Homo Spectator

Marie-José Mondzain, Homo Spectator (Paris: Bayard: 2007)
(Translated by Patrick ffrench for the 'Caves' symposium at the Anatomy Theatre, King's College London, February 2011)
Chapter I
The Images that give birth to us
To exhale and to stand up are the same gesture. Valère Novarina.
It is a grand and beautiful spectacle to see man emerge from nothing through his own efforts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
It is in a sense the history of the seeing subject that I want to relate here. My concerns will take the form of a narrative, an imaginary narrative or a fiction which from the hands of the first spectator draws the capacity to speak and to tell us now of the gestures which gave birth at the same time to humanity and to the image, and of what is at stake in such a birth. This is not in any way a question of a myth of genesis which would posit a demiurge as the all-powerful cause of light, and of a creature in his image. Quite on the contrary, it is the story of the image of man made by the hand of man, to whom we are indebted for eyes which open uniquely onto the world. This is an effort to witness and to recognise the birth of the subject who one day will become the spectator of the world, and who will also give the worlds he sees to be seen by other subjects. These other subjects in their turn will be constituted in this exchange as spectators and producers of innumerable worlds. I will interrogate the story of the subjective experience represented by the birth of sight in the subject who comes to the world, when his actual birth has already taken place. I am asking when the spectator comes into the world. My approach might allow us to grasp how and at what point the image finds its place in this history of our birth into humanity as such. The image will not be interrogated as an object of vision among others, but on the contrary as emerging from a gesture which makes possible a relation, that of our look and the visible world. What is at stake is the constitution of a history of the imaginary, the fictive gestures which preceded and conditioned the manifestation of a world designated as real. The subject becomes the spectator of what escapes him, spectator of the limit with which he will establish relations.
I am turning away from Byzantine or more widely theological sources, as well as from the modern and contemporary sources which have furnished debates on the visible and on the image.
I am moving towards the graphic inscriptions discovered by palaeontology. For more than a century everyone has been able to see in these inscriptions the traces of a man, traces which provoke such emotion that it is customary to speak of cave art with all the precautions that it is necessary to take with the modern use of such a term, faced with the enigma posed by these magisterial figures. If I say magisterial this is precisely to point out that I detect something concerning transmission in these figures; a signal addressed to us is inscribed in these dark places of rock. Our effort is to grasp, at their source, that is on the traces of the very first vestiges, the ways in which man signals to himself the very possibility of vision in the heart of darkness. This possibility seems linked to the foundational impossibility of seeing oneself. It is in that place that we see becoming manifest the humanizing necessity of the operations of the image for a homo sapiens who has set out courageously on the imaginary path of signs. On this path, I am going to devote myself to an exercise in primary philosophy, and say that the man of the Chauvet grotto, since there we find some of the oldest graphic vestiges, gives himself to be seen first by himself and then by the whole of humanity, which comes after him.[1] Giving to be seen is in these places the fabrication of a homo faber who brings to the stage the fabrication of signs, using here the imaging tools of the mouth and the hands. In the grotto, the hand does not seize or measure, it inscribes a distance which it offers to the eyes. In this place the hand produces for the eyes the object of the first look. If these images have such a powerful effect on us, it is not only because we discover there, with wonder, the precision and graphic sensibility of a gesture without fault or clumsiness. Neither is it because the enigma of these traces awakens in us the still possible magic of forgotten gods. Making visible is delineated here in full autonomy, at a distance from any meaning, and I have not the slightest intention of proposing an interpretation of these drawings and signs. If these images astonish, it is because we are directly concerned by this powerful address, we receive the full force of a signal destined for our look. It speaks to us because it speaks of us. What is at stake in this place is the sense of a gesture, not the meaning of an object. In the millennial silence of these images, what is in play is the sonorous virtuality of a decisive articulation of the spectator with speech. Thus what is also in play is the relation between the situation of spectatorship and what has been called the human condition.
Far from temples and museums, we are here in the shadows of the caves where 32,000 years ago ‘humanized’ men designated themselves as the species charged with the specific task which fell upon them of becoming human. The body won from the anthropoids will not only be the most able body, the most shrewd and inventive body in the manipulation of things, it will also be the most fragile body, and the body least integrated with its natural environment. This is the body of an unarmed man, a man of impotence and fear in face of the excess of a world which is enigmatic, unpredictable and unmastered. There is a sort of sovereign displacement of gestures from activities of simple survival, since the hand and the mouth must at a certain point change in use and direction. An original intermittence is established, the intermittence specific to the spectator and the creator of signs. There begins a time which is no longer that of day and night, not of the seasons. A singular experience of time will emerge as distinct from that which makes of life an organic segment between birth and death. Man turns his body and his gestures away from their everyday tasks of survival and conservation. There is a time for life and henceforth there will be a time to look at life and to think it. The man who comes here to draw is experimenting a new temporality, of which what he traces is a mark. He will become, through such a strange sense of time, specific to him, master of day and night. The birth of homo spectator is an insurrection of the birth of the imaging subject, which brings his immortality into being, since now he knows he is mortal.
Cave images are innumerable and offer strange continuities over thousands of years and thousands of miles of distance. Palaeontologists and anthropologists have not ceased to question their ritual, religious, shamanic or sexual meanings. It was doubtless Leroi-Gourhan who was the first to broach what philosophy could expect from such evidence in his intermittent affirmation and renunciation of analogical fictions and hypotheses concerning the caves. Leroi-Gourhan recognised in the cave images the double inscription of sexual difference and of access to symbolic operations, thus to speech, on the basis of the organic evolution of bodies, and through consideration of the distribution of cave figures. He magnificently described the liberation of the foot, of the hand and the forehead, and the millennial construction of memory. If his interpretation of animal figures was controversial, he was nevertheless the first to formulate the possibility of a reading of cave images as the birth of symbolic activity. It is not a question, for me, of setting my story at the level of paleontological science, but of identifying the mechanisms of separation and distance, while taking account of what palaeontology has taught us to recognise and to understand. These distinctions relate as much to sexual difference as to what separates the species, or to what separates the animate from the inanimate world, or the world of shadows from the world of light, and that of the living from that of the dead. To produce images is to inscribe the visible with one’s body, here with the hands and with the mouth, the operators of separation and thus of alterity. This is why I have chosen to speak of the hands one finds everywhere, negative or positive, depending on whether their tracing was effected by impression or by stencil.
What I will evoke, therefore, with as much fantasia as possible, devoting myself thereby to an imaging operation, is the scenario which simultaneously installs the impossibility of seeing oneself, the birth of the image as an operation of withdrawal, the identification of the self through and in dissemblance, the necessity of pressure upon the world in order to exist outside it, at a distance from it, in a word I would like to evoke the inscription of cave images as the inaugural scenario which installs man as spectator in a relation of alterity.
What is my fantasia?
A man leaves the surface of the world and goes down into a grotto. He penetrates into it until he reaches a place where he decides to stop. This place far from the sun is all darkness and so man lights it with a torch. It is perhaps because the light from the torches is constantly dancing that the man sees the shadows dancing and sees fleeting figures emerge on the wall of the cave, figures which evoke, as do clouds in the outside world, the silhouettes of our desires or fears. The man who is there, alone or not, who has taken this path, has taken the risk of being swallowed in unknown darkness, in the archaic place of a return to the earth, to the night from which he emerged to be born. But the man who one day came into the world, this man has not yet been born into his own life as a separate and speaking subject. He plays out the scenario of a return, of a descent back into the matriarchal cavern, an uninhabited place, and one not fit for habitation. These places are chosen for images and sometimes for the cult of the dead. We are at a place of departure, the starting point of all future separations, distances. The man who is to become human is not the mythical subject of a fall from light into the definitive shadows of a disastrous condition, as theologians and more than a few philosophers have imagined. This man of these myths is conceived as subject to the power of an other always stronger and more powerful than he is; the man who is born in the light is caught in relations of force in which his lack of power is a factor only of weakness, never of sovereignty. But the man who we are following into the darkness, in his underground descent, has taken a completely different path. He returns to the darkness of the soil to construct himself, and to reshape the shadows, and the destiny of what will come to illuminate them. He will transform the relations of force in which the real crushes him into an imaginary relation which confers upon him the capacity to be born, thus to become his own cause, putting himself into the world and engaging with the world in a commerce of signs. It is neither the sun nor some speleological or Luciferian divinity that illuminates him. No; it is the torch he lit with his own hands. He stands in front of a wall in the darkness in which he creates light. Faced with the rock, he stands there, upright in the opacity of a face-to-face, with the wall as his horizon, massive, mute and sightless, just as, outside, he faced the incommensurability of obstacles and of nameless terrors. This wall is the world that resists mastery and penetration. This will however be his fulcrum, the irreducible starting point. It is from here that he will begin again, having of his own volition ‘buried himself’ there. Now he extends his arm, presses against the wall and in the same gesture separates himself from it: an arm’s length is the first distancing of oneself from the surface with which he will establish a relation by means of this contact. This touch at arm’s length is effectively the first distance taken from that with which one enters into contact. This is no longer like it is outside, in the light of the sun, where his eyes see further than what his eyes can touch. In the world under the sun his eyes are a tool of foresight, of a distance to cross, or to move through. Outside, eyes open onto a horizon which they interrogate and which provokes a desire for conquest. The horizon is the experience of a distance which solicits dreams or desires for mastery. Its inaccessibility favours the transcendent imagination. Here there is no other horizon for the eyes other than the modest proposition of an arm’s length. This is the immanence of a hand-to-hand. The arm outstretched, the hand pressed to the cave wall, there is no question of flight or of approach, only of keeping the distance measured by the hand (main-tenue), staying there now (main-tenant), in that stance traced out there for the future. This distance is commensurate with the body. The eye is subject to the order of the hands; the cave wall is the horizon and the surface of the look. All around and further back all is darkness. This gesture of separation and connection is the first move. It determines the two points – the body and the surface of the world, in between which the gestures which follow will be played out. This world is a wall. Man and the wall tend towards each other, entertain each other, insofar as man stands in front of the cave wall, which has its own tenure, and what passes between them, in the interval, is only in the hands of man.
The second stage concerns pigment. Man will devote himself to two kinds of action; either he coats his hands with coloured substance, or he fills his mouth with this pigment, in a more liquid form.[2] For this the mouth must cease to be a mouth which bites, tears and swallows. It becomes the mouth of the first cry, a mouth that breathes, an orifice which sucks and blows. But now when it blows out it inscribes, since it is not a mouth which spits or a mouth which cries. This mouth expels the matter of signs with the force of breath. The inter-relation (entretien) of the mouth and the hand is no longer of prehensile predation, possessive and destined for nourishment, it installs a double movement of withdrawal. Man blows on his hand which holds nothing, but holds him there against the rock wall. He breathes in, exhales. The moment of expulsion produces something outside, a jet of liquid, followed by a necessary inhalation of air. It happens that the hand is directly soaked in pigment, immersed in colour, and that man places it on the rock and presses it there for some time. Man presses into the world. Did he wonder if the world was pressing back upon him? No-one can say?
But then comes the third act, the decisive act, the gesture of withdrawal. The hand must be withdrawn. The body separates itself from its pressure. But it is not the hand stained with pigment that man looks upon, since there now appears in front of the eyes of the man who blew upon the wall the image, his image, which he can see now because his hand is no longer there. He cannot divest himself of his hand and look at it at a distance from himself, as if it were the hand of another, or a mutilated hand. It is not that he sees the hand as an object, detached from him, like a dead thing or a fragment having the same powers as his own hand. The image of the hand is neither metaphor nor metonymy. The hand as image has none of the powers that the creator of tools knows his hand to have, yet in the suspension of its manual capacities it points to the power of the look which rests upon it. It is something made, in a making which calls for expression. It points to a fundamental capacity of the subject who brings his first look to bear upon the trace of his own withdrawal. To withdraw is to produce one’s image and to give it to the eyes to be seen, as a trace which is alive, yet separate from oneself. What kind of life will this hand enjoy if it is not the life of images, images without power but richly endowed with a strange potential, the potential to inscribe the signs of distance? Man had already seen his hand, but he had never seen this semblance of a hand, this re-semblance, the image of himself which remained there outside him on the inanimate surface of the world. This hand born from shadows is not a shadow. The association of this gesture with animist rituals is far from certain, but it is unsurprising, since what is really at stake are the vestiges of the first commerce between the animate and the inanimate, between what is living and what is not. What comes towards us from this encounter is the operation of a separation and of a connection that this sign makes with that from which it separates. The cave wall is the mirror of man, but a non-specular mirror, and this hand is the first non-specular self-portrait of man, the manual portrait of man.
Theology tends to have man emerge from the hands of God, from the hand of some divine potter. The gesture in the grotto creates man from the image of his own hand. It is the self-portrait of a subject who knows only of himself and of the world that which the traces of his hands will leave. Narcissus is not the protagonist of the first scene which gives us birth or death to the extent of the separation which must be marked between the subject of the look and the object of vision. The man of the caves does not propose a visual object. He stages the composition of his first look, he brings himself into the world as a spectator in a scenography in which his hands are the figure of the first spectacle. The first look at the visible world is the work of hands. It owes nothing to a sculpted object nor to the fluid nature of a transparent milieu. The spectator is the work of the hands. We know that when Narcissus looks at himself he receives back a reflection in which his hands play no part. A morbid and fatal jouissance derives from this silent impotence of the hands. The child who recognises himself in the mirror, is he not struggling in the hands of another, is he not led to extend his hand to see and to welcome the image given to him, in the proximity of an untouchable distance? The man of the grotto creates his horizon and gives himself birth in stretching out his hand to an irreducible and invigorating alterity, his own.
The Hand of the Other
The hand has the intermittent role of being a part of my body which I can use in place of the body of the other. The hand can give sexual pleasure and thus at any time take the place of the other’s sex, masculine or feminine. So what happens when one divests oneself of the hand to move towards another body? The sexual figures drawn by these first hands suggest in their turn that when it ceases to function as the phantasm of the other’s body the hand becomes the operator of sexual difference. If the hand has the power to give the pleasure procured by the sex of the other is it not the case that when this hand makes something seen, the image is detached from it, and it separates itself from the real hand, inscribing in the same distance the separation of the subject from the world and from the separation of the sexes? It is the unreality of the image which causes the real to come forth, as the experience of irreducible distance, the radicality of separation. Leroi-Gourhan’s recognition of the inscription of sexual difference in the animal figures of the caves thus seem all the more pertinent insofar as these graphic gestures seem predestined to the staging of this distance, this spacing. The hand which draws is the inaugural figure of this installation of difference, alone capable of opening up the field of signs. The image of the hand is the image of an other with which no real relation is accessible, but the imaginary relation to this hand passes through the recognition of something that resembles and signals, makes a sign, from the furthest distance. This is why in the very places where one finds these hands one can also recognise the image of a vulva or the figure of a phallic form, a recognition favoured by the accidents of the rocks.[3] The real of the wall is the point of application of the signs of difference. To make an image comes down to conferring to the hands the task of inscribing a difference, which designates other bodies by a hand separated from oneself. The inscription of this difference has to do with the story of our hands. The image of the world is inscribed in the same movement as the image of the difference between the sexes. This is perhaps why the sin of Onan is of the same nature as the sin of idolatry. The subject’s desire must not have an object, and the taboo against images condemns objects of adoration. The hands of Onan entertain with his own body an object relation which leads to a satisfaction without alterity. This is the inverse of the trap in which Narcissus floundered; he fell in love with an image not made by the hands of man; Onan was in love with hands incapable of producing images. It is because it is in the power of the hand to become the sex of the other and to be satisfied thereby that it falls to the hand to separate from itself, in order to create, in the image of its self-separation, a horizon of expectation without object, but oriented towards another body and another world, The hand is the non-sexual organ which opens indistinctly in each body to inscribe separation or not to inscribe it, the separation of the sexes inseparable from that of the look. Thus the cave wall is there to respond to the pulse of a double desire – to construct an image on the surface of an irreducible real, an image which emerges from the hands and is within reach of the voice and the image, and to constitute a separation of bodies, since the hand will no longer be the hallucinated sex of the other but the agent of the appearance of another body, encountered in the field of a new horizon. The hand makes visible the surface on which difference appears, as inseparable from the signs which constitute the presence of a subject faced with the world. The hands are the first organ of address, they address a sign to the body which looks, and the spectator is the site of this first address. To see demands the scene of a making visible which separates the object of desire from an object-relation turned in upon oneself. Without hands, there is no image and man is without a look, deprived of the look of the Other.
Why, when it seems that Christianity is responsible for having re-established the power of the hands, does it seem to dismiss them again in the periods following the resurrection? Whether it is the noli me tangere directed to the hands of Mary Magdalene, or the doubts of Thomas, who is reproached for having wanted to touch, the hands seem to suggest a renewed condemnation which it looked like the incarnation had revoked. It would be a mistake to see here a renewed law against the making visible of the hands. These hands make nothing visible, they want to touch so as to believe. These scenes take place for the companions of Emmaus, in the short time during which those who formerly knew the one who died are now no longer able to recognise him, since he no longer has his body, he is no longer an object of vision. It is then that hands, forgetful of their power of separation seek to hold the object of their doubt and incredulity. What has happened with the resuscitated image is that mourning cannot work through taking the dead in hand again, but must pass through a new gesture of separation, addressed to the look and not to vision. The image which appears to them is no longer of a body, it is impalpable light endowed with strange powers, the image of their desire to see which summons only their look. This is why when the hands of Thomas seek to verify the tangible reality of what they see, Jesus proposes that he touch the holes of his wounds. This is the new regime of vision which the eyes will make visible, they will address holes to the look which moves towards the recognition of the other. The story also speaks of the incapacity of the hands to retain the dead. With them is inaugurated a relation to the image through which, further on, will be found the strength to cure the melancholy of grief. One does not seize an image any more than one grasps hold of a phantom. Images are not held in the hands which create them. They escape from them in the uninterrupted movement which makes the image an operator of separation apt to produce a spectator. In order for there to be a look the hands must withdraw. If one knows how to listen to ghosts one can hear that they speak to us of the shared life of images, and not of the terrifying return of the dead. It is thus that one should understand the status, in the history of the hands, of the fables of images not made by the hands of man. During the crisis produced by the iconoclastic emperors, one of the major arguments evoked in favour of the image was an insistent recourse to the legend of so-called archeiropoetic images, those not made by the hand of man. According to this legend, any image made by the hand of man would be justified by Jesus’s act of leaving his own image in the form of a ‘natural’ impression on a sheet. This legend enjoyed innumerable declensions as much in the West as in the East.[4] The iconic doctrine of the subject of the hands thus refers back to the double register of the image, its visibility and its invisibility. Iconic truth has nothing to do with a resemblance specific to what we still know today under the guise of the digital impression. The authentification of a semblance draws its legitimacy from similitude with an untouched impression.
The Translucent
How is the invisibility of the world constructed, for a subject, and how is that of a subject constructed for the world, in the darkness, and from our hands? Man asked the fire of his torches for what Aristotle evoked perfectly in Treatise on the Soul[5]: ‘The object of vision is the visible. The visible is colour, and it is also what it is possible to say in speech, while remaining nameless.’ ‘We have told of the reason why colour can only be seen in the light. Fire is seen in the two cases kai en skoto kai en photi, in light and in darkness, and that is necessary because it is thanks to it that the translucent becomes what it is’.[6] Aristotle attributes to the fire that one sees in the light (the sun) and to that which one sees in the darkness (the fire of torches) the power to make the translucent or the diaphanous pass from potential to actual. Now the translucent is for Aristotle the invisible and nameless condition of the visible itself in the unfolding of colour. The translucent is independent of the light of the sun of which it is the ‘shaded resting place’, as Anca Vasiliu has written.[7] The invisible condition of the visible supports the condition of the visible not as a power of the eyes but as a power of thought. Colour determines access to what the Christians will later call ‘incarnation’. “In fact the visible is colour and this colour is applied to what is visible in itself. ‘ Now what is in itself is not so by the power of words but because it contains in itself the cause of its own visibility. All colour is the putting into movement of the translucent which is in the nature of the thing. This is why there is no colour without light, and the colour of everything is seen in the light. Thus the man of the Chauvet grotto came to greet the translucent through illuminating with his fire the colour that it brought to life in the shadows. The translucent is not the transparent, even if transparency serves as a metaphor for it. Transparency is crossed through by light and many colourless materials can give us the illusion of seeing the translucent. But the translucent itself is supported by colour. This is why transparency is an analogy of the translucent, and can even become a trap, the place of disaster, as for Narcissus. On the contrary, the translucent remains a constitutive and invisible hypothesis of the visible itself. The translucent produced in the cave is the silence of the anonymous logos which awaits the gift of the voice which will arise from the image. The translucent will invisibly direct the look through the power of the visible in colour towards the nomination of things which accede to the visible through colour. The translucent is the relation between the visible and the nameless voice which supports the look. It appears that it is this translucency which is intended by Christians when they seek to name what it is that supports toe look beyond the visible. They designate it as a transfiguration of the look, a metamorphosis of the visible in the visible itself, and as giving rise to the recognition by a subject of another subject. The story of the pilgrims of Emmaus, cited above, wove this legend. In that place where the eyes remained blind, the look constructs, in the visible, the commerce of the separated, and the division of things into bodies. But the hands of the Chauvet grotto draw a completely different lesson from the shadows, because there man finds his darkness, there he creates his light and there he develops his nascent capacity to entertain, with the world, a constitutive and separating relation. Not in sharing out bread, but through incarnating in colour the image of the separate. It is certainly the case that the evangelical fable is concerned with conferring to the hands the gesture of distribution which opens the eyes, but, in the grotto, it is not a question of regulating our vital relation with the dead, thanks to the conjuration of ghosts. In the grotto, what is at stake is the separation of the living from the site which first gave them life, a separation in which the infans first accedes to speech.
The Birth of the Spectator
To make an image is to bring man as spectator into the world. To be human is to produce the trace of one’s absence on the surface of the world and to thus constitute oneself as subject, a subject who will never see himself as an object among others but who in seeing the other shows him what they might share: signs, traces, gestures of welcome and withdrawal. To make an image is to give the other something to see, including oneself, as a subject separate from oneself, to show the other the trace of successive withdrawals and uninterrupted movements. If the image is born in the night, on the occasion of a departure, if this image liberates the image-making subject from the object that could keep him there in the darkness, is it not also this which is transmitted to us in the fable of the daughter of Sicyone, told by Pliny?[8] The operation of the image is the point of departure, man sets off, he will speak and not turn back. The man who gave birth to the humanity of man signals to us with his hand, indicating in that gesture that the visible is produced by hands as destined for a look which renounces the possession of things and possession by them. These hands look at us and speak to us, they address humanity as a whole, and with insistence, since the one who left his trace knows himself to be fragile. These hands have the contour of an appeal for the acknowledgement of what makes humans of us, and of what we have in our hands. This gesture of self-foundation, of self by self, this sign with the hand, comes to us as a message concerning our birth to humanity. It owes nothing to transcendence or to any other creator. It transforms into the look the vision of a subject who is not constituted in an object-relation but who produces in the visible the sign of a commerce with the absence of an object, the sign of this absence itself. Outside the cave, in which no-one would stay long, in the world under the sun, relations of objects, whatever they are, will be forever under the aegis of a relation of power to impotence, force to lack of force, mastery to submission. Possession will be property and will depend on just or unjust, equal or unequal rules of the articulation of things. Where there are objects there will be real masters, but also imaginary powers. The cave is not the place where idols are made. Idols concern the commerce of shadows with the visible, in a world where hands give them body or matter so as to negotiate with the visible over signs of delay, prediction and calculation. The domain of ruse and of dissimulation is under the sun. The idol appeals to presence, the image revokes it; the idol belongs to the field of dominion, the image to the uncertain domain of fragility. The primal scene of the image is independent of ruse and grasp. It is true that the term eidolon long designated among the Greeks the visible signs of negotiations with the shadows over the terms of belief, while idolatry semantically brought the idol over to the side where fascination and adoration were more closely linked to the power of things than to the potential of the subject. The image does not belong among objects, thus the relation of the subject to his image is not a relation of possession but of dispossession. What gives this decisive scenario its dramatic potential is the fact that the tension which animates involves the same courage in the face of the experience of fear, power, authority.
Condemnation of the Hands
We can better understand why the Christians invented “images not made by the hand of man” in order to guarantee the iconic privileges of God, his precedence in the genealogy of man’s images. It is through the condemnation of image-making hands that the Hebrews decided to preserve this divine privilege. Hebrew thought considered hands only in their capacity of fabricating objects, and never in their capacity of producing signs of separation. Only speech and writing were in their eyes susceptible of constituting a subject worthy of the dignity of being human. This position obliged the composers of Scripture to elaborate two distinct scenarios, one oriented towards the condemnation of the works of hands, the other intended to preserve the constitutive quality of the look. On the one hand, the power of the eyes is cursed by Noah, who rewards the look of respectful children and punishes the vision of the incestuous son. The look is distinguished from vision but does not receive its dignity from the power of our hands.
The only gesture which is authorised for the construction of the look of the good son is that of occultation, the backwards step which covers what the eyes should not see. There is no redemption for the visible. This scenario transmits the question of separation in terms of filiation and paternal authority, founded on the invisibility of transcendent power. It is clear in this story that the register of the constitutive look is present, but that it owes nothing to the hands, and everything to the word, which can bless or curse.
There is nothing further from the man of the Chauvet grotto, who chose to confront the darkness so as to appropriate for himself he capacity to show. He does not leave the grotto backwards, in a state of submission, he is the master of what he does when he shows what he separates. He thus founds the authority of the visible on the basis of his own gestures. It is in effect a gesture of self-authorisation of his legitimacy disengaged from natural filiation. In another space, the interdiction in the Torah which bears upon the works of hands inscribes in the register of power the look of an all powerful creator which leaves no place for the independent autonomy of a self-constituting subject. The hands of the Old Testament are solely the agents of darkness, and this darkness threatens the subsolar order, in which strengths and weaknesses, mastery and submission are shared out without possibility of appeal. Here again, these are not hands instructed of their own capacities, only the voice may instruct the look about its limitations. Man does not draw his legitimacy from himself, and if he holds authority he is authorised only by the visible power of which he has a temporary mandate. The creator is the sole author.
The man of the caves is an author, his work is the spectator. Before the spectacle of the world he must live in the uninterrupted tension which makes of him the object of vision and the subject of a look, starting from this very world. Platonic philosophy also protected the sovereignty of being in constructing the allegory of its own cave. This allegory was needed, however, as the dramatised scenario of our incapacity to found the sovereignty of the logos in the field of knowledge as well as in the field of politics. Wherever we look we see that the image puts into crisis and difficulty the whole regime of order and rule. The hands of the cave do not rule, they elaborate a different type of sovereignty, perhaps the authority of the weak over the forces which crush them. We know that in the Platonic darkness man is a prisoner of shadows, impeded by the chains of error and the opacity of bodies. He is in need of a master to lead him from night into day. Night thus comes from behind him, and he must leave the cave to accede to the illumination of the truth: phantasia of the sovereign power of the logos. Socratic philosophy, however, was intimately haunted by the model of the birth and the putting into the world of man of himself. This maieutic self-foundation did not, however, lead to the triumph of the knowledge of midwives over that of philosophers! Plato fears the power of the image-makers, whose commerce with darkness he denounces. The science of return is illuminated by the power of a master. In vigorous and irrefutable response to all the myths and stories which persistently protect the tyranny of a power or the discourse of a master, the man of the Chauvet grotto responds that it is man who produces light with his own hands and it is these illuminated hands which bring to being the definition of man, in the cave. This man is the subject of the signs of withdrawal and of separation, the site of his origin and of a departure without return. One only leaves the cave having appropriated for oneself the potential of one’s desire, which the subsolar mechanisms of power will across the centuries strive to make us forget. The first men invented the image made by the hand of man, the image of man as spectator of the works of hands, the spectator of the hands of man which bring into being man’s look at himself. Man thus causes the emergence of the look of the world at him. Anamnesis will be a political gesture for as long as human desire maintains the courage to oppose all dominion, of whatever kind, and to preserve the imaging capacity, versus all the regressive temptations of return. In the theatre of our birth, each repetition is an invention.
Breath and the Word
The inaugural gesture of sight in the nocturnal yet luminous image of a withdrawal was at the origin of speech itself since the mouth which blew participated in the operations of constitutive separation. If the translucent has something to do with transparency it is not that of the ether conceived as a milieu, but the transparency of the air which is specific to breath. The mouth which blows the translucent will be able to speak, it begins to speak since in producing the visible it empties itself to leave room for the proffering of names. Man creates himself by word of mouth (de bouche à l’oreille). Is this not the real meaning of the Annunciation? The mouth will name what it sees, what it puts into the world. The image is the place where speech is born. To see is to become the spectator of the image that our hands produce to inscribe the trace of our passage. The figure of expulsion operates on a double register; one in expiration, the other in the abandonment of places. Separation relates in an inaugural sense to an experiment of inside and outside dependent on real sequences of entrance and exit. Breathing is a foundational experience. As long as the child is in the womb of the mother the experience of a distinct outside and of an inside is no doubt mediated through a sonorous and primary tactility; the birth of the skin which submits to and provokes movements and the confused sensibility of the edges and limits of the body. Agitations cannot be temporalised in that internal space. Going out into the air suddenly projects the body into a new rhythm, that of breath. The site of the cave, the inaugural scene of the cave wall which one moves away from, installing a surface of the world which takes the place of an irreducible real, is inseparable from respiratory rhythm and the temporality of the cycle of breathing. But what manifest fragility there is in this dramaturgy of the birth of man to signs by way of images. The man of the grottoes stages the register of his two expulsions, that of his breath and that of his exit from the place which enclosed him and can no longer retain him. The scenario of expulsion is the foundational figure of the production of all signs. It is thus, perhaps, that the spectator of the world was born, a man who walks and who breathes, a man, that is, who will live his relation to an outside in the different regimes of his movements and displacements, that of respiratory rhythm, that of his gestures and his steps. Breath, and the step, are given to the hands, to confer the expressive vision of an appropriation of the world through its image and its nomination. There is no image thus no sign, speech or writing without the potential of breath to animate the movement of the feet. The step and the heartbeat together compose the inseparable tempo of imaging operations. We will come back to this when it is a question of subjective collapse in response to images which fascinate, paralyse and ‘take the breath away’. The industries of visual apnoea are tremendously violent with regard to what brings us to humanity itself. The image born from the gestures of the hands and the mouth draw their rhythm, and their temporality, from the breath and the step. The scenario we have designated has sequences, and has a rhythm which inscribes the birth of the image in the whole body, and inscribes this body in time. The adventure of the look is profoundly synaesthetic, it concerns the whole body. In this light we might understand better the mistreatment of the body in the industrial productions of the visible, when these do violence to the breath and to mobility, and to all the various forms of appetite. If the mouth and the hands are the organs which initiate the image, it is thus the whole history of orality, of our breath and of our appetite, which is at stake in the foundation of the subject. The spectator is born of our hands and through the force of breath. The mistreatment of the image is a mistreatment of desire throughout the body.



[1] This is the oldest decorated grotto thus far revealed. More than 30,000 years old, it was discovered in the Ardèche on the 18th December 1994 by three speleologists: Eliette Brunel, Jean Matie Chauvet and Christian Hilaire. It is not accessible by the public. I refer here to the documentary film made by Pierre Oscar Levy, In the Silence of the Chauvet Grotto, shot between 1999 and 2003 thanks to authorization by the Ministry of Culture. See also the site: www.hominides.com/html/art/grotte-chauvet.htm
[2] See the film by Gilles Sevastos, Master’s Hand, which shows the experiments of the early historian Jean Courtin (Artè, Archimède, 08/09/1995) who shows and explains the modes of production of the cave images, and the negative and positive hands.
[3] Jean Clottes, The Chauvet Grotto, the art of origins, Paris, Seuil, 2001. See also the film by Pierre Oscar Levy, The Chauvet Grotto, Dialogues with the Team, in which the spectator can follow an intriguing debate on the interpretation of the figures within Jean Clottes’ team itself.
[4] See the chapter ‘Story of a Spectre’ in my book Image, Icon, Economy, pp. 235-252.
[5] II, 418a, 26-419a, 25.
[6] II, 418a, 10.
[7] On the translucent, see Anca Vasiliu, On the Translucent, Paris, Vrin, 1997, p. 193.

[8] Pliny, Natural History, Book XXXV. On this topic see my analysis of this tale in The Commerce of Looks, Paris, Seuil, 2003, p. 50.