Here is the summary of my research project on the Ontology of the Image:
The Ontology of the Image will be developed through an immanent critique of two of the most important schools of thought of the second half of the twentieth century: philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction. Both of these philosophical schools have been in their own way influenced by the inheritance of classical metaphysics whether in a positive or a negative way.
The project of metaphysics has always sought to achieve dominion over time and over the present. It has always sought to think time and actuality through and elevate itself over these times. It is this radically anti-historicistic aspect of metaphysics that must be re-awakened. To achieve dominion over time is a noble endeavor and one which thought should not shame itself of.
Obviously in this context, the notion of metaphysics must be particularized. Metaphysics is still rooted in the European Geist. But we must think in a European, super-European, Western way. Metaphysics is coextensive with the Western project. Metaphysics in its connection with science, logic and ethics constitutes the essence of the Western project.
This act of spiritualization of metaphysics is something which our times require in the greatest way. After post-structuralism and post-modernism, one of the excesses that Western thought has fallen into is the temptation of historicism. But the aim of philosophy and of thought has always been to conceive actuality conceptually in order to achieve distance from it and overcome it. Thus, what is required is a new metaphysics that will allow us a renewed access to the vital spiritual values of the West.
Metaphysics was already associated by Heidegger with a will-to-will that could be reduced to its will to dominate. Derrida was in fundamental agreement with Heidegger as was shown by his text “Violence et métaphysique”. But metaphysics and ontology must be understood as the science of Being qua Being. Metaphysics is a way in which an aspect of reality is spiritualized and detached from its mere embodiment and instantiation. The domination that is bemoaned by the post-modernists is not domination of one class over another or of one gender over another or of one race over another or of one culture over another. What one achieves domination over through metaphysics is time.
The connection between Nietzsche’s concept of Becoming and my notion of the Ontology of the Image is the following: through his critique of Becoming, Nietzsche has problematized the ontological and epistemological notions of permanence and stability. In Western metaphysics, permanence and stability are associated with the Platonic concept of Being and with the idea of the Good. The image is what is im-permanent, un-stable and un-true. It is a mere copy or projection of the idea. The idea is permanent, stable and a warrantor of truth.
Nietzsche writes: “We have uncovered a manifold one-after-another where the naive man and inquirer of older cultures saw only two separate things, "cause" and "effect" as the saying goes; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it.” This passage shows that Nietzsche, along with the rest of the tradition, with the possible exception of Gadamer, has under-estimated the value and worth of the image. Nietzsche still believes that we should somehow reach “beyond the image or behind it” and this constitutes perhaps his “real” entrenchment in Platonism as opposed to the one claimed by Heidegger.
In the third section of Truth and Method, Gadamer develops a universal ontology of language. This linguistic ontology is predicated upon the thesis that Being is (identical with) language. Gadamer has already alluded to the possibility that language may be conceived as an image in his Truth and Method, but the image and the “Ontology of the Image” that Gadamer begins to sketch in the first section of Truth and Method, is subsumed under the ontology of language of the third section of Truth and Method where Gadamer develops the universality of hermeneutics from the point of view of an ontology of language. Thus, the Ontology of the Image remains subordinated to the ontology of language even in the thinker that comes closest to articulating it in the Western philosophical tradition. Language certainly has an ability to self-transcend itself but this self-transcendence cannot capture the image within language. The philosophical project of the Ontology of the Image will seek to overcome philosophical hermeneutics, deconstruction and certain issues that are left un-resolved by Nietzsche’s account of Becoming.
Through the concept of différance and its linguistic manifestations, Derrida hopes to go beyond what he sees as still residual of the metaphysics of permanent presence in Heidegger’s thought. The essence of différance which is “neither a word, nor a concept” is the image. This understanding of différance as image (eikon or eidolon), will lead to an overcoming of deconstruction and hermeneutics through the development of an ontology of the image. The de-ontologization of Becoming operated by Nietzsche but left in-complete in its essence is in fact much more ancient than both the ontological difference and différance. It is grounded in the Platonic distinction and differenciation of the eidos and what Plato calls images (eikonai and eidolai). The distinction between the idea and the image works-through (in the German sense of wirken Wirkungsgeschichte) the totality of the Western metaphysical tradition. It will be the aim of this research project to show the deep dualism that inhabits the Western metaphysical tradition and that can be traced back to the Platonic distinction between idea and image.
Deconstruction and post-modernism have both attempted to overcome the representationalism of modernity that had been inaugurated by Descartes and continued by Kant. Différance was, for Derrida, a way to return behind the difference between signifier and signified that was at work beneath the Cartesian subject and object. Derrida thus polemicized with representationalism and inaugurated a post-modern anti-representationalism.
Similarly all the emphasis that was laid by post-modernism (Lyotard being on of its main representatives) on language and on the notion of “language-game” was a strategy aimed at overcoming modern representationalism. At the same time as it criticized modern representationalism, post-modernism attacked the concept of a modern metaphysics. Post-modernism is, in its essence, an anti-metaphysical movement. The essence of post-modernism is constituted by the fact that it cannot think through the present and actuality in a metaphysical way.
Being is the transcendental pure and simple. It is infinite and eternal. It is in this way that the project of the ontology of the image detaches itself from the Heideggerian Fundamentalontologie. For Heidegger, Being is ultimately finite. It is given, always, against the horizon of time and temporality. Heidegger has, in this way, de-transcendentalized metaphysics and ontology. The meaning of Being is always given through the mediation of Dasein’s temporality and historicity (at least in the early Heidegger with whom I am mainly concerned here).
It is here that the ontology of the image parts ways with Heidegger. The image that is seen in the Platonic cave is perceived through the senses as opposed to the idea that can be seen only, noetically, that is with the mind’s eye. But the only thing that is truly eternal, the only thing that always returns within our memory, is the image that is given to our senses.
In relation to this, the term and concept of image that will be so central to our research project has a double-meaning, as an object that can be given to the senses and then can be transposed and transmitted into the intellect, and as an object that is produced by only one of the faculties of the intellect: the imagination.
Plato writes in the Timaeus that time is an image of eternity. But time is composed of instants: these instants are cross-cuts. These instants themselves are only seized through images. In every new instant, new image is given. But each new instant, leaves its place in eternity. At the same time as it passes and never comes back, it perseveres and endures eternally. This is the paradox of time and eternity. The eternity of the instant is the eternity of the image. It is this absolute, eternal and infinite aspect of the image that the project of the ontology of the image will seek to describe and de-limit.
The idea, it is true, also has eternity as one of its features but it is non-spatial. The deeper truth of the image is that it is both a-temporal and spatial. The spatiality of the image allows it, to appear and be given in an instant. But as soon as the instant has passed, the spatiality of the image has also transformed and transfigured itself. The transformation and transfiguration of the spatiality of the image is what differentiates it from the Platonic idea and allows it to be represented. The image represents the idea. The idea is invisible whereas the image is visible. It is is in this interplay between the visible and the invisible that meaning appears and is given.
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