| Twentieth century French thought is essentially an answer to the crisis precipitated by the Cartesian depersonalization of the subject. This dissertation asks the question: What is the place of the image in twentieth century's ontology of the impersonal, specifically in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze? Is not Bergson's idea of ‘pure recollection’ a return to Cartesian impersonal consciousness, indeed not to the universal subject as an embodiment of Reason but to an equally universal, impersonal Pure Memory? Is not Sartre's conception of the subject as a degenerated version of a pure, pre-reflective, impersonal consciousness, similarly Cartesian by nature? The central, privileged term in these two ontologies—image-consciousness (Sartre) and pure recollection (Bergson)—is construed as a return to a pure state, in which consciousness is either absolutely identical with its object (Sartre's ‘image-consciousness’) or it is not yet debased (actualized) in memory images (Bergson's ‘pure memory’). Bergson's and Sartre's theories of the image prefigure the development of an aesthetic of the ‘inhuman’ by Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Deleuze. The ‘inhuman’—whether it is called ‘pure perception’ (Bergson), ‘image-consciousness’ (Sartre), ‘the sublime event’ (Lyotard), ‘the fatal object’ (Baudrillard), or the falsifying cinematic ‘time-image’ contrasted with the traditional notion of subjectivity. Bergson identifies matter as a pre-reflective, pure (virtual) perception, which becomes degraded into conscious (actual) perception. For Sartre, image-consciousness constitutes the clearest manifestation of the pre-reflective, absolute transparency of consciousness. Lyotard locates the pre-reflective or the unthought in the experience of the sublime (what he calls the ‘event’). Baudrillard conceives the pre-reflective in two mutually exclusive ways: either he identifies it with the virtual/hyperreal (which he then criticizes), or he identifies it with the object (i.e., he conceives it, after Bergson, as equivalent to matter and, thus, to pure perception). Finally, Deleuze welcomes the time-image in contemporary cinema as an expression of an impersonal, desubjectified consciousness. |
