Upcoming Events
Paris, Jean Charmoille Seminar
Image of Life, Life of Image
Whereas the “media” would have us believe that images control our destiny; somehow they manage to lay claim to a different one for the speaking being. Why?
They history whose contours I am proposing to sketch begins 2000 years ago, with an unprecedented event that was styled as a mystery: the living incarnation of the father, the son as his visible image. A knowledge of life is presupposed as image. Patristic thinking, highly aware of the elusive stakes underlying this, encouraged interchanges to promote it.
This was too much for the temporal powers who knew nothing but the image’s political weight. Constantine I called the Nicene Council in 325 in order to put a stop to the development that had begun to take shape.
But the life of the image persisted outside the fixity of dogmas, it found refuge in Byzantium, in the secret of the visibility of icons.
In the midst of their flourishing, Constantine V surrounded himself with theologians and unleashed the first crisis of iconoclasm in 754, which would subside only after his death, at the Nicean Council II in 787. Thirty years later however, political power returned to the scene of the crime via Leon V. The arguments were subtle, the Church Fathers used Aristotle’s Organon to support their iconophilia.
Years passed, and Rome became the focus again. The Italian Renaissance and the Enlightenment Encyclopedists opted for Opsis. Other images emerged, which the Church and Political Authorities rejected.
Has our contemporary corporeal drive, which is driven by the spectacle of everyday visibilities, forgotten that the life of the image is the image of life, to be invisible?
Psychoanalysis would be the response that has been made for more than a century, insofar as in the transference a living articulation between sex and word may be created (Lacan, 21-May-1974). This is the wager made in my Seminar, which is open to all persons interested.
Paris, second Wednesday of the month at 21:15. First meeting October 10th.
4, place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 75006 - Paris
Visit www.sonecrit.com to listen to the seminars in the “Audio” section.
The following is a summary accounting of the Seminar “Image of Life, Life of Image,” in addition to a separate lecture I delivered on 8-December-2007 in Saint Paul de Vence (France).
Although the seminar lectures were given without written notes, they are recorded on video in the “original version” in which they were spoken, namely French.
The Enigma in Every Image*
Everything seems to want to make us forget the enigma that adheres in every image, because the omnipresence of the visual images we see before us – be they everyday, scientific, political, religious or cultural – in fact maintains us in the position of being seen, and rebelling against this will change little, because the act of rebellion is itself another way of being maintained as this being-there for and by the all-seeing Other.
Thus how to ek-sist in this “reality,” that the psychoanalysis of transference has revealed to be a reality of the fantasm, is not something that goes without saying.
The Psychoanalyst holds fast to something very specific in order to effect progress in this domain, namely the fact that there is no such thing as a reality that is pre-discursive. This wager of every transference – this assertion that there is no such thing as a pre-discursive reality – is what enabled my Seminar “Image of Life, Life of Image” and the lecture I gave on 8-December entitled “The Enigma in Every Image” to revisit the passage from idol to image traveled by the Greek Pagans – a passage which was also traversed by the Jews in going from oral law to written law. Such is the Psychoanalyst’s “a-theism.”
This way beckons to a closer examination of the failed encounter between the Chosen People and the Pagan World, via a re-examination of the concept of “incarnation” as something other than God revealed in human form for the purpose of redeeming Original Sin – this all the more true in that Christianity, which styles itself as the clear proof of this revelation, has frozen out all discussion of it by instilling it in dogmas.
The psychoanalytic wager compels us into an examination of the Gospels as we would any other discourse, secularly, from the “lay” perspective, using the Lacanian notions of Symbolic Imaginary and Real as points of reference, and thus meaning via the space of the speaking-being that language instigates forever anew, thereby eschewing the realm of the subject constituted by the gravity-laden, audible substances which comprise his histories and History writ large, always the same.
Thus in response to the “Enjoy” (Jouis!) issued by the commandment that fixates images in words, an enigmatic subject of the Law may say “I hear” (“J’ouis”), a response that relegates jouissance to a place in between the lines – the image is raised up into a painting.
Two questions: In what sense does the dialogue between Jacques Lacan and his brother Marc-François Lacan allow us to locate a Real of jouissance that may be heard, in the sub-text of the Gospels, as saying “yes” to the knowledge (savoir) that the praxis of analysis uses? In what sense is the enjoyment of knowledge (jouir du savoir) fundamentally what is at stake in Lacan’s teaching?
Paris 17-Feburary-2008
* Written in the aftermath of the talk given on 8-December-2007 and the seminar meetings recorded on video at www.sonecrit.com