Force of Imagination by John Sallis

Author:John Sallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253028228
Publisher: Indiana University Press

C. SHINING

But spacing alone does not suffice for the self-showing of the thing. Presence, too, is required—that is, the occurrence of presence, hence also its locus, hence the frontal image on which the various spacings come to bear. Indeed the frontal image is central to the self-showing of things; it is itself centered in the frontal aspect, as which the thing is present and which, in the self-showing, comes to open onto the thing itself. And yet, even before the thing itself turns out to be dispersed through its spacings—in the sense that full presence and determination are indefinitely deferred—the frontal image, even its frontal aspect, proves to have its promise of sheer presence undermined by the binary character of certain senses, not as an anatomical fact, but as it comes into play in the unfolding of apprehension. That vision is binocular, that hearing is biaural, that one touches with two hands—this already disturbs the simplicity and stability that the frontal aspect could otherwise seem to possess, especially at a level prior to the workings of horizonality. Already with the binocular image, for instance, there will have been a minute difference of perspective and a corresponding protohorizonal operation.

In this regard the opening of the image onto the thing itself is always already under way; there is no level at which the image would be the present representation of a remote, absent original. Indeed any such duality or separation is precluded by the very determination of the frontal image as the occurrence and locus in which the thing comes to be present to one’s vision. As the very upsurge of the presence of the thing, the image is distinguishable from the thing only through a distinction that is itself unstable and that tends toward self-effacement. It is a distinction that borders on being no distinction at all, for the image, even if duplicitous, is nothing other than, nothing distinct from, the thing. It is precisely as image that the thing itself is present, even if duplicitously, even if not yet showing itself as itself. When one prehends a frontal image, what is present to one’s vision is the thing itself in a particular aspect or profile. The image is there as the surface—the thin, almost diaphanous surface—at which the thing itself displays itself before one’s vision, casts forth a certain radiance, that is—in a word in which resounds an ancient word set at the limit—shines.

Most directly, shining (shine) transliterates Schein (scheinen). It is to be heard in the full range of senses carried by the German: shine, look, appearance, semblance, illusion. In this range of senses it is not a matter of simple polysemy but rather of senses so interlinked and mutually dependent that they form a field or spread rather than a series of distinct senses. The word has a kind of semantic spread such that each sense is constitutively implicated in the other senses that precede it; for instance, only if something shines forth can it put forth a certain look, and only then can it appear to some vision and thus become an appearance.

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