Limit within image, image within limit

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the state of dependency between the tableau and the image. The proposed ideas go against the normal understanding, usage and function of the image and follow instead a particular ontological understanding of the image. This ontological analysis of the image is irritated by the presupposition that the ontological difference and distinctness of the image is not fixed and secure; on the contrary, it is conditioned by change, as is the case with all beings, being or beingness. This ontological difference exists and is only in its ontic manifestations. Furthermore, the article underlines the fact that the image, as a mode of being, is a plastic being that can be blocked in an ontological and ontic malady. The artistic image is interpreted through an analogy that tries to resist a reifying, objectifying or mechanical relation with an artwork, and one that acknowledges its distinctness, differentness, separateness, and rends, and that accepts the threat of semiotic collapse and its incomprehensible kernel. The intellectual context that is addressed and disrupted at the same time is oriented around the writings on the image of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's (*1940), the existential and clinical term of a ‘divided self’, the subject of research in R. D. Laing's book, The Divided Self, published in 1960, and the thinking of a cultural ontology by the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica's (1909–1987).

KEYWORDS:

• tableau
• image
• limit
• Jean-Luc Nancy