Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Image of Visual Culture
- 1 Cutting and Letting-Be
- 2 Dancing Equality: Image, Imitation and Participation
- 3 A Question of Listening: Nancean Resonance, Return and Relation in Charlie Chaplin
- 4 The Image: Mimesis and Methexis
- 5 On the Threshold: Visual Culture, Invisible Nature
- 6 Pornosophy: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Pornographic Image
- 7 Presentation and Disappearance: Dialogue between Soun-Gui Kim and Jean-Luc Nancy
- 8 Writing in the Place of the Animal
- 9 Together at the Limit: Jean-Luc Nancy, Art and Community
- 10 Turning Around the Written Mark, Opening from a Weight of Thought
- 11 Uncanny Landscapes of Photography: The Partage of Double-Exposure after Jean-Luc Nancy
- Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Image: Mimesis and Methexis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Image of Visual Culture
- 1 Cutting and Letting-Be
- 2 Dancing Equality: Image, Imitation and Participation
- 3 A Question of Listening: Nancean Resonance, Return and Relation in Charlie Chaplin
- 4 The Image: Mimesis and Methexis
- 5 On the Threshold: Visual Culture, Invisible Nature
- 6 Pornosophy: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Pornographic Image
- 7 Presentation and Disappearance: Dialogue between Soun-Gui Kim and Jean-Luc Nancy
- 8 Writing in the Place of the Animal
- 9 Together at the Limit: Jean-Luc Nancy, Art and Community
- 10 Turning Around the Written Mark, Opening from a Weight of Thought
- 11 Uncanny Landscapes of Photography: The Partage of Double-Exposure after Jean-Luc Nancy
- Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I opened my eyes; what an increase of sensation! The light, the celestial vault, the verdure of the earth, the transparency of the waters, gave animation to my spirits, and conveyed pleasures which exceed the powers of expression. I at first believed that all these objects existed within me, and formed a part of myself. – Buffon, Natural History: Of Man (1785)
The use of a medium to experience an image is analogous to the way in which we experience our own bodies as media through which we both give birth to inner images and receive images from the outside world. These mental images happen within our bodies, like dreams, and in both cases – that is, in the case of dream and mental images – we perceive the image as if it were using our body as a host medium. – Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body
When we say of a portrait that it lacks only speech, we evoke something more and other than the sole privation of verbal expression. This very privation, in manifesting itself as the unique lack that would separate representation from life, already transports us into the sentiment or the sensation of a speech of the portrait. The lack affecting the portrait is designated at the same time as considerable and imponderable, so much does its annulment appear accessible and even imminent. In fact, the portrait speaks, it is already in the midst of speaking and it speaks to us from its privation of speech. It makes us hear a speaking before or after speech, the very speaking of the lack of speech. And we understand it, it communicates this saying, its sense and its truth.
In a similar manner, we desire to hear the voice of she or of he who is absent. Their aspect can be carried with us in a photograph, or indeed a film, to which the recording of the voice can also be associated. But listening to this voice still remains of an order other than the order of the visual. Its resonance attunes us to an order of sense and of truth whose essence differs from the visual order of recognition. Love and hate are always that by which recognition is judged indigent.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nancy and Visual Culture , pp. 73 - 92Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016