The Crossing of the Visible and the Invisible

I

In itself, perspective exercises a paradox. Even more than that, perspective and paradox are determined by similar characters: both indicate the visible entirely in its withdrawing, discretely but radically. The paradox attests to the visible, while at the same time opposing itself, or rather, while inverting itself; literally, it constitutes a counter-visible, a counter-seen, a counter-appearance that offers in a spectacle to be seen the opposite of what, at first sight, one would expect to see. More than a surprising opinion, the paradox often points to a miracle — it makes visible that which one should not be able to see and which one is not able to see without astonishment [stupeur]. Thus, in the Septuagint, the works of God in liberating Israel from Egypt themselves produce paradoxes, known as miracles: "See what is most paradoxical [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]]: in water that extinguishes, the fire increases its power" (Wisdom 16:17). In this sense, or rather, in another sense that will soon become precisely the inverse of this, the human face offers a paradox to be seen; in the words of Char: "As the bee leaves the orchard for the fruit already black, so the women supported without betraying the paradox of this face that did not have characteristics of a hostage." A paradox of the face, which finds itself fulfilled in this "strange paradox in Christ ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), the Lord in the form of a servant, the divine glory ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) within the strictures of the human." The paradox testifies here that what enters into visibility is that which one should not have encountered there: fire in water, divinity in humanity; the paradox is born from the intervention of the invisible in the visible, whatever it might be. From this arises the necessary effect of the paradox, in thought but also in the sensible: it dazzles, taking the mind by surprise and shocking the gaze [la vue] in such a way that, far from fulfilling or satiating them, its very excess of visibility injures them. Just as the miracles give rise to so much resistance that their reality cannot be questioned, so theoretical paradoxes stimulate polemic much more than they stimulate the production of evidence. — And yet perspective, in its own way, also provokes a paradox. Or rather, it imitates the paradox, by inverting the relation it has established between the visible and the invisible. In the two operations, the gaze strives to see what it is not able to see, but differently: the paradox offers a counter-appearance, while perspective suggests a breakthrough of the gaze. The paradox poses a visible that belies the visible, perspective a gaze that pierces through the visible. Moreover, in classical Latin, perspicuus qualifies what offers itself as transparent to the gaze, for example a vestment; and in fact, in perspective, the gaze pierces through what one would call, for lack of a better term, a middle ground [milieu], a milieu so transparent that it neither stops nor slows down the gaze but allows it to rush through, without any resistance, as if it were a vacuum [vide]. In the case of perspective, the gaze pierces the void [le vide], without any obstacle or limit other than its own exhaustion; not only does it cross through this void, since it does not aim at any object defined by a horizon, but perspective's gaze pierces the void without end because it crosses through it for nothing; in perspective, the gaze loses itself in the void — more specifically, it aims at emptiness, outstripping every object once and for all, in order to aim at this void itself. In this, moreover, it loses itself only to find itself there continually.

What void? Here it is not a question of a physical void, which, as a pure absence of things, a real [réelle] breakdown of res, gives nothing to be seen but rather gives only vertigo. A physical void: there is nothing to be seen, no new spectacle, but conversely, the real void of reality [le vide réel de la réalité], as a desert of things, where I then enter, am moved, live, possibly fall and, when it ends, crash upon the final frontier. This desert of things I then almost see, as opposed to other things that mark or signal its boundaries in a way that renders the void visible. The physical void, precisely because it defines itself as a visible desert of things, remains reified, real, visible. On the contrary, the void that opens itself to the gaze in perspective does not open itself as a real "traversable" space that could be inhabited or defined, nor does it add anything to the store of visible things, not even a visible void. The void of perspective does not add anything to the real visible, since it puts it on the scene. In effect, in perspective my gaze invisibly traverses the visible, in such a way that, without undergoing any addition to the real, it becomes that much more visible: the auditorium that houses us today would not appear habitable to me, and strictly speaking would not be so, if, while crossing a certain invisible emptiness, my gaze was not rendered vast. For it is my gaze, opened up by perspective, that separates these colored surfaces to be seen and made out as walls, that raises this other clear surface to see there and make out a ceiling, that finally levels out this darker surface in order to recognize the unfolding of a ground where I can put my feet. Better, without the invisible space that separates them, we would not be able to recognize the surfaces in what would remain simply patches of color, amassed without order, or sense, or figure, piled up one on top of the other, without the slightest crack, thus requiring that we be subjected to a test to determine if our eyes are functioning like a kind of camera. In other words, more simply, if my gaze did not have the strange habitual property described as binocular vision, if it thus did not have an ability to deal with space, precisely the strained character of invisible space as the dense and confusing aggregate of the visible, then the auditorium containing us would not appear to us as — therefore would not be — spacious: we would be stifled by the promiscuous lack of differentiation of surfaces, to the extent that we would perceive not even surfaces but rather spots and colored shadows. With the visible coming to crush us, anguish would beset us, just as it did the prisoner who, in Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, saw the walls inexorably closing in upon him. A quotidian Samson, the gaze of perspective separates the visible by the equal power of the invisible, in a way that renders it for us vast, inhabitable, organized. Perspective's gaze bores through the visible in order to establish there the invisible distance that renders it aimed-at [visable] and first, simply, visible. The gaze instills the invisible in the visible, not indeed to render it less visible but, on the contrary, to render it more visible: instead of experiencing chaotically informed impressions, we see there the very visibility of things. Therefore it is the...