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Image Politics
Author(s): Emmanuel Alloa
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Winter 2015), pp. 367-389
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/679080 .
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1. Forbidden Representation
Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image (Exod. 20:4). The
second commandment from the Tables of Law, referred to in Exodus, is
quoted prominently by Immanuel Kant, but not, as one might imagine, in
his Critique of Religion; the reference to the biblical commandment is
found in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.1 While in the Critique of
Religion Kant argues against any kind of commandment imposed by religion or any other revealed faith,2 here, in the context of a discussion of the
concept of the sublime, he surprisingly quotes the second of the Mosaic
commandments, presenting it as the consummate exemplification of what
the sublime purportedly is. Having concluded his analytics of the sublime,
Kant adds a General Remark which reads as follows: Perhaps there is no
more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than the commandThis text was first presented in the framework of the IKKM lectures at the BauhausUniversitt Weimar in November 2012.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, in The Cambridge Edition of the
Works of Immanuel Kant, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Guyer (Cambridge, 2000),
p. 156, hereafter abbreviated CPJ; see Kant, Allgemeine Anmerkung zur Exposition der
sthetischen reflektierenden Urteile, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Werke, ed. Wilhelm
Weischedel, 6 vols. (Wiesbaden, 195664), 5:274 (A 123, B 124).
2. See Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in
Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and Di Giovanni (Cambridge, 1996),
hereafter abbreviated R; see Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloen Vernunft
(Knigsberg, 1793).
Critical Inquiry 41 (Winter 2015)
2015 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/15/4102-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.
367
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ment Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image (CPJ, p. 156).
The trope of the unrepresentablephilosophically formulated in a context
where the aesthetical shifts towards the ethical and its characteristic
moralization of the aesthetic experienced an unparalleled renaissance
in the late twentieth century. In the wake of the experiences of mass
destruction and particularly of genocidal extermination, the moral argument concerning the prohibition of representation achieved a completely new form of authoritysecular but no less constraining.
Although other traumatic events of the twentieth century have also
given rise to certain rhetorics of unrepresentability, it is beyond doubt that
the experience of the Holocaust established unrepresentability as an irrevocable element of public discourse. While Pablo Picassos Guernica can
still be regarded as a forceful depiction of the tragic shelling of the Basque
town of Guernica by the German air force, one would be hard pressed to
find an artwork that is generally taken to represent the entirety of the
Shoah. While the Nazi perpetrators invoked aneedless to say, profoundly pervertedKantian ethics to justify their deeds, and Adolf Eichmann even gave a definition of the categorical imperative during his trial in
Jerusalem,3 Kants argument for the negative sublime and a secular version
of the unrepresentable was now called upon. At present, the tropes of the
3. This argument has been repeated often. See prominently Joshua Halberstam, From
Kant to Auschwitz, Social Theory and Practice 14 (Spring 1988): 4154. However, the oftinvoked Eichmann is not a good example of Nazi officials blindly claiming Kantian
justification. As Hannah Arendt relates in Eichmann in Jerusalem, at his trial in 1961, he indeed
affirmed that he had read Kants Critique of Practical Reason and provided a fairly accurate
definition of the categorical imperative in front of the judges. But Eichmann then proceeded
to explain that from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution he
had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had
consoled himself with the thought that he no longer was master of his own deeds, that he
was unable to change anything. What he failed to point out in court was that . . . he had
not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had distorted it to
read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the
law of the landor, in Hans Franks formulation of the categorical imperative in the Third
Reich, which Eichmann might have known: Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew
your action, would approve it.
(Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [New York, 1965], p.
136).
4. Jacques Rancie`re, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge,
2009), p. 123.
5. See W. J. T. Mitchell, The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable, Cloning Terror: The
War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2001), p. 63.
6. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (1957;
Marlboro, Vt., 1992), p. 3.
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370
already jumps forward in time and gestures toward the end of the narrative. What is yet to be told, the survivor quickly realizes, progressively takes
on the character of the unimaginable. The word is italicized, as if to indicate that it does not belong to the narrator but is instead somehow taken
over as a metaleptic quote.
Indeed, at the end of the narrative, the explanation for this wording is
provided: When the American soldiers who liberate the camp listen to the
first accounts given by the detainees, their first reactions are frightful and
unimaginable. But soon after, says Antelme, the soldiers grew tired of
listening to the innumerable accounts and simply repeat their judgment.
Frightful, yes frightful, the detainees confirm, in the same tone of voice.
Yet an unbridgeable gap has opened up between the survivors and their
liberators, a gap, as Sarah Kofman comments, that the words frightful
or unimaginable uttered by the American could not bridge, since their
effect was to suggest to the detainee that he had been understood, that with
just a few words, the other had been able to grasp everything and to form,
about the unknowable and untransmissible, a definite and reassuring opinion.7 The detainee has no choice but to submit to the apparent consensus, as
Antelme concludes pithily: unimaginable, its a word that doesnt divide,
doesnt restrict. The most convenient word. When you walk around with
this word as your shield, this word for emptiness, your step becomes better
assured, more resolute, your conscience pulls itself together.8 This passage exemplifies as few others do how the notion of the unimaginable
could develop such a magnetic appeal that no one, not even the victims,
could resist its pull. To pretend that it is imaginable, that it can be told,
would be to relativize its devastating, overwhelming character and to betray the memory of those who have not survived. The survivor is caught in
a double bind, which is one of the paradoxes of the witness: he has to speak,
and to speak infinitely, and, at the same time, he cannot speak without
betrayal; the words are knotted, for there is no possible way that they
would be understood.9 Ultimately, he surrenders to the only possible solution: to endorse the imposed qualification, the discourse of the unimaginable, an action that of course also puts an end to any discourse.
Despite these lucid remarks about its ambivalence, the category of the
unrepresentable has become a key reference point of aesthetic debate, and
quite often those very authorssuch as Antelme, Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz, and Jorge Semprunwho have not surrendered to silence but have
7. Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, Ill., 1998), pp. 3738.
8. Antelme, The Human Race, pp. 28990.
9. See Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 39.
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20. See Descartes, Meditation Six: Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the
Real Distinction between Mind and Body, Meditations, Objections, and Replies, trans. and ed.
Roger Ariew and Donald Cress (Indianapolis, 2006), p. 40.
21. See Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the Speckled Hen, Mind 51 (Oct. 1942):
36873.
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correlate a certain moral claim about history to a specific aesthetic genealogy of antirepresentationalism, such as that which Gerard Wajcman
undertakes in LObjet du sie`cle,34 that exemplifies all the internal contradictions of the trope of unrepresentability, hence anti-representative
art is constitutively an art without unrepresentable things. In and of
itself the event neither prescribes nor proscribes any specific artistic
means; it is only an issue of relative or comparative unrepresentability, of adaptation of the means and ends of representation. Against all
kinds of speculative hyperbole, Rancie`re advocates aesthetic sobriety.
Nothing is unrepresentable as a property of the event. There are simply
choices (A, pp. 137, 130, 129).
Lanzmanns film Shoah is a good example of the fact that no artwork
can avoid a certain process of selection of what will and what will not be
shown. Although Lanzmanns film certainly avoids fictional reconstruction, it cannot avoid construction. Historians have shown that the empty
clearing of Chelmno on which Simon Srebnik stands and speaks was not as
wide as it appears in the film. The director thus used a wide-angle lens to
underscore the discrepancy between the scenes described in Srebniks testimony and the peaceful appearance of the site today. Like every filmmaker, Lanzmann makes images; like every artist he makes choices; it is
these that will be judged. If one knows what one wants to representi.e.,
in the case of Claude Lanzmann, the reality of the incredible, the equivalence of the real and the incrediblethere is no property of the event that
proscribes representation (A, p. 129).
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but rather that its question remains wide open? In his essay La Representation interdite, translated as Forbidden Representation, Nancy suggests that the prohibition (linterdit) has in fact to be understood as the
challenged or questioned representation (la representation interdite),
for in French, the expression etre interdit also means to be dumbfounded, disconcerted, or taken aback (which in turn alludes back to
the interdictum of Roman law, which survives in modern judicial systems
as interlocutory injunction: the arbiter going between two conflicting parties and pronouncing an arrest, a suspension of opposing claims until the
trial can be set. The interdictio would thus stand, in Nancys eyes, for that
which intervenes in the discourse and brings it to a halt, leaving it bereft of
its certainties) (see FR, p. 38).
The question for Nancy is thus: What became of representation itself at
Auschwitz? (FR, p. 34). If the argument that there cannot be any representation amounts to saying that there can be no adequate representation, what does that say about the concept of representation? At this point,
Nancy suggests an interesting aspect: the re- of representation should not
be understood as repetitive but rather as intensive (or, to be more precise,
in the manner the initially iterative value of the prefix re- was progressively
transformed into an intensive or, as it is called in linguistics, frequentative
value). Representation is more than a subordinate, vicarious presentation;
it isthus Nancythe reinstantiation of presence for a certain gaze, a
directed presentation of presence, supplemented with a specific interpretation of what is to be seen. Consequently, representation does not present something without exposing its value or sense (FR, p. 36). To
summarize: Representation is presentation plus signification of what it presents. For Nancy, it is this indissociable linking of representation to significationrepresentation as the added value of presencethat explains that
the so-called crisis of representation is, first of all, a crisis of meaning.
The notion of signification implied in the order of representation is a
notion of complete signification without any lack. According to Nancy,
repraesentatio would be the Latin equivalent of the Greek hypokeimenon,
the ability to subsume something signifiedfully and thoroughlyunder
the order of conceptuality. However, the assumption of the completeness
or saturation of the signified rests on an initial dichotomy. Unlike the
representing entity, the represented thing is full and determined, but at the
price of being absent, invisible, and intellectual.
Two scenarios open up: either to completely cut off this realm and
prohibit any attempt to bring it into presence through representation (this
would correspond to the iconoclast option) or to deny the dichotomy and
try to completely transfer the full and saturated signification into presence
36. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political,
trans. Chris Turner (Oxford, 1990), chap. 7 as well as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Nazi
Myth, trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 291312.
37. See also Nancy, Un Souffle, Rue Descartes 15 (1997): 14.
38. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1989),
pp. 1112.
39. See Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans.
Shane B. Lillis (Chicago, 2008), p. 23; hereafter abbreviated I.
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What is significant for our purpose here is that according to Kant something invisible exists that does not necessarily have to have the character of
a sacred mystery. Kant criticizes the religions based on faith for presupposing something like an arcanum that every believer knows but cannot
tell of beyond him- or herself. Kant objects that while the form according to
which any principle has to be shapedsuch as the principle of human
freedommust be universally intuitive and shared, its reason is impenetrable for the individual (Kant speaks of the inscrutability of the idea of
freedom [CPJ, p. 156]). A comment on Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason contains the following instructive sentence: But as regards
what transcends the senses . . . we see nothing of it . . . apart from its law
(though this is enough by itself) (R, p. 190n; trans. mod.).
Kants interpretation of the Old Testament prohibition of images thus
amounts to saying that beneath the statutary, normative proscription lies a
logical, categorical impossibility. It is not that representing suprasensory
principles through images is prohibited; rather, it is fundamentally impossible to find any positive representation.
I am stressing positive here, as Kant nevertheless thinks that another
(precarious because negative) form of presentation of this invisible is possible. Of this suprasensorial we see nothing, writes Kant, apart from its
law, adding though this is enough by itself. What cannot be fathomed is
not merely invisible; it reveals itself negatively, as the pure law of its own
unrepresentability, as a purely formal how with no intuitive what. The laws
governing what lies beyond sensorial intuition are the laws of experience.
They strictly amount to the terms in which that which cannot appear as
sensory content presents itself to experience. The principles of unrepresentability thus do not lie in some ineffable absolute realm; they
coincide with the principles of experience as such and its limits. Nothing is unrepresentableone could summarizebecause unrepresentability is no thing; it is not a quality of an object but a determination of
experience defined through its constitutive limits.
Accordingly, when the third Critique speaks of negativity, this negativity does not concern something beyond presentation; it is rather the presentation itself that becomes negative. Kant characterizes this presentation
as abstract, but in its most basic etymological sense. This abstract presentation [abgezogene Darstellungsart], . . . becomes entirely negative in
regard to the sensible (CPJ, p. 156). Therefore, presentation does not give
within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, where the statutary law is described as that of a religion
which can contain only the means to its promotion and propagation (R, p. 138).
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tition of arbitrary forms in the name of one principle on the other (R, p.
198), beyond the opposition of a transcendent thing-as-such and a purely
immanent presence, Kant gestures at a concept of presentation (exhibitio)
in which the rules of presentation themselves come to the fore. Such a
concept of presentation implies a Copernican turn. Attention has shifted
from the content or the what of representation to the form or the how of
representation (corroborated by the fact that judgments of the sublime are
not determinative but reflective). To rephrase this: When Kant invokes the
biblical commandment of nonrepresentation, this says far more about presentation than about anything allegedly unrepresentable per se. Beyond Kant,
one could probably argue that the inadequacy invoked here for the experience of the sublime is hardly restricted to the sublime but that it concerns
any given sensible presentationthat which Edmund Husserl will later
call the inadequacy46 or the radical incompleteness of any perceptive
experience.47
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anticipates the ultimate stage of the dialectical odyssey through art. The
symbolic intervenes not only where the idea does not have a sensible appearance yet but also at the end of the dialectical process, where the external appearance is no longer needed, as its content has been fully interiorized
in the form of the concept. What seemed to be bad infinity is now turned
into good infinity; the unthinkable has received its highest form of determination. Rancie`re is absolutely right when showing that the discourse of
the unthinkable and that of the fully thinkable are symmetricaland in
the wake of the contemporary, quasi-theological discourse of unrepresentability a reminder of its authoritarian (if not terrorist) structure is, alas,
necessary. But this concernsto use Kants terminologyonly the Kanon. To
reflect on unpresentability in terms of an Organon is to highlight that within
the event of sensible presentation is something that cannot be reduced to the
order of the concept. In this sense, it would certainly be a bit too rash (and
rationally self-confident) to affirm that representation is merely a question of
choice.
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