The Image in French Philosophy (Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 5) (Conciousness Literture and the Arts)

'The Image in French Philosophy' challenges dominant interpretations of Bergson, Sartre, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Deleuze by arguing that their philosophy was not a critique but a 'revival' of metaphysics as a thinking pertaining to impersonal forces and distinguished by an aversion to subjectivity and an aversion of the philosophical gaze away from the discourse of vision, and thus away from the image. Insofar as the image was part of the discourse of subjectivity/representation, getting rid of the subject involved smuggling the concept of the image out of the discourse of subjectivity/representation into a newly revived and ethically flavored metaphysical discourse - a metaphysics of immanence, which was more interested in consciousness rather than subjectivity, in the inhuman rather than the human, in the virtual rather than the real, in Time rather than temporalization, in Memory rather than memory-images, in Imagination rather than images, in sum, in 'impersonal' forces, de-personalizing experiences, states of dis-embodiment characterized by the breaking down of sensory-motor schemata (Bergson's pure memory, Sartre's image-consciousness, Deleuze's time-image) or, more generally, in that which remains beyond representation i.e. 'beyond' subjectivity (Lyotard's sublime, Baudrillard's fatal object). The book would be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, aesthetics, and film theory. Contents -- Introduction: The New Metaphysics of Immanence -- Bergson's Matter-Image: The Degradation of the Impersonal -- Sartre's Image-Consciousness: The Allergic Reaction to Matter -- Lyotard's Sublime: The Ontologization of the Image -- Baudrillard's Simulacrum: The End of Visibility -- Deleuze's Time-Image: Getting Rid of Ourselves -- Imaginary Time in Contemporary Cinema -- Bibliography -- Index