The City as Spacing of Existence

Comprising a selection of photographs from throughout the artist’s career, this book by Valérie Jouve sets out to show what, in the course of these “twenty years of work” has gradually emerged, as she herself puts it, as “a project, a method, a relation to my tool, but also to a context, and to a reality.”
From the multiple images we have before us here, it fairly quickly becomes evident that this “reality” is articulated around two constitutive or foundational themes that are humans and the milieus in which they live together, and particularly the urban environment. The town here is envisaged in terms both of its architectural constructions and its geographical extension, all the way to its peripheral limits, which are so often considered problematic.

Although, formally, on (or like) the very surface of these images, an initial glance might detect the emergence or hardening, with all the urban and social conflict that this entails (as attested by the rootlessness and tension afflicting today’s megacities), of a clear dichotomy or opposition between the two, it may on the contrary be the case that what is affirmed or attested here is in fact the ontological or in any case necessary convergence of human existence and urbanity. This is already and especially the case as it occurs in the spacing of the essentially open, that is to say, in-essential, essence of man – of his body, of his “being there,” and therefore, at the same time, of his “being-there” as “being-there-with”  –, the city constituting, in this sense, the spatial extension of that “with,” the rhythm of the “between” within which the “with” is constantly coming to pass.
So it is that at the origins of Western civilisation, Aristotle designated the appearance of the city as the condition of possibility, not only of human existence, but also and above all, of its free conduct within the horizon of the commonweal: “A city is a sharing of clans and villages in a perfect and self-sufficient life. That is, we say, a happy and good life.”  Thus, if it comes into existence “for the sake of perfect and self-sufficient life” – and here Aristotle is again insisting on the absolute and necessary anteriority of the city in relation to the individual (the whole being necessarily anterior to the part) –, then that which must constitute its essential purpose, its telos, is not only possible coexistence, but the “good life.”
In this sense, what comes first in the order of human things is coexistence, namely, the “co,” “cum” or “with” of existence, without which man is not and cannot become human; in other words, if man attains his substance and essence only in the relation to the other, as materialised and enacted by the city, it is because man is essentially a zoon politikon, a “political animal.” But here we must immediately make it clear that what defines the city is not “living” (subsistence) but “the good life” (to eu zen), so much so that man would fall short of his essence if he failed to achieve it, as if he were thus renouncing his freedom, his supreme destiny, which would be meaningful only insofar as it is given concrete, spatial form in or as a just sharing, of which the polis is the name and the “perfect” incarnation.

It is in this dimension, the original constitution of human existence as a plurality displayed and spatially organised under the shared horizon of the city, that is to say, as the political space par excellence, that Valérie Jouve’s photographs can be seen to exist, since they present its “lineaments” and sometimes even its going-astray, in contemporary cities, insofar, that is, as today’s cities can still be given the name “city” in the sense this word acquired over the centuries before this one, and through the risks it has been exposed to, wherein it may have been lost, at least in part, as indeed I shall attempt to show with regard to the photographs here.
Valérie Jouve states: “I am fascinated by cities, by elusive spaces. Also, because I believe that today people are trying to apprehend the city as a whole, but with tools that leave no room for what cannot be spoken. What is wanted is a city that can be analysed. That is what I am trying to accompany: today’s world.”  This “elusive space” of the city that cannot be apprehended en bloc or analysed, but only accompanied, like the movement of “today’s world” – such is the focus of this photographer who recognises in the city (like the city or through it), “the world” is taking place and taking its space, but in such a way that it cannot be analysed or grasped as a whole. What is at stake here, too, bears on the constant birth of the world to the world, as it is spatialised in the plurality and heterogeneous multiplicity of the singular spacings of each singular existence in the urban places of our communal now. There is no need here of lengthy sociological analysis to establish the point that today human coexistence has reached an extreme degree of density and explosiveness in cities, with all the problems, including social and cultural conflict, but also the inventions both welcome and dubious, that this entails.

It would therefore be reductive to say the least to consider the city solely as a delimited geographical zone organised as the nodal or intersecting point of communications networks. The city is primarily a fabric woven from sets of social, political, cultural, religious, ethnic or simply professional or neighbourly relations; in short, it is a coexistence that transcends and mixes the respective contexts of all these origins, constantly replaying them in the spreading and spacing of its hybrid, multiple effectiveness, which is essentially and unfailingly multiple. Beyond or through all these determinations, the city is a place that produces ties, that is to say, a spatial fabric made up of inextricable threads through and in which human plurality and living together are bodied forth.
How, then, are we to meet the ethical and political imperative of “living together” and of the “good life” when life in contemporary cities is growing more problematic in every way. It as if the extension of the place were causing the ties to fray, its megapolitical extension wearing thin its cohesion and social articulation. Such is the great challenge put to us by this world or being-in-the-world, given that “beyond the acute and media-magnified crisis in the ghetto suburbs, it is the collective becoming of our cities that is both fascinating and disturbing. The city is constantly spreading and scattering. A huge and undecipherable kaleidoscope, it seems to be fragmenting into functional zones unconnected by any visible continuity. Arrogant wealth sits beside islands of poverty, social fragmentation redoubles spatial fragmentation. This archipelagic space is also, of course, a space of growing interdependence, of the mobility of the most diverse connections – but the price to pay for this wealth of relations seems to be a dissolution of the city itself.”  It is as if the city was being lost or vanishing in this “fragmentation” or “scattering,” its basic and essential role as a forger of human ties disappearing into endless mutations, recompositions and de-compositions. This, at any rate, is the question and the challenge, of concern to all lives and all successful living-together, that is posed as we go further and further into this globalised world, a world where we may find ourselves bereft of the city we knew before, while continuing to insist on “justice” and the “good life,” without which we would run the risk of also losing the ties and the “withness” that constitute human existence.
If, then, under the immense and uncontrollable pressure of this scattering and fragmentation into “archipelagos,” the city is constantly recomposing itself by overflowing its own limits, replaying these ever further and more on the edge, then – and surely there is no denying this – it is not so much at its centre as on its edges, its frontiers, its respective limits, that the city is inventing and constructing itself, that it is playing out its destiny. In other words, all this is happening in the process of mixing, or hybridity (the mixing of places, dwellings, people and identities), more than in its heredity (notably as regards the central location of all or at least most of those things that relate to heritage, power, culture, and even commerce and work). Should we not therefore turn our attention away form the historical and cultural loci of the city and towards those of its banality, towards it “remote” edges, that is to say, those places we call the “suburbs,” where the city is endlessly replaying and exhibiting, ever more overtly, in what seem their most condensed forms, many of the problems and issues that it must now confront? It is to this place, precisely, where the city, and the coexistence that is in play there, are constantly opening and reinventing themselves at the risk of losing themselves, that nearly all of Valérie Jouve’s photographs take us, as if they were inviting us to realise that this, now and in the future, is one of the laboratories, if not the essential laboratory, of our contemporary living-together.

What remains to be said is that, insofar as the present and future of the city are, through globalisation, organically and intimately bound up with those of the world,  there can henceforth be no right politics in the world unless this first takes into account the problems of the city today, notably as regards access to this public good that it ultimately constitutes. In short, the destinies of the city and the world are bound up with each other, as if they were both engaged in a process of mutual covering and enveloping, to the extent that they almost merge on the very edges of these places of encounter and mixing, of transition and crossover that are articulated by today’s urbanity, and spread in almost anarchic fashion by this general movement whose name, “globalisation,” struggles to hide the fractures and imperfect mending, the fragmentation and risks of closure, that threaten them in their separate and shared stretching.
Consequently, inasmuch as they usually remain tied to a clearly identifiable urban and social centrality, as they do to perceptible limits, all our traditional criteria and yardsticks need to be rethought, for, as Jean-Luc Nancy has shown, “it is no longer possible to identify, either a city that would be ‘The City’—as Rome was for so long—or an orb that would provide the contour of a world extended around this city. Even worse, it is no longer possible to identify either the city or the orb of the world in general. The city spreads and extends all the way to the point where, while it tends to cover the entire orb of the planet, it loses its properties as a city, and, of course with them, those properties that would allow it to be distinguished from a ‘country.’ That which extends in this way is no longer properly ‘urban’—either from the perspective of urbanism or from that of urbanity—but megapolitical, metropolitan, or co-urbational, or else caught in the loose net of what is called the ‘urban network.’ In such a network, the city crowds, the hyperbolic accumulation of construction projects (with their concomitant demolition) and of exchanges (of movements, products and information) spread, and the inequality and apartheid concerning the access to the urban milieu (assuming that it is a dwelling, comfort, and culture), or these exclusions from the city that for a long time has produced its own rejections and outcasts, accumulate proportionally. The result can only be understood in terms of what is called an agglomeration, with its senses of conglomeration, of piling up, with the sense of accumulation that, on the one hand, simply concentrates (in a few neighbourhoods, in a few houses, sometimes in a few protected mini-cities) the well-being that used to be urban or civil, while on the other hand, proliferates what bears the quite simple and unmerciful name of misery.”
It is now easier to understand why Valérie Jouve has always tended to gravitate towards the edges of cities, for it is there that this spacing of the world and of being-in-the-world as being-with in the city is constantly moving and growing, endlessly increasing in a movement that, far from being under control, is creating a new kind of urbanity, in which it may be that the city as we knew it is disappearing or, so we may hope, reinventing itself in a process that, as Jouve holds, we may also accompany.
To sum up, then, because they are on the edge, these urban spaces are constantly mutating, both in human operations of construction and demolition that seek to encroach further on the countryside, on nature or on the environment in general, and in those of nature itself, which always fights to regain the space that the city has won from it. There is always a latent sense of crisis relating to what we could call a kind of finiteness of place, of these urban places that we can see in Jouve’s photographs and that, it is tempting to say, we can also smell and touch. The abandoned buildings and even the walls attest this finiteness (as in the photographs of facades). And so do the trees that rise up like individual characters in this peopling of the place.
Many of these photos show figures against urban backgrounds, but these are not really portraits, or at least not portraits of these individuals, even if they do show us their individual features. What is portrayed here, if we insist on keeping that idea, is the spatial articulation of these beings in their urban environment with which they interact as they also do amongst themselves. Thus the place is resonant with their presence, just as their presence is imbued with the geographical, urban and even architectural specificity of the space they inhabit or are passing through. It is as if, in fact, the urban space inhabited or traversed them as much as they, in their occupation or idleness, inhabit and traverse it, in a kind of ontological chiasmus, with man and city mutually imparting their Stimmung. It is in this sense that the video Grand Littoral presents the “Colline” neighbourhood of Marseille not only as an urban space but also as an existential, physical and mental one, which inhabits those who alive there, individually and collectively.

 In other words, the city where we live from day to day is primarily a sensible space that we experience not only with our eyes but also with our ears and all our senses, as well as with our memory and our imagination. At the same time, our movements, actions and words feed into and colour the city. This reciprocal process is constantly shifting and always open. And if the city and space are more than a neutral and amorphous surface for recording, “it is because whenever someone says something, it colours the space, just as it is coloured, in its very indifference, by what happens within it.”
Whether they show buildings, passers-by or smokers, these photographs are therefore portraits of this resonant interrelation between urban space and its inhabitants, a reciprocity that is diffusely present and infinitely open. It is as if we are called upon to take care of it, for we realise that taking care of people and their coexistence may perhaps began with taking care of the place of their individual and shared spacing – the where of their being-there and being-with, for there can be no being-with (or shared existence with justice and dignity) without a there, a proper place. Which is why these photographs issue an injunction, reminding us that we should not look down on this space, and in particular these peripheral zones of contemporary urbanity.

Thus, because it is this open space where existences meet and pass, the city does not need to be circumscribed or confined in an identity that would express its identity once and for all. In its essential and constitutive openness, it always dismisses and overflows all identity, for it is itself, through the singular-plural nature of all these encounters and passages, and through their inexhaustible, unpredictable nature, a continuous production of meaning or excess of meaning, of fragments or splinters of meaning. More than a state or even a space, then, the city is a movement, that of the articulation or conjugation of urban and architectural forms, but also of actions and words, locomotion and occupation of all kinds, of ways and voices open to and opened by the incessant advent of meaning through all the bits of meaning that animate it and carry it beyond itself. Likewise in the splinters of meaning presented in these photographs that, far from seeking the meaning of the city where they were taken (or rather, perhaps, constructed), multiply the impossibility of such a definition, given that this is, so to speak, continuously carried away and overflowed by its own extensive movement.
As Jouve points out, “I need the physical dimension of an experience. I want to get the beholder to feel my image in his guts more than with his eyes. This is a concern that has guided my experiments and my relation to this tool [the camera]. Perhaps it has something to do with a need to go beyond the common understanding of the world in order to set it in motion again. This need is central to what I do, and up to now, at every level of what I do, I like to question meaning through dialogues between bodies, between a human body and a block of building, between an image and another one that challenges it, between the spectator’s body and the photographed body. This unstable, intermediate space refuses affirmation, states of fact.”

 Even when they reflect the harshness and severity of these urban living conditions, or precisely because they reflect them (seeking neither to hide nor to underscore them by taking them as a “theme,” which is what contemporary photography does all too often), in these photographs Valérie Jouve is celebrating, in the depth of these images, so to speak, the vital forces of cohesion and relation or encounter that are at work in these spaces. And this is all the more remarkable because people are constantly underlining the absence or exhaustion, or even the fundamental impossibility, of these forces, so insistently do the media present these places in terms of social and cultural relegation or banishment, a tendency already present in the etymology of the word suburb, as that which is below or under the city.
These photographs invite us to go beyond this commonplace, or rather, not to enter into it, to go back and attempt to touch on the common, or more precisely, the in-common of this place and of the city in general. For if, as these photographs do, we look a little further, we realise that here and elsewhere the city is constantly creating encounters, between people, between places in the city and the people who pass through them and in so dong are touched or transformed by this urban environment as much as they by their presence or trace touch and transform it.

 The body does not exist as such (there is not the body, or even a body), because it is at its origin and by its ontology that by and as which all men and all beings and all things are in the world, being only by being there in common, in space in the general “with” of all bodies that ultimately constitute the world. In other words, as soon as a body is, it is or is simply being-among or with other bodies, in the singular-plural of an encounter or a relation, of an opening to the other or an alterity that is not, therefore, secondary, but primary and originary. It is as if things began with isolated existences that subsequently forged relations or communication in which they always are already, even in the deepest solitude.
In other words, the relation to the other is not something to initiate or produce. Man is always already a “being-in-relation,” a “being-with,” an access to alterity. “Humanity” is not made up of isolated beings, but of the communication between them. We are never given, even for ourselves, outside a network of communication with others: we are steeped in this communication, are reduced to this incessant communication that we feel, even in solitude, as absence.”  In this sense the fact that “we” and “with” come before the individualities that constitute them, and well before all the ethnico-national or socio-political figures that men have always tried to impose on them, defines the community of the existent as an originating and unsurpassable condition of existence itself. And so we must affirm that “community is not added to the existent. The existent does not have its own consistency and subsistence by itself: but it has it as the sharing of community. Community (which also has nothing subsistent by itself […]) is consubstantial with the existent: to each and to all, to each as to all […] it is coexistence by which existence itself and a world in general are defined.”  Thus it is the “with,” the “bond” that itself produces the place or, in accordance with the spacing of being-in-the-world and being-in-the-city, as it is figured in or as our contemporaneity, that produces the city, giving it its place in the full openness of its “between.”

 If I invoke what, from Bataille to Blanchot and Heidegger to Jean-Luc Nancy (to mention only them), no doubt constitutes the fundamental discovery of 20th-century political thought, this is not, as is customary in such writings, to annex the prestige of a “school” of philosophy to my analysis of these images by Valérie Jouve, but to acknowledge or echo that which, it seems to me, is the major concern that, constantly referring to the archi-originary political dimension of being-in-common, also or perhaps primarily as it exists in space, in our contemporary spaces, informs and animates all her images, as if they were privately worried about the justice that necessarily accompanies the spacing of this being-in-common. As if, while innocent of political messages or critical, utopian or messianic pretensions, they themselves constituted the appeal or invitation thereto, making resonant in their collective organisation and in each individual one  the meaning of this “being with,” as if this represented its main aesthetic and political strength. And as if they did this simply through the intrinsic quality of her photographs which, instead of embodying what is called an engaged or critical art (starting, for example, with a critique of urban peripheries), on the contrary denies or refuses in their very form any capacity that the image might have, including in art, to objectively and authentically capture something that one could identify as “reality,” in this case, the urban, cultural or social reality of the towns that are presented to us here.
Somewhat in the manner in which Walter Benjamin attempted to define the spirit of modernity in the place that, as he saw it, epitomised the period, namely, Paris, Capital of the 20th Century, the Paris of arcades, these photographs show how these times of ours are spaced in contemporary cities. Thus, “if there is a possible or conceivable ‘everydayness of utopia,’ it is certainly no simple slogan. It is at the heart of the labyrinths and networks of holes and passages, courtyards and streets of the city that it awaits like a manna that the passer-by not only receives but also interprets.”  Without speaking for others, or in their place, Jouve’s photographs become the visual echo of this quotidian song of the possible in which the bond and place of the city are reciprocally woven on the very edge of the city. Like so many shreds of this weave, each photo presents an individual, singular occurrence of this, showing us, not how the inhabitants traverse an urban landscape, but how they themselves belong to it or how, conversely, the landscape breathes in their presence, their passing or their face. The singular-plural of existence is thus in a permanent dialogue with the urban space, and that too is what passes through, passing also in the space of these images, making a sign or vibrating in their respective surfaces. One might think here of the aesthetic coup carried off by Flemish painting, and particularly by Bruegel, when he represented figures or religious scenes in the midst of the social and urban environment of his day.
Without getting hemmed in or postulating an absolute spatial or social determinism, which would be to deny the individual and shared openness of the city or the existences inhabiting it, it is rather as if these images were celebrating this openness, as if a voice came forth from them saying, “Look at their cities, you will known what man are, what they are worth individually and collectively. There you can see the meaning of their times disseminated and shared in their reciprocal spacing.” That each city is like the “novel of the times,” is also what Baudelaire and, more recently, in his wake, Benjamin wanted to convey to us. Benjamin, indeed, even planned to make Paris the subject his magnum opus, which was to show how modernity took an exemplary form there.

The fact that we can speak here of the “novel of the day” does not mean that it is simply a matter of hunting down the urban signs that might reflect this narrative, as if photography were considered as no more than a tool for objective representation, designed to bear witness to the forces that animate and shape it. This would be to overlook the fact that the age itself, saturated with an ever-growing and invasive multitude of images of all kinds, in which “reality” – when everything is already an image or photograph – does not reveal or no longer reveals itself in the whirlwind of the “visual” (Serge Daney), but must in a sense be earned (or rather, insofar as it remains inappropriable, indicate or signal itself) beneath the spectral and spectacular-commercial layer which, having laid itself down and fossilised on it, moves it even further away by drowning it in “general equivalence.”
It is a major issue, both aesthetically and, inseparably from that, politically, for what is at stake here is the capacity or power to represent the real. We cannot forget here “he who holds up the Mirror holds his fellows at his mercy,”  or, to put it differently, i.e., “he who takes control of the visibilities is master of the kingdom and organises the looking police.”  Now, if a society’s capacity and the capacity that is a society to represent itself is confiscated and appropriated by a single theologico-political perspective, even if this is presented as “Ideal,” and if its constitutive plurality is thus registered and denied by the One which is One only by virtue of having devoured and digested otherness and difference, then “being with,” in its free singular-plural spacing, gives way to the totalitarian monster and its deadly “Mirror.” This also means that there are no longer any “gazes” but only a Vision (of the world, of life, of being-in-common, of the city, etc.), that deleterious Single Vision that we would be mistaken to assume disappeared along with the age of the Ideologies and Metanarratives that formerly animated the theologico-political epic of the world. For even if it dresses itself up in the glad rags of the End of History or Nature, as the epochal, final or destinal revelation of the World, which we now call “globalisation” – and though it may reduce the real to the “spectacular” and the “spectacular” to “commodities,” though it may present itself as the only Vision of the world, by subordinating everything that inhabits it to its consumerist imperatives, even in the deepest misery and in war, which it is constantly globalising – the fact cannot be hidden that it constitutes one of the most powerful enterprises of reduction or ideological enslavement that the world has witnessed, goings so far as to lose the “real” under the layers of its simulacra, hiding it more and more under the spectral and specular spectacle that it is incessantly beaming out via its faithful servants that are the myriad screens of the theatrum mundi.

Does this mean that it is therefore impossible to show the real, that photography and images in general are doomed to the pure relativism of an all-powerful subjectivity, or even to the factitiousness of spectacularisation? Or, to put it differently, that photography can no longer lay claim to any indicial value, as if what had been constituted within it under the horizons of “photojournalism” and “documentary” were no longer relevant or valid in this way? Surely not, providing that we recognise – and this is essential, so much so that it constitutes a kind of ethics of the image – that all images are themselves ultimately constituted by an unbridgeable gap between what they purport to show and the way in which they show it – which, ultimately, is their form. For, in addition to the partiality or subjectivity of framing, of viewpoint, of editing or what it leaves out of the frame, the image is never able to objectively testify to what it gives us to look at, without there being some residue or disparity.
And that is why Valérie Jouve always works with the same protocol, which rests as much on the imaginary constitution of what she has “seen” inside herself as on the perceptual constitution of what she has “seen” in front of her, organising or orchestrating in a sense this mixture of fiction and snatches of reality like a scene from urban life, as it is put before us in her photographs. That is why, for example, editing and dramaturgy come in here – the way the photographer composes her images like an invitation to multiply the way we regard, and therefore, our regard for, this plurality or this singular-plural of the with, as if to indicate or manifest the fact that there is and can be no direct or objective access to the real. Unless, that is, we deny the difference, the alterity and the plurality that are constantly being disseminated there, causing a proliferation of gazes, like so many signs of what, formally-aesthetically, ontologically and politically is out of the frame, and that also breathes in her images. And this is not just a sign of respect or acknowledgement, but also, beyond that, a call and invitation to always preserve, protect and welcome it as the most precious good through which is constituted at once our relation to the real, to the other and to images, and beyond that, to art itself, insofar as it is a purveyor and conveyer of difference and not unity, of singularity and not individuality, of disparity and openness and not closure or objectivity, of opacity and not transparency – insofar as it is a call to multiply the irreducible plurality of voices that people the real and not the assumption of one Single Voice authorising itself to reveal its fictive and monstrous truth.
It is then for us beholders to whom the photographer offers these “views” to appropriate them and feed them in return with our own imaginary of the city and its inhabitants, as if it was above all a question of passing on responsibility (that of the gaze and of what it implies in the face-to-face with those whom we are gazing at) and not or no longer of imposing an authority (that of the artist “who sees” and brings back to morals the precious truths of her solitary adventure, as is still often the case). That is why we would be wrong, to say the least, to see this as merely social or political photography designed to decry the various injustices rampant in cities and on their margins. The photographer is too familiar with such pitfalls to blunder into the trap of that aesthetico-political good conscience that, while denouncing, continues to partake of the combined enterprise of making reality unreal and packaging it as spectacle/commodity, reducing everything, including denunciation and engagement, to an obsolete commodity that is devoid of meaning. As Adorno pointed out in his Aesthetic Theory, if art can still purport to be “subversive” or have the slightest political and social impact, then it is primarily and above all when it takes on “revolutionary” or innovative forms, and not when it distils political messages or meanings (which at best can only satisfy the good conscience of those emitting them).

In this sense, as Jean-Luc Godard says, “there are no just images, there are just images.” That is to say, there are multiple perspectives on a nondescript reality, which themselves give rise to interpretations or visions that are also multiple. Without taking this point any further, we may just point out, as indeed many great image-makers of our times have done, notably Chris Marker, Jean Rouch and Frederick Wiseman, that “fiction” is necessary – precisely because it incorporates these acknowledgement of the loss of objectivity, of the idea of fidelity to the truth as a matching – as the best means of representing the real, of bearing witness to it, insofar as this can be done at all. The point, in a sense, is to depose the authority of the image as the faithful representation of a presence, insofar as such authority continues to be effective today, thus affording a handle on what one could call the excess of the image or its native violence, as manifested both in the icon that purports to give access to a sacred or divine presence (as incarnated in the image itself), and in the “spectacular-commodified” image, which is at work in the ever-growing multiplicity of planetary screens of capitalist globalisation.
It may indeed be the case that in this so-called “civilisation of images” we actually find ourselves dealing with images less than ever before, having instead of these images – as Serge Daney foresaw – only their spectacular, commercial simulacrum, that is, “the visual,” in other words, an exuberant proliferation of “visions” without a gaze, images in which we see nothing, images that have run out of or are bereft of images, images without images but not without influence on bodies and minds. By analysing the way in which the “the play of signs defines the anchorages of power,”  Michel Foucault showed how political violence was insidiously exercised within the very flesh of images and, from that flesh, continued into our own flesh. And so, because the ideological and visual apparatus are one, the efficacy of their conditioning flows almost naturally from our immersion in the world of images. Which proves, indeed, that “under the surfaces of images, one invests bodies in depth.”
Hence, indeed, the need, not to destroy these images (which in the end would be merely to replace one kind of violence with another), but, by deconstructing this apparent neutrality which disguises the ideology of the world, reified as the commodified spectacle, by already reinjecting alterity and disparity, to create an ethics of “seeing” articulated to a responsibility of “showing,” since the image, contrary to the propagandistic strategy of the visual, always implies an irreducible difference at work between the world and its representation, and to introduce the place of the other (the other whose image this is and the author who consults it ).
 
If the point is, as Barthes recommended, “to disfigure signs rather than destroy them,” and to do so by saturating them with disparity or difference so that they can no longer withdraw into themselves and enclose us in their closure, but open up to the alterity that traverses them but is never contained or absorbed by them, then the ethical and aesthetic strategy of a form of art that proceeds through the very forms of these images, using their codes and grammar so as to insinuate something other, can turn out to be doubly effective: first of all, with respect to the images themselves, because it interferes with or disrupts them by reinjecting the alterity that would prevent them from retreating into any kind of single voice or effect of fusion, thereby constituting mutant forms of utterance; and then, in relation to the public space where they usually operate, because, by using their form, it slows or arrests the vision brought to bear on them, even transforming that vision into a “gaze,” which in turn discovers the complex but fragile nature of the image which can always – and this is the nature of violence – be reduced to a vision. Which shows once again that in this ethical idea of the inhabiting and comprehending of signs, it is our role as beholders and makers of images to invent, in place of the “visual,” a politics of gazes (forgoing both presence and identification), a politics of resistance to fusion and confusion, by virtue of which the alienation and violence of the visual could be converted into freedom and respect of and in the images.