Remembering Sartre’s analyses of Giacometti’s sculptures, as well as thinking of the relationship Charlotte Street draws between the double and the uncanny, I wonder whether Giacometti might be said to reveal not the movement of the living, but a strange restlessness which belongs to the dead. What if Jesus’s command, ‘Lazarus, venture forth’ brought forward not the living Lazarus but the one who was still dead, the corpse still wrapped in his winding sheets and stinking of decaying flesh? Perhaps it is this command to which Giacometti’s sculptures would have responded.
Blanchot remarks of Kafka’s The Castle that it is as though the distance the reader normally has with respect to the text had withdrawn into the text itself. As though the distance which is normally permitted to readers had been withdrawn and the reader is pressed up against what might be called the materiality of language. What if one were to understand a similar withdrawal of the normal distance a sculpture permits into Giacometti’s sculpture itself? (Sartre has begun to understand this …)
Blanchot writes of a ‘passion for the image’, that fascination which reveals to us a kind of shadow of an real thing. It is as though what was revealed came before the thing – as though the image were its condition of possibility and not the other way round. Strange priority. The image is what a thing is when it turns from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it: it is what resists the very impulse of our existence, that is, to create meaning, to as it were ‘exist’ things into being, bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. No longer is the thing what offers itself to be deployed; no longer, indeed, does it exist at any distance from me at all. Fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing up against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.
The corpse would exist in the manner of the image of the human being such that, with the cadaver before me, I see what life dissimulated: the presence of the familiar other as it is caught, implicated by a kind of unfamiliarity, an uncanniness. I have lost my bearings with respect to the one who died; I am fascinated, instead, with the indefinite, senseless opacity of a body. Such is the situation where, for Blanchot, a corpse begins to resemble itself: it is the image that, at the heart of the living body, hides itself insofar as the living are caught up in our existence in a manner analogous to things. For the most part, cultural categories mediate our relationships: you are my colleague or a vendor, I am a patient or a service provider; each of us disappears for others into the roles we are made to perform. But what happens when the body holds me at its distance? What happens when I confront the image of the other person?
‘Each living man, really, does not yet have any resemblance’, Blanchot writes; ‘each man, in the rare moments when he shows a similarity to himself, seems to be only more distant, close to a dangerous neutral region, astray in himself, and in some sense his own ghost, already having no other life than that of the return’. One should understand by analogy with Blanchot’s remarks on the image of the thing. The image confronts us when the thing is put out of use, when it no longer has any value with respect to the tasks and projects which occupy us. The thing fails, but even as it disappears from our world, it brings us into contact with the image that as it were keeps its distance at its heart.
What is the image? One might think of it as the materiality of the thing, as its silent weight or presence as it fails to offer itself to the light of meaning. Then with respect to the image of the other person, it is as though the cultural categories which organise our relationship to others in a manner analogus to the way in which our tasks and projects organise our relationship with things have failed. But if these categories can no longer guide us, if it is the other, finally, who is to be revealed, it may appear to have happened too late: the one before me is, on Blanchot’s presentation, is a corpse, or is close to being one.
Perhaps Giacometti’s sculptures remind us of this other. This is because they do not, as Sartre writes, ‘inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’, but indicate another movement, a kind of restlessness. The image is the ‘other’ Lazarus who responds to the call ‘Lazarus venture forth’.
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