it imitates; it is derivative. It is something which diverts and perhaps entertains us, but it is nothing significant. Could one say that the corpse is an image? This seems strange indeed. We normally conceive an image to be a reflection or imitation of something else. But the corpse is not an imitation, is it? It is the mortal remains of a person, let’s say for the purposes of this discussion a friend. It is my friend’s corpse. One could say the corpse resembles my friend. But does the corpse does not imitate my friend as a portrait the original? Perhaps one way of approaching this difficulty is to claim the corpse does not so much resemble my dead friend as disclose the way in which my friend always resembled a corpse. Or, better, the the corpse presents what was dissimulated by the living presence of my friend, hidden by his gestures, his conversation. This animation was precisely what is missing in the corpse; it is not ensouled, but, for that reason, according to Blanchot, it becomes the ‘other’ image.

Let us approach this from another angle. Blanchot always seems to present his claims against a background of what, for him, is the Husserlian conception of the human being as the source of light, of meaning, illuminating things in the world around it. Sometimes meaning breaks down. Heidegger elevated these breakdowns to the status of phenomenological ‘epoches’, reductions, in which something primordial gives itself over to be experienced. A tool breaks; I am gripped by anxiety – what happens? The tool appears as what it is when it is no longer useful – which is to say, it obtrudes; it is present to me; I no longer ignore it. And in anxiety? I am ‘there’ insofar as I am not there – I am, in Heidegger’s expression, a lieu-tenant – I keep the place of the nothing that I, nevertheless, am. Which is to say, with respect to this nothing , I am no one in particular – I am not yet someone; I am suspended. Only then can I resolve to authenticate my existence, to seize it as my own and answer to what is most proper to me.

Common to both Heideggerian ‘reductions’ is an interruption of my capacity to produce meaning. This production is understood, by Blanchot, in terms of the ek-static movement of the human being into the world, which, as it were, throws out webs of signification in which particular things are ‘caught’. That is to say, things show up as being meaningful, as being imbued with meaning. Yet not all things allow themselves to be caught in this way. There can be no guarantee of what things resist, since Blanchot’s intention is to focus on what it is they reveal through this resistance.

(To this extent even my claim that he is conducting a phenomenology of the corpse is inaccurate. Never think phenomenology is a matter of provoking us, through its analyses, to say a-ha, that is what I was experiencing all along. Blanchot is doing what all great post-Husserlian phenomenologists do: disclose the hidden – to lay bare the structure of my experience. This is what Marlene Zarader understands.)

Would the corpse, understood as the ‘other’ image, tell us something we have missed about the world? No: it reveals, rather, its hither side, which Blanchot presents when he invokes the other ek-stasis – not the initiative of the self, based on power, upon the opening of possibilities – but the interruption of this power and this possibility. The ‘other’ image stands out and makes us, too, stand out. We are ex-posed; what we encounter does not permit us to draw back into ourselves. We are brought into an encounter with what outstrips us, with what, that is, refuses to be interiorised. And thus a kind of reversal occurs; I encounter something which not merely limits my power to bestow meaning, but escapes the measure of sense altogether.

Perhaps one has a sense, now, why the word image is important to Blanchot. It will allow him to play with the notion of the simulacrum, of copy and original.

This reversal is what I encounter in the ‘other’ image. It is not just another object – or rather, it reveals what is other than all objects, what exceeds objectivity to the extent that it resists me, resisting my grasp. One can adapt what Heidegger writes of anxiety to the experience Blanchot is elucidating: I am implicated in what I experience to the extent that I am no longer present to myself; I am a lieu-tenant. But Blanchot’s claim is subtly different to Heidegger’s: the experience he describes is brought about by the encounter with a particular thing, the corpse, rather than opening up through a mood that implicates one’s being-in-the-world.

Thus the experience in question is not something I can negate and pass over – or better, even if it appears that I have this power, I have to live the encounter with the image on another plane. Here, the weight of the image drags me with it; I pass into an experience from which I cannot escape. The measure of negation has failed; I meet what is non-negatable, the indeterminable, the incessant – not as an object like other objects, but the very impossibility of their subsisting an object that could be encountered by a subject. Nothing is there, but this nothing has a kind of presence. There is absence, but this absence affirms itself. There is no ‘content’ to this experience; it is only an ek-stasis, an experience which draws me from myself – yet this contentlessness is affirmed as the content of my experience, as it shatters all forms.

Let me be clear (or as clear as I can be): it is not the shadow of a particular thing that I confront – a shadow that would be linked in a determinable relation to its ‘original’. The ‘object’ of experience is not delimitable. It is, to that extent, as great as the world, and resounds through the world. It is as though the encounter with the ‘other’ image is only the ‘trigger’ for a broader collapse – but this is insufficiently precise: the ‘other’ image is always indeterminable, which is to say, it reveals what is indeterminable in and as the world.

In this way, I encounter what Blanchot calls the ‘neutral double’ of things in the world; their hither side. Thus, although things appear to have meaning, offering themselves to us, and form part of the continuity of a world, this is illusory. This is not to invent a world beyond this world, but what Heidegger has called the ‘earth’ , which is to say, a resistance, an opacity implicit to things and implicit in others ‘in’ the world.

Meaning, non-meaning: these cannot be reconciled through dialectic. Non-meaning, here, is to be understood as the other of meaning – what escapes us in the world even as the world appears to enclose us, and confirm us in our powers. What comes first, then? Meaning? Non-meaning, which is to say, the ‘other’ of meaning? The original? The copy? There is ambiguity, which is to say both at once. We might experience the image as what is primordial or profound ‘in’ things and the ‘original’ – things in the world – as what is superficial. Or we might experience things in the world as what are more real or more significant than the image. Put another way: the world might appear solid and sure, but at any moment, this solidity and certainty can give way and we are turned over to the uncertainty of the image, which seems, because it reaches us when we are passive, to be much more real than anything else. Then again, the ‘reality’ of the image often seems illusory – we begin to forget those periods of fascination in which we can no longer make our way with confidence in the world.

What happens when we are fascinated? It is as if everything we were taught was a lie, a fake. One is aware that a great dissimulation has occurred – that beyond or beneath the self and the world, subjects and objects, there is a more primordial experience in which what is, what we thought existed, is suspended. At one and the same time, things are and they are not. But this imprecise, for, being and nothingness are not be counterposed in the manner of Hegel’s dialetic. It is necessary to maintain an ambiguity, to suspend the dialectic in its movement. It is possible to negate the image, to absorb it, to integrate it into one’s experience, to learn from it, to enjoy it – this is true, But there is another experience of the image, of a portion of the world become image which escapes integration.

Think of Plato’s account of the escape from the cave. I philosophise; I am no longer ensorcelled by images; I have burst forth into the real world. Blanchot’s version: I am captured by a particular image, fascinated, to the extent that I break through the ‘real’ world, but not into another one. I plunge into the cavewall itself; I encounter the heaviness of rock, the density of stone; and I learn that I, too, am as if I were made of rock, and weighed down. It is as if the world I experienced collapsed upon itself and I with it, forming an infinitely dense point, a singularity into which all light disappears. At the point of my fascination, there is nothing left. Thus does the ‘other’ image claim me.