Ecrits

1997
Original language: French
Excerpts from a televised debate on the
French cultural program “Le Cercle de
Minuit,” broadcast as “Le Destin des images:
allons-nous devenir prisonniers?” (The future
of images: Are we going to become prisoners?)
Moderated by Laure Adler with Jean-Marie
Straub, Danièle Huillet, Paul Virilio, Enki Bilal
and Philippe Quéau, February 18, 1997,
1 hour 10 minutes.
NOTES
1 A specialist in Information Science,
Philippe Quéau was the founder and program
director of Imagina, a forum for new images
and virtual reality at the Institut national
de l’audiovisuel (INA) between 1981 and
1995. —Ed., this and all subsequent notes.
2 Immanentism: the belief that God or an
abstract mind or spirit permeates the world.
The influence of immanentism on German
philosophy can be seen in the work of
German Idealists such as G.W.F Hegel and
F.W. J. Schelling, and can be traced to the
work of Baruch Spinoza through infamous
“pantheism controversy” between F. H. Jacobi
and Moses Mendelssohn.
3 Thomism: philosophical school of
thought inspired by Saint Thomas of Aquinas
(1224/5–1374) whose most renowned work,
Five Ways of Proving the Existence of God,
maintains that reason and faith are not in
conflict, because both originate in God and
lead to the truth.
4 Neoplatonism: enduring philosophical
tradition initially founded by Plotinus in
the third century AD and whose ideas were
influenced by Plato and the Platonic tradition.
As a religious philosophy, it combines idealistic
monism with elements of polytheism.
5 Paul Virilio is a French cultural theorist
and urbanist, particularly well-known for his
study War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception
(London: Verso, 1989).
6 Enki Bilal is a French comics artist, graphic
novel author and film director. In 1983, he
collaborated with Alain Resnais on La Vie est
un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses).
7 A historian by training, Laure Adler has
had a long and prolific career as a journalist
and writer. In 1989, President Mitterrand
appointed her as a cultural advisor. In 1993
she took over the cultural program “Le Cercle
de minuit” on the France 2 television channel.
She has written biographies of Hannah
Arendt, Françoise Giroud, Simone Weil and
Marguerite Duras.
In February 2016, President François Hollande
wanted to name Adler the new Minister of
Culture, but Adler thought the call was a hoax
(Le Canard enchaîné, February 24, 2016).

57. DEBATE ON IMAGES AND VIRTUAL
REALITY

Philippe Quéau:1
I was speaking about abstraction. It seems
that for some observers…
Jean-Marie Straub: But what
are you selling, you represent
what? You’re a salesman! You’re
from the CIA or the World
Bank?
PQ: …Civilization’s progress
comes from the capacity to distance itself; you go outside of
yourself to become more aware
of yourself.
JMS: I know of only one abstraction; it’s that of Cézanne.
PQ: With the virtual, we have
an additional capacity for abstraction that is going to help
us move forward.
JMS: Progress again! But good
god, it’s the biggest lie in the
history of humanity! You’re
running into the abyss; those
are future generations that you
are programming, and that
is barbaric. You’re a publicity
agent!
PQ: I don’t believe in the
prophets of the “Big Day,” with
this outpouring of spiteful
anger, bile, and hatred.
JMS: I have neither anger, nor
bile, nor hatred; in fact, it’s precisely because I care! The only
thing we have is the planet; I
love life and it’s out of love that
I’m telling you what I’m saying.
PQ: You’re full of hatred, and
me, what I want to give is a
message of love. I have three
children and they are going
to live that! You have simply a
dump truck full of hatred and
insults to unload; you don’t
even know who I am and you
treat me like a CIA agent, and
you speak German with a kind
of incredible hatred; never have
I been treated like that; I’m beside myself… Too many people
believe themselves made of the
same fabric as the world; we are
spiritual beings. Virtual technology allows us to democratize this fundamental intuition
that we came here by accident
but that we are perhaps called
to manage; the virtual is a way
of saying to ourselves that the
real is only the real, only the
thing.

JMS: [begins to sing]…carry
my soul deep into the heavens. What you’re saying there
confirms the fact that Goebbels
won the war; it’s worse than the
Nazis!
PQ: Madame Adler, it’s unbelievable, this kind of statement
is really unbelievable!
LA: I didn’t really understand
that.
PQ: It’s a frightening cynicism!
JMS: The situation of this kid
that you describe is worse than
the Nazis!
PQ: You greatly disappoint me,
Monsieur Straub!
JMS: But it’s not you, it’s not
you…
PQ: When I think that I saw
a film like Chronicle of Anna
Magdalena Bach and that it’s you
who says that to me today, you
can’t imagine how much you
disappoint me.
JMS: […] In Bach’s music, there
are several centuries of peasantry.
LA: Okay, let’s come back down
to earth, and even with our feet
in the mud: we will live in a
sterile universe. How will our
relationship with reality function?
PV: By battle. There is a great
battle in the Bible, that of Jacob with the angel. For Jacob
to remain a man and not to
grovel before his god—you
remember that he is one of the
inventors of monotheism with
Abraham and Isaac—he wrestles with the angel. If we don’t
struggle, if we grovel before
technology, we’ll no longer be
men. Technology only advances
by exposing what is negative
in it. With the appearance of
photography, Cézanne diverges, he is going to paint reality
differently, because he is going
to fight against this figurative
reality that is no longer possible
to represent as such.

LA: Before, between reality and
the image, there was harmony,
beauty, gentleness, and the pleasure of the image…
PV: All the new technologies
emerged from a deterrent. We
couldn’t wage war because of
bombs, that was frightening.
As there was no war, we made
technology: it’s continuing the
war by other means.
LA: Who’s in charge?
PV: Fear. The fear of being poor,
of being lost, defeated. Fear is
the Grand Master of the world.
DH: The civil war in Yugoslavia…
LA: Images become a servant of
our collective fear?
PV: We inherited images that
are a kind of deterrent, from an
era of terror, and even of a balance of terror; we’re going to
have to clean this technology of
this imperialism of deterrence,
of this result of the military-industrial complex. Listen to
Deleuze! We’re headed towards
monitored societies!
JMS: I agree completely! What
you have said just now is very
fine; it’s the first time that there
are clear and sensible things
[said] since the start of this
conversation. This imperialism,
where does it come from? How
are we going to get rid of imperialism? We’re going to allow
Silicon Valley to prosper? We’re
completely colonized!

JMS: In short, what he dreams
of, is the liquidation of Thomism,3
for me the soul is the form
of the body and nothing more.
PQ: I am a Platonist, a Neoplatonist.4
JMS: Me, I’m a Thomist.
Paul Virilio:5
I believe that we
cannot find a way out of the
current situation in accepting
that the world is catastrophic,
apocalyptic, and marvelous all
at once. It is both; everything is
going faster; everything is more
rewarding, and everything is
more tragic. The day when we
have understood that, we will
finally be in a Shakespearian era,
where the heroes will be great
in the drama. The world will be
there, but it will be abandoned.
When the elevator was invented, we lost the staircase; we lose
the staircase, which becomes
the “emergency exit”…
JMS: The world in which we
live manufactures invalids, substitutes, and legless cripples!
PV: The overriding danger is
that there exists an emergency
reality and humanity, which exists but no longer has the right
to its story.