In a letter about the Penelope episode in Ulysses dated February 8, 1922, James Joyce writes: “In conception and technique I tried to depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman.” We can distinguish two modes of reflection in this synthetic observation. First, the idea that informed the twentieth century of an end to humankind, fleeting passengers on the earth both as individuals and as a species. This leads one to think of at least two kinds of inhumanity: the absence of man (determining, for instance, the treatment of nature in Godard's work today) which is thus an anthropological inhumanity; and that which has precipitated this absence in the heart of humankind—a moral inhumanity.

But a second mode of reflection is instructive here. Joyce says this inhumanity is elaborated and manifested “in conception and technique,” that is, in the structure of the text itself. It is therefore no longer a matter of motif, theme or story—as decisive as they may be—but of formal work. Such formal work is committed to envisaging certain cinematic paths of dissimilarity and therefore proposes four notions and procedures that are, if not necessary, at least useful to the figural analysis of cinema. Today, there is a corpus of films that seems major but that analysis has neglected: contemporary action movies which allow one to observe the treatment of a critical situation—murder—where something of the human, the body, action or gesture is revealed as the figures break apart. John Woo's films impose themselves here because death is at once his favorite motif, his main subject and his recurring problem. Let's not confuse these three concepts. In Woo’s films, they correspond euphorically.

According to Erich Auerbach, the work of figuration concerns all phenomena related to plastic form: appearance but also the instability of things and, selectively within this field, the role played by resemblance in representation. This engages with two kinds of manifestation:

• 1. Doubles: copy, semblance, vision, dream image, model, sketch, plan.

• 2. Analogical undertakings and, thus, analogy as a dynamic: the role of resemblance, balance, correspondence.

A figure, Auerbach explains, is not primarily an entity, but the establishment of a connection: Something's movement toward its Other.