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DOI: 10.1177/1470412909354256

2010 9: 63Journal of Visual CultureHagi Kenaan

What Makes an Image Singular Plural? Questions to Jean-Luc Nancy

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Vol 9(1): 6376 DOI 10.1177/1470412909354256

Abstract

This article examines the connection between Jean-Luc Nancys thinkingof images and his radical ontology of the singular plural. It shows

how Heideggers conception of Dasein becomes operative in Nancysunderstanding of the visual and examines the implications which Nancyscritique of Heidegger carries for a new ontology of the image. The articles

central concern is the question of what it means for a philosophy of thevisual to embrace the singular plural? In what senses is the singular plural

the foundation of an images being? How should the singular plural playitself out in a thinking of the image? Focusing on Nancys interpretationof paintings origins, the article questions the manner in which theethical consequences of Nancys ontology are brought to bear on his

understanding of art.

Keywords

art being-with Heidegger image Jean-Luc Nancy Lvinas origins

of painting singular plural

What Makes an Image Singular Plural? Questions toJean-Luc Nancy

Hagi Kenaan

The figure proves itself to be capable of opening onto the withas its border, the very limit of its outline.

(J-L. Nancy,Being Singular Plural, 2000)

Being-an-Image

One of the unique features of Nancys thinking about the visual is the ontologicalcharacter of his investigation. Nancy thinks of images in an ontological manner.

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64 journal of visual culture 9(1)

This primarily means that his treatment of the image is guided by the question ofbeing: being-an-image or the being of an image.

In addressing images in terms of their being, Nancy breaks away from a

predominant tradition that grounds the conceptualization of the image in theopposition between true being and mere appearance. In this tradition, theimage is characteristically understood as that which merely appears, a type of

representation that draws its significance from its relation to being, while havingno genuine part in it. When construed as a representation, the image gives itselfto thought only in terms of that which it is not, i.e. in terms of its relationship to

another typically more basic kind of entity whose presence it re-presents. Assuch, the imageis commonly relegated by the tradition to a secondary, derivative,domain of existence: a copy, a double, a substitute.

Hence, Nancy s methodological starting point is, in itself, an expression of an

understanding that images are not actually copies (Nancy, 2006: 214), thatthe image is not the double of a thing in the world (p. 73). Nancy thus

underscores the need to recognize the images ontological autonomy but, atthe same time, he also emphasizes that we should be careful not to turn theimage into yet another kind of object. Images, for him, are not re-presentations;

they embody their own unique form of presence but this presence is not thing-like. Images are neither copies nor are they objects. And, in fact, they call for athinking that resists the binary opposition between object and copy. For Nancy,in other words, it is crucial that we learn how to think of images as sui generis

and, in particular, that we think of them in ways that resist not only the more

traditional rhetoric of imitation and copy, but also the more contemporaneoustendencies of integrating the image into a language of identity and objecthood.

The image, Nancy (2005) writes, is neither the thing nor the imitation of thething (p. 8). And this may be taken as the first distinction of the image, the initialsense in which Nancy can speak of The Image The Distinct. The distinct

stands apart from the world of things considered as a world of availability(p. 2). The image is distinct from its being-there in the sense of the Vorhanden,its simple presence in the homogeneity of the world and in the linking together

of natural and technological operations What is distinct in being-there isbeing-image (p. 9).

The clear Heideggerian resonance that we can hear in Nancys language is not

a coincidence, but reflects, rather, an ongoing dialogue with Heidegger which isconstantly present at the background of Nancys thinking about ontology and art.Furthermore, in arguing for the need to distinguish the being of the image from

the being of an object (what Heidegger calls the Vorhanden), Nancy is, in fact,borrowing importing from Heidegger a wholly distinctive interpretationalscheme that is central toBeing and Time:the analytics ofDasein. For Heidegger,the analysis ofDasein is necessary in order to open up the question that regulates

his investigation, the question of the meaning of Being. What is primarilyinterrogated in the question of the meaning of Being is that being which hasthe character ofDa-sein (Heidegger, 1996[1927]: 37).Daseinis chosen as that

necessary point of entry due to its uniqueness:



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Hagi Kenaan What Makes an Image Singular Plural? 65

Daseinitself is distinctly different than other beings Daseinis a beingthat does not simply occur among other beings. It is ontically distinguishedby the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.

(p. 10)

Dasein is a unique being whose uniqueness lies in the way it relates to

its own being. And, since the essence of Dasein lies in its existence, thecharacteristics to be found in this being are thus not objectively presentattributes (p. 40). For Heidegger, in other words, the analysis of Daseincalls for an interpretation that must resist the parameters of objecthood

and, instead, develop with a view toward [Daseins] structures of existence(p. 40) such as, for example, its being-in-the-world, being-with-others,temporality, care, being-toward-death. This shift from Daseins object-

modalities to its particular modes of being from categories to existentialia

is reproduced by Nancy who, in turning to the image, explicitly bracketsthe images objectively present attributes and focuses, rather, on its unique

structures of being: e.g. the images givenness, its temporality, presence,absence, finitude and transcendence. Hence, taking this analogy further, wemay say that if Heidegger is the philosopher who taught us as Lvinas

(1985) puts it how to hear the resonance of the verb to be in the conceptBeing (p. 33), then Nancy can be said to be a philosopher who teaches ushow to recognize the presence of that verb in the word image.

Being-With: Nancys Critique of Heidegger

Nancy often acknowledges his debt to Heidegger whose fundamental ontologyhe regards as that which has put us on the way to where we are, together,

whether we know it or not (Nancy, 2000: 26). In this context, one of the

most crucial moments in Heideggers Being and Time (1996[1927]) is, forNancy, the discussion of Daseins relations with others (theExistentialeofbeing-with).Dasein, according to Heidegger, is never alone in the world and

the world is thus typically experienced through the prism of co-presence;however,Daseins being-with is not just one amongDaseins traits. It is not

a contingent fact, but a constitutive feature of Daseins being-in-the-world.Being-with-Others belongs, according to Heidegger, to the being ofDasein

[and] this must be understood as an existential statement as to its essence.In this sense, even when actual, factual Daseindoes not turn to others andthinks that it does not need them it isin the mode of being-with (Heidegger,

1996[1927].

Being-with, Mitsein, is, according to Heidegger, a grounding and regulatingstructure of human existence anExistentiale that, for Nancy, carries significant

implications for any understanding of the self (selfhood) and, consequently, ofthe unfolding, the event, of meaning. In other words, Nancy (2000) identifies apromise in HeideggersMitsein, a potential for a radical philosophical beginning

which he describes in the following way:

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Heidegger clearly states that being-with is essential to the constitutionofDasein itself. Given this, it must be made absolutely clear thatDasein,far from being either man or subject, is not even an isolated and unique

one, but is instead always the one, each one, with one another. If this

determination is essential, then it needs to attain to the co-originarydimension and expose it without reservation. (p. 26)

What Nancy finds in Heidegger is a lens through which the self can be viewed asan event of multiplicity; and, in a corollary manner, an opening to a new kind offundamental ontology that will take issue with this co-originary dimension and

expose it without reservation. Taking seriously the Heideggerian conceptionof being-with ultimately implies, according to Nancy, thatego sum = ego cum(p. 26). Yet, this way of putting things should not be regarded as a conclusion as

much as it is an opening of an avenue that invites further exploration. In other

words, Nancy hears in HeideggersMitseinthe reverberation of a call for a radicalbeginning, for a philosophy that needs to recommence, to start itself, from itself,

against itself. And, in order to do this, philosophy needs to think in principleabout how we are us among us, that is, how the consistency of our Being is inbeing-in-common and how this consists precisely in the in or in the between

of its spacing (p. 26).

HeideggersMitseinserves as a mark which indicates to us a place from which firstphilosophy must recommence (p. 26). Yet, this is also precisely what Heidegger,

according to Nancy, fails to see. Heidegger fails to come to terms with the potentialof his own thinking because he moves too quickly from thinking about the poleof the one (Dasein) to the pole of the undifferentiated many (das Man) and does

so without ever dwelling on how we are us among us, on how the consistency ofour Being is in being-in-common. To put this more specifically, instead of dwellingon the phenomenon of being-with, Heidegger hurries to conceptualize thisexperience as a structural condition en bloc a condition of average anonymity

which he sets in opposition toDaseins authentic possibility of individuation.

For Nancy, Heideggers affirmative assertion of co-originarity never fulfils itself

since Heidegger ultimately gives up on the step to the consideration ofDaseinitself and never considers the possibility of an explicit and endless exposition

of co-originarity and the possibility of taking account of what is at stake at thetogetherness of the ontological enterprise (p. 26). In this respect, there is an

important negative lesson to be learned from Heideggers analysis ofDasein, ananalysis that brings Heidegger so close and yet leaves him all too distant from themeaning of being-with.

Being Singular Plural

The existential analytic ofBeing and Time, Nancy writes, is the project fromwhich all subsequent thinking follows, whether this is Heideggers own laterthinking or our various ways of thinking against or beyond Heidegger himself (p.

93). Indeed, NancysBeing Singular Pluralexemplifies such an attempt to thinkagainst and beyond Heidegger. Hence, growing out of a critique of Heidegger that



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is far more profound than what first appears to be a simple readjustment of theHeideggerian discourse (p. 26), Nancy takes on the task of redoing the whole offirst philosophy by giving the singular plural of Being as its foundation (p. xv).

The starting point for this enterprise for which the form of the ontologicaltreatise ceases to be appropriate (p. xv) is nevertheless formulated in anontological manner. The givenness of Being, Nancy writes, is a gift that can be

summarized as follows:Being itself is given to us as meaning(p. xv, emphasesin original). This postulation consists of three focal points: Being, meaningand, in between, an us. The term Being is used here by Nancy in a manner

that refers back to and concomitantly breaks away from the Heideggerianvision. Unlike Heidegger, for Nancy, there is no brute givenness of Being Being does not have meaning (p. 2). Nancy explicitly refuses to allow anyconcept of pure Being to become operative in his first philosophy to serve

as grounds for our thinking independently of the actual manifestation ofmeaning. Being does not havemeaning because Being itself, the phenomenonof Being, is meaning (p. 2). But, it should not in any way be understood as

something given. It is never simply there in the form of an object, but presentonly as an incessant unfolding. Meaning is its own communication or its owncirculation. How and where does this circulation take place? For Nancy, we are

this circulation (p. 2).

Meaning is grounded in the human we. The very possibility of having meaning isthus always already a co-possibility, or more clearly put, the fundamental condition

of the appearance of meaning is being-with. As suggested, however, this is not a

simple condition that could be taken for granted, but one that calls for a radicalexposition. Indeed, for Nancy, the question of the ground of meaning the one

philosophy needs to think is a question about how we are us among us how the consistency of our Being is in being-in-common and how this consistsprecisely in the in or in the between of its spacing (p. 26). In other words,

the space in which the meaningfulness of things unfolds is one that never stemsfrom and can never be traced back to a single unified origin, but that isconstituted, rather, by a constant pluralization and splitting. Meaning begins

where presence is not pure presence but where presence comes apart in orderto be itself assuch. This as presupposes the distancing, spacing, and division of

presence (p. 2). Another way to put this is to say that the origin of meaning isneither the individual nor the community. What makes meaning possible is neither

the infinitesimality of an undividable selfhood nor the unified homogeneity of apublic space but, rather, what Nancy calls a transindividuality, a singularityindissociable from its being-with-many.

But, how does all this bear on our understanding of the visual? Returning toour discussion of Nancys ontology of images, let us ask: what would it meanto think an images being as a being-with? In what ways is the singular plural

the foundation of an images being? How does the singular plural of the imageplay itself out? Or, more generally, what are the implications which NancysBeing Singular Pluralcarries for an understanding of images? What would it

mean for a philosophy of the image to come to terms with the condition oftransindividuality or with the singular-plural origins of the image?



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The Origin of the Image

In Nancys writing on the visual, the question of the images plural singularorigins is, surprisingly, hardly ever addressed.1 Nancy does often underscore

the need to think the image beyond the specificity of a medium, but thispreoccupation with the inner plurality of the artistic medium developed,for example, in Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One? (Nancy, 1996) never leads Nancy back to the question of the co-originarity of our being-with.

How should we understand the apparent forgetfulness of the singular plural inNancys writing on the visual arts? I am not sure how to answer this question.But, in order to get a better view of its significance, let us turn first to a text in

which Nancy explicitly reflects on the origins of the image.

In Painting in the Grotto, Nancy (1996) addresses the question of the originof painting by responding to a primal image a primal scene of creation: the

image of the making of the first image.

Let us imagine the unimaginable, the gesture of the first imager His hand

advances onto a void, hollowed out at the very instant that separates himfrom himself instead of prolonging his being in his act. But this separationis the act of his being. Here he is outside of self even before having his

own self, before having been a self ... the animal that stands in the grottoand that makes this gesture knows things, beings, different kinds of matter,structures, signs and actions. But it is ignorant of form, the rising up of a

figure or a rhythm in its presentation For the first time, he touches the

wall not for support nor as an obstacle or something to lean on, but as aplace, if one can touch a place. The rock wall makes itself merely spacious:the event of dimension and of the line, of the setting aside and isolation of

a zone that is neither a territory of life nor a region of the universe, but aspacing in which to let come coming from nowhere and turned towardsnowhere all the presence of the world. From the painter to the wall the

hand opens up a distance that suspends the continuity and the cohesion ofthe universe, in order to open up a world (Nancy, 1996: 745).

Nancy describes (imagines) the birth of painting as a drama for one actor: a solitarypainter who, facing a wall in the depth of a dark cave, encounters a new kind offreedom that allows him to open up, for the first time ever, a space in which meaning

can reverberate. Unlike Plato, for whom the cave signifies a human condition thatis radically severed from the origins of meaning, Nancy interprets the cave as thecradle of the meaningful.2 Following Bataille to whom Painting in the Grotto

is an homage Nancy approaches the first image in terms of the agency and theact involved in its creation. The prehistoric image on which Nancy focuses is oneof a human hand. Hand stencils and hand prints are indeed typically dated among

the most early images of the upper Paleolithic, but Nancy reflects neither on thespecificity of a given hand-print nor on the different types different techniquesinvolved in the making of such images. He seems to bracket a discussion of theimages objective traits since, for him, the image quaobject is only a trace of that

primordial act that generates the very possibility of the image which is co-originary



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with the possibility of selfhood. In this respect, Nancys text is not only a dramain one act, but also a drama of an act, a singular gesture, an event that allows theemerging self of the painter to be itself by relating to itself, by presenting and

seeing itself through what inBeing Singular Pluralis described as a constant

distancing, spacing, and division of presence (Nancy, 2000: 2).

Indeed, if we reread Nancys description of the first imager in the light of our

discussion ofBeing Singular Plural, the presence of his ontology and, in particular,of his claim about meanings split origins, becomes evident. The painters handadvances onto a void; yet, unlike, the story of divine creation, the human act is

not an embodiment of a being that precedes creation. As we have seen in Nancysontology, there is no brute givenness of Being, no pure unshared presence presence to nothing. Nancy insists on a language that begins with the manifestationor the givenness the gift of Being:Being itself, the phenomenon of Being, is

meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation and weare this circulation (p. 2). InPainting in the Grotto, the cave is the site of meanings originary circulation. Yet,as is underscored in the description of the first painter, meaning is not something

that can ever be traced back to an ultimate or first signification. In French, thewordfond means both ground and depth and, in this context, the intertwining ofthese senses in Nancys titleAu fond des imagesmakes the point clear: the ground

of the image is the images depth. The image unfolds as meaningful, but there is noself or identity that grounds meanings appearance, no unified, self-contained formthat supports this unfolding. For the painter, the image he creates is a surprise; it

is born at the very instant that separates him from himself through a separation[that] is the act of his being. In other words, sinceweare meanings circulation,i.e. since meaning is made possible by who weare as humans, meaning begins

where presence is not pure presence but where presence comes apart in order tobe itself assuch (p. 2, emphasis in original).

For Nancy, there is no meaning if there is no self, of some form of another (p.

94). In Painting in the Grotto (1996), he thinks of the origins of painting in amanner that calls into question the cohesiveness of the self and, in turn, thinks ofthe alterity and difference that are at play in the constitution of selfhood in order

to illuminate the manner in which an image becomes meaningful:

Man began with the strangeness of his own humanity. Or with the humanityof his own strangeness The similar came before the self, and this is what

it, the self was. Such was his first knowledge, his skill, the quickness of thehand whose secret he wrested from the very strangeness of his nature the schema of man is the monstration of this marvel: self outside of self, the

outside standing for self, and the being surprised in face of self. Paintingpaints this surprise. This surprise is painting. (p. 69)

In the spirit of Lacans Mirror Stage, Nancy offers a dialectical reading of therelationship between the first painter and his newly made image. The painters act

leads to the appearance of an image which is, itself, operative in the constitutionof the painters self a human self whose identity, in turn, can become manifest(as meaningful) only on the condition that it can never be possessed by that self.



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has created for the image a murky, imaginary, dreamlike space of appearancethat he then illuminates with one spotlight so as to allow the presentation ofa surprising event a single gesture of a single human being. Reading Nancys

description of the first painter, we may easily forget that the animalman in

the cave is not alone in the world and that he is, most likely, not even alonein the cave itself. According to anthropological research on this early type ofprehistoric images, hand-prints are typically understood in the context of

communal rituals in which the first image-creators presumably had a distinctiverole. As such, the hands used to create the hand-prints we see today in the cavesare often understood as belonging to the painters fellow humans rather than to

the painters themselves.3 Is the first painting born, then, as Nancy argues, outof the complex encounter with ones self(hood) or, rather, with the living, oftendisturbing, presence, the hand, of the other? What exactly is the first painter

facing and what does he see? Does he see the coming of the stranger that he

himself is or is it the you [who is] absolutely strange because the world beginsits turn with you? Is the first painting the trace of the strangeness that comes

like an open intimacy, more internal than any intimacy, deep-set like the grotto(Nancy, 1996: 70, emphases in original), or is it a trace of a different, albeit aclosely connected, kind of strangeness [that] refers, as inBeing Singular Plural,

to the fact that each singularity is another access to the world ... [that] there isnothing but the manner, the turn of the other access which conceals itself in the

very gesture wherein it offers itself to us (Nancy 2000: 14)?

These two options are, of course, not mutually exclusive. And yet, in his work onthe origin of painting as well as in much of his work on the visual arts Nancyseems indifferent to the relevance of the you, the other whose alterity is its

being-origin. This is not to say that Nancys work on the origin of art overlooksthe possible presence of others, but that the unique character of this presenceand its relationship to the image is never taken up and addressed in its actuality.In this respect, Nancys thinking of the images being seems to miss the potential

of his ontological thinking. Thus, in spite of his critique of Heidegger, Nancyultimately seems to reproduce the Heideggerian elision of the possibilitiesopened by the existentiale of being-with.4 To be specific, he approaches the

images being-there without allowing its being-with to open up as a genuinequestion, without grappling, to use Nancys own words against Heidegger,

with the possibility of an explicit and endless exposition of co-originarity and

the possibility of taking account of what is at stake at the togetherness of theontological enterprise (Nancy, 2000: 26).

The Singular-Plural Origins of Painting

The call for an endless exposition of co-originarity is primarily that is, prior to its

ontological implications an ethical imperative. It reflects philosophys commitmentto the ethical in the sense that ethics begins with an acknowledgement of theunending enigma that the other person presents to us in his or her very being.

This is one of the central themes in the writing of Emmanuel Lvinas for whomthe fundamental form of our acknowledgement of the others alterity is that ofresponsibility. For Lvinas (1998), the presence of the other person



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signifies an irrecusable order, a command which puts a stop to theavailability of consciousness What is at stake here is the calling of aconsciousness into question and not a consciousness of calling into

question. The I loses its sovereign self-coincidence, its identification, in

which consciousness returns triumphantly to itself to rest on itself. Beforethe exigency of the other, the I is expelled from this rest [the others]presence is a summons to answer. The I does not only become aware of

this necessity to answer it is in its very position a responsibility To bean I then means not to be able to escape responsibility. (p. 97)

The questioning that concerns Lvinas is not one that can be solved conceptuallyor, better, it does not belong to the order of the conceptual. It does not offeritself to a knowing or an understanding, but summons to moral responsibility.

Morality is the enigmas way (p. 72). Consequently, Lvinas offers a vision of a

philosophy whose task is an endless response to the unsettling presence of theother endless in that it brings to the fore but never exhausts the enigma of a

persons alterity.5Nancy has a complicated relationship with Levinass thinkingwhich deserves a separate discussion.6However, for the purposes of this article,I think that the kind of Lvinasian sensitivity towards the irresolvable enigmatic

presence of the other person is necessary if we wish to make the singular pluralthe fundamental ground of our understanding of the image.

To begin taking the first step towards such an explicit and endless exposition

of co-originarity, I suggest we turn to a figure, an image that would allow usto illuminate the origin of painting in a manner that embraces the conditionof being-with as fundamental. What I have in mind is a mythical, age-old, image

that appears again and again in the history of reflection on painting, fromQuintilian to Alberti to Leonardo and Vasari to Rousseau and Romanticism and,in 20th-century French philosophy, from Merleau-Ponty to Derrida.7This image tale or myth of the origins of painting (or of drawing) is first found in Plinys

Natural Historywhichprovidestwo versions of the myth. While both versionsdescribe the first act of painting as a tracing of a mans shadow on a wall, the moredetailed account locates the first painting in a story of love and abandonment.

This more elaborate account is given by Pliny precisely at the moment he movesaway from painting to a discussion of a different art form, the modelling of clay.

Enough and more than enough has been said about painting. It may be suitableto append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through theservice of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first inventedby Butades, a potter from Sycion, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter,

who was in love with a young man; and she, when this young man was goingabroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by thelamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by

exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness waspreserved in the shrine of the nymphs (Pliny, 1952[779]: 43).

Nancy is acquainted with this tale of origins and, although he does not seemto be interested in its details, he touches briefly on it in Visitation: Of ChristianPainting (2005), and offers the following reading:



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The legend of its own origin that painting made for itself the Greek storyof the girl who traces the outline of her fiancs shadow on the wall as heleaves for war should not be understood as a parable of representation.

This girl is not seeking to reproduce an image of the one who will no

longer be there, in order to recollect it later: rather, she fixes the shadow,the obscure presence that is there whenever light is there, the double ofthe thing of everything and its invisible ground. (p. 121)

For Nancy, the gist of Plinys story is found in its affirmation of one of Nancys keypositions: the being of an image calls for a non-representational understanding

that releases the image from its traditional servitude to the order of the actual.The painted image is not a form of representation. It has nothing to do with areproduction or a recollection of the world but, on the contrary, with an opening

towards what he terms the immemorial: painting opens onto the immemorial:

presence always-already there and always there again, inexhaustibly withdrawninto itself, relentlessly exposed before us ourselves before being born, after

dying the immemory of a dawn or a twilight of the world (p. 121).

For Nancy, the first painter is not seeking to reproduce an image of the onewho will no longer be there, in order to recollect it. This is because what she

faces and responds to is the thereof a beyond (p. 125, emphases in original),an invisibility in which painting, itself, is grounded. The painter responds, inpainting, to the invisible grounds, the transcendental conditions of visibility. But

does this really capture the drama of the first painting or the significance of the

first gesture of drawing? Even if we agree with Nancy that what is at stake here isnot at all a representation, can we begin to understand the girls image without

coming to terms with the fact that the inner form of her painting is a responseto the complicated presence of another person? Plinys account provides a richand concrete setting for the legendary birth of painting, one that integrates

the allegedly technical act of the tracing of a shadow into the particularity of apainful and dramatic moment. Butades who, in the tradition takes on the nameof her father becomes the first painter through a gesture directed towards herlovers imminent departure.

Painting, as such, originates at an intersection: it takes place at the crossroadof desire and the experience of loss, of wanting to hold on to what one loves

in a familiar way and of letting go. Once we recognize desire and loss as thetwofold root of the act of painting, we shall also see why the predominant wayof speaking about the first painting as a form of replacement or substitution

cannot suffice. Butades is not creating a substitute because she has no need fora substitute. Her love is real and she cannot sell it short. The young woman isin love. She wants to love and she wants one specific love, but she also knowsshe has been abandoned. Desiring, she faces the object of her love. Yet, she also

faces, just the same, the impossibility of fulfilling that love. Butades faces herlimits and limitations, her finitude herself. In other words, the first painter is a

woman who experiences the world without collapsing the experience of desire

and loss into one another, without replacing one for another. In this sense, heract of painting is not a means for construing a stand-in for her lover, a surrogateor a substitution. To use the common rhetoric of presence and absence, we



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should notice that the issue here is not the alternation between these two poles.Butades is not concerned with filling up and eliminating the absence which haspervaded her life. Her act is not an attempt to replace absence with a new form

of presence but, on the contrary, it reflects an attempt to create a new place

for herself in between the opposite poles of absence and presence. Indeed, thenotion of the in between is helpful. It is precisely a domain of in between-nessthat the act of the Corinthian maid opens up. As she faces her situation, Butades

could have responded in a variety of ways. The field of options is there for her,characteristically arranged in pairs of oppositions. Yet, in her response, she resiststhe appeal of the either-or. She neither tries to prevent her lover from leaving

nor does she insist on joining him. She neither holds on to her object of love nordoes she renounce or turn her back on it. She is neither active practical, goal-oriented nor passive. She opts for an option that has no significant objective

consequence, no real effect in the world, but she clearly does not retreat into

the privacy of the purely subjective. The act of the Corinthian maid is neither asomething nor a nothing. It is, to use Vladimir Jankelvitchs expression, apresque

rien. And it is in this location of infinitesimality that painting originates. This iswhere the image opens up.

Furthermore, we need to notice that, in the act of painting, Butades not only

reorients herself in the world, but she is, more specifically, taking a newstance in relation to the person she loves.8 The primordial act of drawing isthus inseparable from her response to the other person whose presence has

become elusive and which can no longer be taken for granted. To put this moregenerally, we may understand the making of the first image as an expression ofan unresolved tension which is characteristic of our relationship with others.

This is a tension between the others existence as opening for us a meaningfulworld of things that affect us that we want and love and care about and, atthe same time, as marking a world that remains forever elusive, unexpected andimpenetrable: a world whose strangeness refers to the fact that each singularity

is another access to the world (Nancy, 2000: 14).

In this context, Butades act of tracing should also call for our attention.9 Butades

traces the shadow of another person who, having being close and intimate,now loses its grounding in the common domain of the familiar and the known.

Butades no longer relates to the ordinary figure of the person she loves, but onlyto a trace found at the limits of his shadow. What can this teach us about the

origin and the essence of painting? Should we understand Butades gesture inLvinasian eyes as a tracing of the trace of the other, a trace [that] obliges withregard to the infinite, to the absolutely other, and that establishes a relationship

with illeity, a relationship which is personal and ethical? (Lvinas, 1998: 105).

Plinys tale of origins deserves a more comprehensive reading than the one Ican offer here. But, what we are already in a position to see is that his image

of the first image is, in fact, an invitation: the tale of Butades and the origin ofpainting invites us to come to terms with the senses in which the singularity ofthe image is always already pluralized by the human condition of being-with. In

responding to this invitation, we shall be taking the first step towards a thinkingof the ethical dimension of the image.



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Notes

1. InBeing Singular Plural(2000), the question of the image is not central; and yet, when

touched upon, the imagesymbol appears to be a clear case in point: objecting to the

critique of the image which has become a sort of ideological trope in theories of the

spectacle and in theories of communication, Nancy argues that the sole criterion ofsymbolization is not the exclusion or debasement of the image, but instead the capacity

of allowing a certain play, in and by the imagesymbol with the opened interval that

articulates it assym-bol. For Nancy, the termsymbol(with its prefixsun= with) already

suggests that the dimension, space and nature of the with are in play here the

symbolic is not simply an aspect of being-social it is this Being itself (p. 58).

2. In Painting in the Grotto (Nancy, 1996), Platos allegory of the cave is a recurring,

albeit a criticized, point of reference. For Nancy, the Platonic cave with its

topography of high and low, beyond and under, open and enclosed is an image

of that Platonic space of thinking which he attempts to subvert. Nancy inverts the

platonic order of meaning and, refusing to privilege the transcendent realm of bright

daylight, locates the roots of the meaningful in the depth of the dark cave.3. See, for example, David Lewis-Williams (2002) on the hand print in the cave of

Gargas:

This co-operative mode of making at least some of the prints seems to be

confirmed in the case of Gargas where the hand and the forearm of a child

were held against the rock by an adult, whose grip on the childs arm can be

seen: it was not the child who was blowing the paint. (p. 220)

4. An interesting question in this context has to do with how Heideggers avoidance

of the being-with bears on his understanding of the visual? Is there a significant

connection, for example, between his blindness towards the experience of alterity

which is always part ofDaseins world and his blindness towards the personal

dimension of Van Goghs famous painting of shoes? On Heideggers failure to respond

to Van Goghs painting of shoes, see Kenaan (2005). In this context, we should ask

further: is there a connection between Heideggers elision of the singularity of Van

Goghs shoes and the neglect of the concrete presence of the others alterity in

Nancys ontology of the image?

5. On the relationship between the enigma of the other person and the grounds of the

meaningful, see Kenaan (2006b).

6. It can be shown that Nancy is not only well acquainted with Lvinas central positions

but that he is also very influenced by Lvinasian formulations. At the same time, his

mentioning of Lvinas is almost always critical. InBeing Singular Plural(2000), Nancyhardly mentions Lvinas, but he explicitly criticizes positions that assume surreptitiously

that Man is entirely a question of the Other. This is, according to him what is most often

at work in the call to ethics: a transcendental unrepresentability of the most concrete

presence (pp. 489). Nancy explains that something unrepresentable or unfigurable

runs the risk of revealing itself as completely oppressive and terrifying, if not terrorists,

open to anguish of an originary Lack. In contrast, the figure proves itself to be capable

of opening onto the with as its border, the very limit of its outline (p. 48). Is Nancy

criticizing Lvinas or Lacan or perhaps both? In any case, Nancys turn to the figure as

that which ties the with to the question of an outline will be particularly relevant to our

discussion of the origins of painting.

7. In this context, the work of Robert Rosenblum has a unique status in the way it setsthe field for an investigation of the origin of painting as an iconographical problem.

Rosenblum (1957) is primarily concerned with the manner in which Plinys tale is

turned into a prevalent pictorial theme by romantic classicism. He is interested in

explaining the surprising abundance of pictorial images of the Corinthian maid the



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first painter in the last third of the 18th century. Yet, as he proceeds with an anatomy

of this image of origin and of the significance it carries for late 18th-century painting,

Rosenblum also provides a condensed history of Plinys tale from late antiquity to

the 18th century that enables us to appreciate the complex matrix of versions and

interpretations which presented itself to the imagination of romantic classicism. Amore recent interpretation and analysis of Plinys tale, to which I am indebted, is

Stoichita (1997), which underscores the significance and role of the shadow in this

tale of origins.

8. I notice that Plinys story of the Corinthian maid, positions the first painter in relation

to two male figures: her lover and her father.

9. For a more comprehensive discussion of the phenomenological implications of

Plinys tale and, particularly, of the significance of the act of tracing, the line and the

shadow, see Kenaan (2006a).

References

Heidegger, M. (1996[1927])Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh. New York: SUNY Press.

Kenaan, H. (2005) The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Kenaan, H. (2006a) Tracing Shadows: Reflections on the Origins of Painting, in C.

Versar and G. Fishof (eds)Pictorial Languages and Their Meanings. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv

University, Faculty of the Arts.

Kenaan, H. (2006b) The Plot of the Saying, Etudes Phenomenologiques: Lvinas et la

phnomnologieXXII(434). Louvain: Ousia.

Lvinas, E. (1985)Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R. Cohen.

Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne: Duquesne University Press.

Lvinas, E. (1998) Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA:

Dusquesne: Duquesne University Press.

Lewis-Williams, D. (2002) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art.

London: Thames & Hudson.

Nancy, J-L. (1996) The Muses, trans. P. Kamuff.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Nancy, J-L. (2000)Being Singular Plural, trans. R. Richardson and A. OByrne. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press.

Nancy, J-L. (2005) The Ground of the Image, trans. J. Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press.

Nancy, J-L. (2006) Multiple Arts: The Muses II, trans. S. Sparks. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Pliny, (1952[779]) Natural History, XXXV, 43, trans. H. Rackman. Cambridge: Loeb

Classical Library.

Rosenblum, R. (1957) The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic

Classicism, The Art Bulletin 39(4): 27990.

Stoichita, V. (1997)A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books.

Hagi Kenaan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Tel-AvivUniversity. He has published essays on phenomenology, aesthetics and the philoso-

phy of art, on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Derrida and Lvinas. He is theauthor of The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language

(Columbia University Press, 2005) and of Otherwise than Seeing: The EthicalOptics of Emmanuel Lvinas (forthcoming).

Address: Tel Aviv University [email: [email protected]]
http://vcu.sagepub.com/

Journal of Visual Culture 2010 Kenaan 63 76

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