SEEING THE INVISIBLE
In 1971 Marguerite Duras met Francis Bacon in Paris. They spoke about painting and writing. It was a matter of the experience of accident shared by writing and painting. Bacon said, "I do not draw. I begin by placing a lot of spots (taches). I wait for what I call the 'accident', the patch from which the painting emanates. The patch is the accident. However, if you stick to the accident, if you believe that you understand the accident, you will once again make an illustration, because the patch always resembles something. You cannot understand the accident. If you could understand it, then you would also understand the way you act and proceed. But the way of acting or proceeding is unforeseen (l’imprévu); you will never be able to understand it".
The definition which Bacon provides of the way a painter proceeds is the following: to paint means to integrate the accident (accident, hazard, chance) into the movement of painting, without subjecting oneself to it. To paint means to stand up to the accident (the catastrophe), to give it a chance by responding to it with a technique which neither allows it to triumph nor restricts nor neutralizes it. Bacon calls the technique, imagination technique. It is his means for making the accidental chaos precise. The imagination technique unifies two contrary efforts. It resists and it affirms. It affirms the accident of chaos by resisting it. It gives form to formlessness.
There is no subject that does not touch formlessness, the abyss of its possibilities, the boundaries of consciousness, the limits of reason. The subject's self-experience is the experience of these limits and these chaotic depths, the experience of collapsing orientation, of memory caving in, an experience of blindness, frenzy, and turbulence. The subject touching chaos goes through a blinding that is not ameliorated by anything. It traverses the night of its ontological blindness. Its eye, if this singular makes sense for a second, this transcendental organ of the singular experience of world and experience, is flooded and blinded by the excess of the visible, by the "blinding extent of what is to be seen".
Seeing can do nothing else but become blind. It has been placed in an absolute darkness: blind seeing blinded by visibility or seeing of nothingness or of emptiness, seeing that lowers its eyelids in order to see, that closes its eyes in order to see more than it sees with 'eyes open'. It is this other seeing with closed eyes which Duras has repeatedly defended. "She sees," it is said of the woman in the film, The Truck, "as soon as she closes her eyes. What is unbearable about the world she sees even more strongly when she closes her eyes. [...] she closes her eyes. Behind her eyelids she sees something. [...] the end of the world." By denying herself visibilities, the ocular evidence, she opens herself to the space of the invisible, the sphere "where one is dumb and blind". "I try," says Duras, "to see as much as possible there". As much as possible in the space of blindness which is the space of absence itself, of absence and emptiness, which leaves the subject itself empty and absent, indeterminate, without properties, indifferent.
There is no art which could close itself off to the experience of this indifference. There is no art which could not be catastrophic, because the subject can only be affirmed as a catastrophic subject, as a subject of desubjectivization, of the turn-around, the turning point, of contro-versy or the turn, as aggression turned against itself. As long as the subject remains turned toward emptiness, the abyss, nothingness or the exterior, it is the subject of catastrophe. As soon as it begins to affirm itself as a catastrophic subject, it opens the dimension, if not of happiness, then at least of cheerfulness, of joyful self-affirmation and beatitudo. Instead of drawing its catastrophic identity from the tragic paradigm of unhappy consciousness, self-affirmation as catastrophe transports the subject into a state of universal cheerfulness which could also be called happiness. Happiness or cheerfulness. in any case, it is a matter of a free relationship of the subject to its unfreedom, of a commanding way of dealing with everything which seems to have robbed it of its autonomy from the very start.
The full subject is the subject of this intensified freedom and autonomy. It knows about the limitedness of its knowledge and it knows that this limitedness is what first makes knowledge possible because its objective unfreedom in the space of facts is the condition of possibility of absolute freedom and of a real overflying of the self. This freedom is not absolute because it is limitless. It is absolute because it puts itself into an easy relationship with unfreedom. The subject is the subject of this easiness which allows it to experience its life in its unliveability. This life includes it's being unleashed into the absolute, into an absolute which is another name for what is impossible and untouchable and unliveable and unpossessable and without reference.
That is the sense of its primordial unbounding. There is experience only as the experience of the limits, as the destabilization of the subject of experiencing the absolute, the impossible, the untouchable, the unliveable, the unpossessable and the non-referential. To "go through an experience," says Heidegger, "means that it happens to us, that it hits us, comes over us, throws us over and transforms us. To speak of 'going through' in this turn of phrase means precisely that we do not bring about the experience through ourselves; to go through here means to suffer through something, to receive that which hits us insofar as we bow to it". To receive what is necessary is the condition of possibility for putting it into question and rejecting it. Heidegger's concept of experience aims at this excessive reception as an expression of being in agreement with what cannot be changed. In Lacanian terms: beyond cynicism, there is the confrontation with (constituted) reality, the experience of the real. This experience demands its hyperbolic affirmation or signature which drives the subject to its limits. Perhaps this is the definition of philosophy which all philosophers share: philosophy is the experience of the unavoidable and its affirmation.
The question concerning the subject (What is a subject?) The question concerning art, the question concerning writing, the question concerning philosophy (What is art? What is writing? What is philosophy?) must open itself to the question of blindness. It is as if there were a subject or as if there were art, writing, philosophy or only as this experience. It is clear that the subject is blind. It does not see without not seeing, without being blind in relation to the visible which keeps contact with the invisible. Seeing is seeing of the invisible; what is seen only marks the boundaries of an enveloping invisibility which coincides with the (itself invisible) visibility of the visible. The subject includes an intimacy with invisibility which, as the abyssal ground of the visible, remains the necessarily missed target of its seeing. The question concerning the subject implies the question concerning its place in the order of the visible, concerning its position in the domain of constituted reality.
Obviously, the subject is placed up against the wall of the invisible. It sees without seeing. By supposing that it sees, it brings forth an entire world of the invisible. Like its act of existing, the movements of writing and painting are catastrophic. They owe their continuity to the discontinuity of encounters with the incommensurable, which is the space of the subjectís ontological blindness. At the edges of this space, the subject seeks a language without being able to appropriate it, without being its owner. Instead of being the owner of its language, the subject is taken into possession by the catastrophic movement of writing, by a language. "What happens when you write without seeing anything?" asks Derrida at one point. There is no writing that is unrelated to the invisible. One cannot write without blindness or: one writes necessarily "with eyes closed".
Just as the painter has to "live through a moment in which he doesn't see anything, through a collapse of visual coordinates," the subject has to rely on its blindness by writing. To write means to give space to the catastrophe through language. Writing is connected with painting through this catastrophic experience to which the subject tries to give adequate words and form. It is a matter of approaching the catastrophe, the collapsing horizon without giving oneself up to it, without being torn apart by chaos, without pathetically sacrificing oneself to it. The responsibility of art in relation to chaos is decided here: does the subject have the courage and the willingness to affirm itself as a subject touching chaos in dizzying blindness? Does the subject have the strength and endurance to aver its impotence in view of the catastrophe.
Does the subject have the will and energy to erect itself in a situation of collapse of its world, i.e. in a situation of complete loneliness which throws it back onto its ontological desolation, thus infinitely singularizing it? "There is no painter," Deleuze repeats, "who did not go through this experience of chaos [...] where he no longer sees anything and threatens to go under, collapse of the visual coordinates". Collapse of lived reality, collapse of the familiar universe which is our world, reality as a shared communicative connection of world of facts, the order of well-known things and visibilities, phenomenal dimension. Armed with its blindness, the catastrophic subject, the subject of writing, the subject of painting, penetrates the domain of phenomena to respond to its fundamental inconsistency and emptiness. The visible hovers over the abyss of the invisible toward which the act of painting flies while lifting, piercing, tearing the phenomenal veil, the fabric of visibilities.
The catastrophe does not devour everything. If it is true that painting is the "painting of catastrophe", as Deleuze asserts, that in art or in philosophy, in writing, in science it is a matter of embracing chaos, of integrating it into one's own arrangement, then it becomes indispensable to emphasize that the embracing of chaos, which is anything but an enclosing, implies a twofold demand: 1) "the inevitable catastrophe must not wash everything away"; 2) it must always be a matter of "escaping the catastrophe". Painting does not open itself to the experience of catastrophic blinding in order to sacrifice itself to the catastrophe. It opens itself in order to escape it by retaining within itself an enhanced seeing which I want to call seeing the invisible.
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