2.5 ideas about the image

1. 2.5 ideas about the image • If today we live in the era of the image ... • Pornography is perhaps one of the most strong (and often discussed) images of the crisis of the image • Some texts on pornography - Baudrillard(-) - Baudrillard (+) - Agamben (+)

2. Baudrillard: Stereo-porno • “The trompel’oeil removes a dimension from real space, and this accounts for its seduction. Pornography on the contrary adds a dimension to the space of sex, it makes the latter more real than the real – and this accounts for its absence of seduction” • Excess of reality, “hyperreality”: the whole opposition between reality and appearance has become meaningless; the predicate “real” has become an empty signifier that solely draws it meaning from “more real”. • This implies not only a loss of our sense of reality, but also the impossibility that appearances might possess a seducing quality as well as the possibilty to structure social life (loss of “savoir-vivre”)

3. Baudrillard: Stereo-porno • “Technique [... ]digs its own grave. [...] The real becomes a vertiginous phantasy of exactitude lost in the infinitesimal” • “What else does pornography do, in its sham vision, than reveal the inexorable, microscopic truth of sex? It is directly descended from a metaphysics that supposes the phantasy of a hidden truth and its revelation, the phantasy of the ‘repressed’ energy and its production – of the obscene scene of the real” • “vacuum of transparency”

4. Baudrillard: Stereo-porno • “In a non-fetishistic culture (one that does not fetishize nudity as its objective truth) the body is not opposed to the face [...] It is itself a face [...] It is therefore not obscene [...] It cannot be seen nude, no more than the face can for us.” = “The indistinction of face and body in a total culture of appearances” ↔ “the distinction between face and body in a culture of meaning (the body here becomes monstrously visible, it becomes the sign of a monster called desire)”

5. Baudrillard: Stereo-porno • “Pornography is usually faulted for two reasons – for manipulating sex in order to defuse the class struggle [...] and for corrupting sex [...] Pornography, then, is said to mask either the truth of capital and the infrastructure, or that of sex and desire. But in fact pornography does not mask anything (yes that is indeed the case). It is not an ideology, i.e. it does not hide some truth [...]” • Towards a more positive reading …

6. Agamben: The idea of communism • Suggestion to look at the phenomenon as announcing the idea of “a community we can still barely glimpse” • “Judgement Day”: Messianic idea (≠ ideal) (Paul, Romans, 10: 11-12)

7. Agamben: The idea of communism • “If we look for the truth content of pornography, it immediately displays is artless and insipid claim to happiness. The essential character of happiness is that it be enactable at any time or place: whatever the initial situation, it must inevitably end up in sexual relation […] To demonstrate that the potential for happiness is present in every least moment of daily life wherever there is human society: this is the eternal political justification of pornography”. • “The happiness shown is always anecdotal, always a story, a moment seized on, and never a natural condition or something taken for granted […] Pornography does not elevate the everyday world to the everlasting heaven of pleasure, but rather shows the unremediably episodic character of every pleasure”

8. “What we have dreamed, we have had already – a long time ago; so long ago that we don’t even remember. Not in a past, therefore – we do not have any records of it. Rather the unfulfilled dreams and desires of humanity are the patient limbs of the resurrection, always already to reawaken on the last day.”