Global Powers of Horror by Debrix Francois;
Author:Debrix, Francois;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Representing the unrepresentable
In a brief reflection on what appears credible and what does not in narrative and cinematographic accounts of the concentration camps, Rancière seeks to address a seemingly simple question: are some things unrepresentableâparticularly, in a visual sense?47 In this short text, Rancière takes issue with, among other concepts, Jean-François Lyotardâs notion of the sublime.48 Rancière suggests that Lyotardâs understanding of the sublime reintroduces the idea that certain forms of art, or certain modalities of vision, cannot achieve representation. Instead, these artistic/visual forms evoke its impossibility, and they gesture towards something incommensurable. Rancière initially appears to adopt this binary understanding of representation versus unrepresentation by indicating that âtwo regimes of artâ are at play.49 One, the representational mode, remains subject to the ideas of speech, language, signification, and narrative continuity: art or visual forms that represent succumb to the âadjustment of the visibility of speech,â Rancière writes.50 Put differently, speech is rendered visible and (ever) present by some forms of art/visual aesthetics. Meaning/signification as what humansâand humans onlyâdo is boosted by this modality of artistic/visual representation. In this manner, to represent is to put human thought into language, and art/visual aesthetics remain wedded to this logocentric postulate.
But another regime of art/aestheticsâvisual aesthetics, particularlyâappears to be based upon the impossibility of logocentric affirmation or reassurance. In this way, the unrepresentable (perhaps what is âsublimeâ in art, according to Lyotard) is art or the visible freed from speech. As Rancière puts it, art/the visual is âno longer subject to the identification of the process of signification with the construction of a story.â51 The unrepresentable in art/vision thus severs the ties to language/narrativity. By no longer readily making sense or signifying, this form of art/vision appears to reverse the logical order since speech and language now become subject to the whims of the artistic or the visible. Horror, as I have theorized it above, seems to be akin to this modality of art/vision as unrepresentable, since, as both Cavarero and Asad have intimated, horror renders one speechless and shatters regimes of signification/meaning.
Rancière is somewhat sympathetic to this binary opposition between representation and unrepresentation, meaning and non-sense, and logocentrism and horror. And yet he is also not totally satisfied with it either. Turning to some of the introductory scenes of Claude Lanzmannâs film Shoah, scenes of the holocaust that seem too shocking, too inhuman for some to believe or face, Rancière refutes the alleged unrepresentability of these images. Note that Rancière does not deny the horror these scenes reveal. Rather, Rancière argues that the âelimination of the Jews and the elimination of the traces of their eliminationâ are âperfectly representable.â52 But they are representable according to a non-linguistic, non-speech-dominated, non-narrative, and non-logocentric logic of exhibition or action. For Rancière, they are representable as what he calls âthe form of a specific dramatic action.â53 This âspecific dramatic actionâ is the form of representationâor, perhaps, of revelation, as I called it aboveâtaken by that which is no longer contained in language or subjected to speech. It is not simply an excess or surplus of speech or language, however, but something else altogether.
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