PHILIPPE CRIGNON Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the Image The problem that concerns us here is figuration. Not the image, andnot art, even though, of course, these themes are not unrelated to the ar- guments that follow. My initial hypothesis is that our current under- standing of all these phenomena would benefit from our adopting a new perspective, from our yielding neither to an aesthetic line of inquiry, full of preconceptions about the beautiful, the work, and its meaning, nor to the more recent promotion of the incarnated image, which bril- liantly summarizes a certain history but appearsincapable of dealing with the new images producedduring the last century (cinema, for ex- ample) and their anthropological, technical, and political stakes. This is why it seems necessary to ask a simple question: What is it that fun- damentally drives man to produce images, to leave traces that are not readbut seen and that touch us-to produce not signs, but figures? Returning to the act of production-to the compulsion to figure- we can expand our field of analysis beyond the narrow sphere of art and include children's drawings, graffiti, and techniques of image produc- tion (photography, video, etc.). We can also depart, historically, from the tradition of the Christian image, of the icon and its incarnational model, so that the Lascaux paintings are as much at issue as Boltan- ski's installations or Fritz Lang's films. To orient ourselves, let us take as our point of departure a famous image on which Georges Bataille-and not Emmanuel Levinas, who will be the focus here-has extensively commented.2 It is the image 1. See M.-J. Mondzain's Image, ic6ne, economie. Les sources byzantines de I'imagi- naire contemporain(Paris: Seuil, 1996), which carefully retraces the constitution andde- velopment of this tradition. 2. GeorgesBataille, Lascaux, or The Birth of Art, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Lau- sanne: Skira, 1955), 117, 139-40; Lerotisme (Paris: Minuit, 1957), 82-84; Les larmes d'1ros (Paris: Pauvert, 1964), 62-65. YFS 104, Encounterswith Levinas, ed. Thomas Trezise, C 2004 by Yale University. 100