Radical Passivity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The image on the poster, advertising a colloquium on radical passivity in Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy that took place at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht , in 2006, is barely recognisable. It takes a moment, and a certain distance, for the clots of small red dashes to contract into the pixilated image of a human figure, genderless, cropped at the shoulders and bust. To recognise in the computer-modified portrait the figure of a young man, his body dismembered piece by piece by a torturer, one would have had to have seen the photographs upon which it is based - those, most famously , which held Georges Bataille in thrall, and which he reproduced in his last book, The Tears of Eros , dubbed of "Chinese torture." [ supplice chinois or supplice des cent morceaux ]. (Margat) The poster's design - by Joël Vermot/Harrisson - forces the viewer back, creates a distance between her/him and the image, substituting the intimacy guaranteed by The Tears of Eros with the declamatory, quasi-abstract and anonymous sign language of advertising. In establishing this distance, a process of de-figuration, and de-signification, c omes to the fore, prompting us to ask not only how to think of, about such images of extreme violence, but how such images think themselves.
For Benda Hofmeyr, the organisor of the colloquium on radical passivity, Bataille's obsession with the "Chinese torture" images "is the 'substance' of Levinas's ethics: involuntary fascination, arresting paralysis that overcomes conscious thought." "What is important in this context," she adds, "is not the violence of the image but Bataille's reaction to it, i.e. its impact." (Hofmeyr) But how to speak of the encounter between Bataille and the images reproduced in the The Tears of Eros without reference to the violence they depict? What is the connection between the image's "impact" (and how to qualify this impact?) and Bataille's "reaction" (to what exactly, the photograph, its "violence," its referent?)?
