La catástrofe de medusa

Abstract

Through Caravaggio’s figure of Medusa, many questions raised by image, by the statute of image, can be examined. The image acts as a limit of the body, as a detour and a sending of the body beyond itself, out of the confines where a simple and flat look encloses it; but, as well, an image is an image of an uncertainty en route, in that sending. By the image the body sends itself to the other, even if that other is uncertain. An otherness affects the receptor as much as the sent message. Image is in that way image of the wandering body, of its uncertain destination. However, image is not only the representation of an original, but the representation of the lost of that original through the representation. From an “original” constituted by a huge group of relationships which made of that “original” of the image a crossover, a sender that becomes the condition of possibility (transcendental and empirical) of that origin. In that sense the “original” already posses the condition of an image as well. The body is already an “imaginary”. An inversion made by every image lies here, an implicit rebellion against every original: a catastrophe accompanying every representation. The image is always the representation and the re-operation of that catastrophe.