journal of visual culture

What Makes an Image Singular Plural?

Questions to Jean-Luc Nancy

Hagi Kenaan

Abstract
This article examines the connection between Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking
of images and his radical ontology of the singular plural. It shows
how Heidegger’s conception of Dasein becomes operative in Nancy’s
understanding of the visual and examines the implications which Nancy’s
critique of Heidegger carries for a new ontology of the image.The article’s
central concern is the question of what it means for a philosophy of the
visual to embrace the singular plural? In what senses is the singular plural
the foundation of an image’s being? How should the singular plural play
itself out in a thinking of the image? Focusing on Nancy’s interpretation
of painting’s origins, the article questions the manner in which the
ethical consequences of Nancy’s ontology are brought to bear on his
understanding of art.

Keywords
art • being-with • Heidegger • image • Jean-Luc Nancy • Lévinas • origins
of painting • singular plural

The ‘figure’ proves itself to be capable of opening onto the ‘with’

as its border, the very limit of its outline.
(J-L. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 2000)

Being-an-Image
One of the unique features of Nancy’s thinking about the visual is the ontological
character of his investigation. Nancy thinks of images in an ontological manner.

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SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
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Vol XX(X): 1–14 DOI 10.1177/1470412909354256
2 journal of visual culture  XX(X)

This primarily means that his treatment of the image is guided by the question of
being: being-an-image or the being of an image.
In addressing images in terms of their being, Nancy breaks away from a
predominant tradition that grounds the conceptualization of the image in the
opposition between true being and mere appearance. In this tradition, the
image is characteristically understood as that which merely appears, a type of
representation that draws its significance from its relation to being, while having
no genuine part in it. When construed as a representation, the image gives itself
to thought only in terms of that which it is not, i.e. in terms of its relationship to
another – typically more basic – kind of entity whose presence it re-presents. As
such, the image is commonly relegated by the tradition to a secondary, derivative,
domain of existence: a copy, a double, a substitute.
Hence, Nancy’ s methodological starting point is, in itself, an expression of an
understanding that ‘images are not actually copies’ (Nancy, 2006: 214), that
the ‘image is not the … double of a thing in the world’ (p. 73). Nancy thus
underscores the need to recognize the image’s ontological autonomy but, at
the same time, he also emphasizes that we should be careful not to turn the
image into yet another kind of object. Images, for him, are not re-presentations;
they embody their own unique form of presence but this presence is not thing-
like. Images are neither copies nor are they objects. And, in fact, they call for a
thinking that resists the binary opposition between object and copy. For Nancy,
in other words, it is crucial that we learn how to think of images as sui generis
and, in particular, that we think of them in ways that resist not only the more
traditional rhetoric of imitation and copy, but also the more contemporaneous
tendencies of integrating the image into a language of identity and objecthood.
The image, Nancy (2005) writes, ‘is neither the thing nor the imitation of the
thing’ (p. 8).And this may be taken as the first ‘distinction’ of the image, the initial
sense in which Nancy can speak of ‘The Image – The Distinct’. ‘The distinct’,
Nancy writes, ‘stands apart from the world of things considered as a world of
availability’ (p. 2). The image is ‘distinct from its being-there in the sense of the
Vorhanden, its simple presence in the homogeneity of the world and in the
linking together of natural and technological operations … What is distinct in
being-there is being-image’ (p. 9).
The clear Heideggerian resonance that we can hear in Nancy’s language is not
a coincidence, but reflects, rather, an ongoing dialogue with Heidegger which is
constantly present at the background of Nancy’s thinking about ontology and art.
Furthermore, in arguing for the need to distinguish the being of the image from
the being of an object (what Heidegger calls the Vorhanden), Nancy is, in fact,
borrowing – importing – from Heidegger a wholly distinctive interpretational
scheme that is central to Being and Time: the analytics of Dasein. For Heidegger,
the analysis of Dasein is necessary in order to open up the question that regulates
his investigation, the question of the meaning of Being. ‘What is primarily
interrogated in the question of the meaning of Being is that being which has
the character of Da-sein’ (Heidegger, 1996[1927]: 37). Dasein is chosen as that
necessary point of entry due to its uniqueness:
 What Makes an Image Singular Plural?  Kenaan 3

Dasein itself is distinctly different than other beings … Dasein is a being

that does not simply occur among other beings. It is ontically distinguished
by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.
(p. 10)

Dasein is a unique being whose uniqueness lies in the way it relates to its
own being. And, since ‘the essence of Dasein lies in its existence’,‘the charac-
teristics to be found in this being are thus not objectively present attributes’
(p. 40). For Heidegger, in other words, the analysis of Dasein calls for an inter-
pretation that must resist the parameters of objecthood and, instead, develop
‘with a view toward [Dasein’s] structures of existence’ (p. 40) such as, for
example, its being-in-the-world, being-with-others, temporality, care, being-
toward-death. This shift from Dasein’s object-modalities to its particular
modes of being – from ‘categories’ to ‘existentialia’ – is reproduced by Nancy
who, in turning to the image, explicitly brackets the image’s ‘objectively
present attributes’ and focuses, rather, on its unique structures of being: e.g.
the image’s givenness, its temporality, presence, absence, finitude and tran-
scendence. Hence, taking this analogy further, we may say that if Heidegger
is the philosopher who taught us – as Lévinas (1985) puts it how to hear the
resonance of the verb ‘to be’ in the concept ‘Being’ (p. 33), then Nancy can be
said to be a philosopher who teaches us how to recognize the presence of
that verb in the word ‘image’.

Being-With: Nancy’s Critique of Heidegger

Nancy often acknowledges his debt to Heidegger whose fundamental ontology
he regards as ‘that which has put us on the way to where we are, together,
whether we know it or not’ (Nancy, 2000: 26). In this context, one of the most
crucial moments in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1996[1927]) is, for Nancy,
the discussion of Dasein’s relations with others (the Existentiale of being-
with). Dasein, according to Heidegger, is never alone in the world and the
world is thus typically experienced through the prism of co-presence; however,
Dasein’s being-with is not just one among Dasein’s traits. It is not a contingent
fact, but a constitutive feature of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. ‘Being-with-
Others belongs’, according to Heidegger, ‘to the being of Dasein … [and] this
must be understood as an existential statement as to its essence.’ In this sense,
even ‘when actual, factual Dasein does not turn to others and thinks that it
does not need them … it is in the mode of being-with’ (Heidegger, 1996[1927]:
116, emphasis in original).
Being-with, Mitsein, is, according to Heidegger, a grounding and regulating
structure of human existence – an Existentiale that, for Nancy, carries significant
implications for any understanding of the self (selfhood) and, consequently, of
the unfolding, the event, of meaning. In other words, Nancy (2000) identifies a
promise in Heidegger’s Mitsein, a potential for a radical philosophical beginning
which he describes in the following way:
4 journal of visual culture  XX(X)

Heidegger clearly states that being-with is essential to the constitution

of Dasein itself. Given this, it must be made absolutely clear that Dasein,
far from being either ‘man’ or ‘subject,’ is not even an isolated and unique
‘one,’ but is instead always the one, each one, with one another. If this
determination is essential, then it needs to attain to the co-originary
dimension and expose it without reservation. (p. 26)

What Nancy finds in Heidegger is a lens through which the self can be viewed as
an event of multiplicity; and, in a corollary manner, an opening to a new kind of
fundamental ontology that will take issue with this ‘co-originary dimension’ and
‘expose it without reservation’. Taking seriously the Heideggerian conception
of being-with ultimately implies, according to Nancy, that ‘ego sum = ego cum’
(p. 26). Yet, this way of putting things should not be regarded as a conclusion as
much as it is an opening of an avenue that invites further exploration. In other
words, Nancy hears in Heidegger’s Mitsein the reverberation of a call for a radical
beginning, for a philosophy that ‘needs to recommence, to start itself, from itself,
against itself’. And, ‘in order to do this, philosophy needs to think in principle
about how we are “us” among us, that is, how the consistency of our Being is in
being-in-common and how this consists precisely in the “in” or in the “between”
of its spacing’ (p. 26).
Heidegger’s Mitsein serves as a mark which ‘indicates to us a place from which first
philosophy must recommence’ (p. 26). Yet, this is also precisely what Heidegger,
according to Nancy, fails to see. Heidegger fails to come to terms with the potential
of his own thinking because he moves too quickly from thinking about the ‘pole
of the one’ (Dasein) to ‘the pole of the undifferentiated many’ (das Man) and does
so without ever dwelling on ‘how we are us among us’, on ‘how the consistency of
our Being is in being-in-common’.To put this more specifically, instead of dwelling
on the phenomenon of being-with, Heidegger hurries to conceptualize this
experience as a structural condition – en bloc – a condition of average anonymity
which he sets in opposition to Dasein’s authentic possibility of individuation.
For Nancy, Heidegger’s ‘affirmative assertion of co-originarity’ never fulfils itself
since Heidegger ultimately ‘gives up on the step to the consideration of Dasein
itself’ and never considers the ‘possibility of an explicit and endless exposition
of co-originarity and the possibility of taking account of what is at stake at the
togetherness of the ontological enterprise’ (p. 26). In this respect, there is an
important negative lesson to be learned from Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, an
analysis that brings Heidegger so close and yet leaves him all too distant from the
meaning of being-with.

Being Singular Plural

‘The existential analytic of Being and Time’, Nancy writes, ‘is the project from
which all subsequent thinking follows, whether this is Heidegger’s own later
thinking or our various ways of thinking against or beyond Heidegger himself’ (p.
93). Indeed, Nancy’s Being Singular Plural exemplifies such an attempt to think
against and beyond Heidegger. Hence, growing out of a critique of Heidegger that
 What Makes an Image Singular Plural?  Kenaan 5

is ‘far more profound than what first appears to be a simple “readjustment” of the
Heideggerian discourse’ (p. 26), Nancy takes on the task of ‘redoing the whole of
“first philosophy” by giving the “singular plural” of Being as its foundation’ (p. xv).
The starting point for this enterprise – for which ‘the form of the ontological
treatise ceases to be appropriate’ (p. xv) – is nevertheless formulated in an
ontological manner.‘The givenness of Being’, Nancy writes,‘is a gift that can be
summarized as follows: Being itself is given to us as meaning’ (p. xv, emphases
in original). This postulation consists of three focal points: ‘Being’, ‘meaning’
and, in between, an ‘us’. The term ‘Being’ is used here by Nancy in a manner
that refers back to and concomitantly breaks away from the Heideggerian
vision. Unlike Heidegger, for Nancy, ‘there is no “brute givenness” of Being’ –
‘Being does not have meaning’ (p. 2). Nancy explicitly refuses to allow any
concept of pure Being to become operative in his first philosophy – to serve
as grounds for our thinking – independently of the actual manifestation of
meaning.‘Being does not have meaning’ because ‘Being itself, the phenomenon
of Being, is meaning’ (p. 2). But, it should not in any way be understood as
something given. It is never simply there in the form of an object, but present
only as an incessant unfolding. ‘Meaning is its own communication or its own
circulation.’ How and where does this circulation take place? For Nancy,‘we are
this circulation’ (p. 2).
Meaning is grounded in the human ‘we’.The very possibility of having meaning is
thus always already a co-possibility, or more clearly put, the fundamental condition
of the appearance of meaning is being-with. As suggested, however, this is not a
simple condition that could be taken for granted, but one that calls for a radical
exposition. Indeed, for Nancy, the question of the ground of meaning – the one
‘philosophy needs to think’ – is a question about ‘how we are “us” among us …
how the consistency of our Being is in being-in-common and how this consists
precisely in the “in” or in the “between” of its spacing’ (p. 26). In other words,
the space in which the meaningfulness of things unfolds is one that never stems
from – and can never be traced back to – a single unified origin, but that is
constituted, rather, by a constant pluralization and splitting. ‘Meaning begins
where presence is not pure presence but where presence comes apart in order
to be itself as such.This “as” presupposes the distancing, spacing, and division of
presence’ (p. 2). Another way to put this is to say that the origin of meaning is
neither the individual nor the community.What makes meaning possible is neither
the infinitesimality of an undividable selfhood nor the unified homogeneity of a
public space but, rather, – what Nancy calls a transindividuality, ‘a singularity
indissociable from its being-with-many’.
But, how does all this bear on our understanding of the visual? Returning to
our discussion of Nancy’s ontology of images, let us ask: what would it mean
to think an image’s being as a being-with? In what ways is the ‘singular plural’
the foundation of an image’s being? How does the singular plural of the image
play itself out? Or, more generally, what are the implications which Nancy’s
Being Singular Plural carries for an understanding of images? What would it
mean for a philosophy of the image to come to terms with the condition of
transindividuality or with the singular-plural origins of the image?
6 journal of visual culture  XX(X)

The Origin of the Image

In Nancy’s writing on the visual, the question of the image’s ‘plural singular
origins’ is, surprisingly, hardly ever addressed.1 Nancy does often underscore
the need to think the image beyond the specificity of a medium, but this
preoccupation with the inner plurality of the artistic medium – developed,
for example, in ‘Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?’ (Nancy, 1996) –
never leads Nancy back to the question of the co-originarity of our ‘being-with’.
How should we understand the apparent forgetfulness of the singular plural in
Nancy’s writing on the visual arts? I am not sure how to answer this question.
But, in order to get a better view of its significance, let us turn first to a text in
which Nancy explicitly reflects on the origins of the image.
In ‘Painting in the Grotto’, Nancy (1996) addresses the question of the origin
of painting by responding to a primal image – a ‘primal scene’ – of creation: the
image of the making of the first image.
Let us imagine the unimaginable, the gesture of the first imager … His hand
advances onto a void, hollowed out at the very instant that separates him from
himself instead of prolonging his being in his act. But this separation is the act
of his being. Here he is outside of self even before having his own self, before
having been a self ... the animal that stands in the grotto and that makes this
gesture knows things, beings, different kinds of matter, structures, signs and
actions. But it is ignorant of form, the rising up of a figure or a rhythm in its
presentation … For the first time, he touches the wall not for support nor as an
obstacle or something to lean on, but as a place, if one can touch a place.The rock
wall makes itself merely spacious: the event of dimension and of the line, of the
setting aside and isolation of a zone that is neither a territory of life nor a region
of the universe, but a spacing in which to let come – coming from nowhere and
turned towards nowhere – all the presence of the world. From the painter to the
wall the hand opens up a distance that suspends the continuity and the cohesion
of the universe, in order to open up a world (Nancy, 1996: 74–5).
Nancy describes (imagines) the birth of painting as a drama for one actor: a
solitary painter who, facing a wall in the depth of a dark cave, encounters a
new kind of freedom that allows him to open up, for the first time ever, a space
in which meaning can reverberate. Unlike Plato, for whom the cave signifies a
human condition that is radically severed from the origins of meaning, Nancy
interprets the cave as the cradle of the meaningful.2 Following Bataille – to
whom ‘Painting in the Grotto’ is a homage – Nancy approaches the first image
in terms of the agency and the act involved in its creation.The prehistoric image
on which Nancy focuses is one of a human hand. Hand stencils and hand prints
are indeed typically dated among the most early images of the upper Paleolithic,
but Nancy reflects neither on the specificity of a given hand-print nor on the
different types – different techniques involved in the making – of such images.
He seems to bracket a discussion of the image’s objective traits since, for him,
the image qua object is only a trace of that primordial act that generates the very
possibility of the image which is co-originary with the possibility of selfhood. In
this respect, Nancy’s text is not only a drama in one act, but also a drama of an
 What Makes an Image Singular Plural?  Kenaan 7

act, a singular gesture, an event that allows the emerging self of the painter to be
itself by relating to itself, by presenting and seeing itself through – what in Being
Singular Plural is described as – a constant ‘distancing, spacing, and division of
presence’ (Nancy, 2000: 2).
Indeed, if we reread Nancy’s description of the first imager in the light of
our discussion of Being Singular Plural, the presence of his ontology and,
in particular, of his claim about meaning’s split origins, becomes evident. The
painter’s ‘hand advances onto a void’; yet, unlike, the story of divine creation,
the human act is not an embodiment of a being that precedes creation. As we
have seen in Nancy’s ontology, ‘there is no “brute givenness” of Being’, no ‘pure
unshared presence – presence to nothing’. Nancy insists on a language that begins
with the manifestation or the givenness – the gift – of Being: ‘Being itself, the
phenomenon of Being, is meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation – and we are
this circulation’ (p. 2). In ‘Painting in the Grotto’, the cave is the site of meaning’s
originary circulation.Yet, as is underscored in the description of the first painter,
meaning is not something that can ever be traced back to an ‘ultimate or first
signification’. In French, the word fond means both ‘ground’ and ‘depth’ and, in
this context, the intertwining of these senses in Nancy’s title Au fond des images
makes the point clear: the ground of the image is the image’s depth. The image
unfolds as meaningful, but there is no self or identity that grounds meaning’s
appearance, no unified, self-contained form that supports this unfolding. For the
painter, the image he creates is a ‘surprise’; it is born ‘at the very instant that
separates him from himself’ through a ‘separation [that] is the act of his being’.
In other words, since we are meaning’s circulation, i.e. since meaning is made
possible by who we are as humans,‘meaning begins where presence is not pure
presence but where presence comes apart in order to be itself as such’ (p. 2,
emphasis in original).
For Nancy, ‘there is no meaning if there is no “self,” of some form of another’ (p.
94). In ‘Painting in the Grotto’ (1996), he thinks of the origins of painting in a
manner that calls into question the cohesiveness of the self and, in turn, thinks of
the alterity and difference that are at play in the constitution of selfhood in order
to illuminate the manner in which an image becomes meaningful:

Man began with the strangeness of his own humanity. Or with the humanity
of his own strangeness … The similar came before the self, and this is what
it, the self was. Such was his first knowledge, his skill, the quickness of the
hand whose secret he wrested from the very strangeness of his nature …
the schema of man is the monstration of this marvel: self outside of self, the
outside standing for self, and the being surprised in face of self. Painting
paints this surprise.This surprise is painting. (p. 69)

In the spirit of Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’, Nancy offers a dialectical reading of the
relationship between the first painter and his newly made image.The painter’s act
leads to the appearance of an image which is, itself, operative in the constitution
of the painter’s self – a human self – whose identity, in turn, can become manifest
(as meaningful) only on the condition that it can never be possessed by that self.
8 journal of visual culture  XX(X)

The hand-image is the creator’s hand; but only in the sense that it is the imprint
or the negative of that hand. It is through the image that the prehistoric painter
can see his hand as the hand which is his; it is through the image that he can
recognize himself as the ‘man of the hand’, and yet what he sees shows itself only
from within a distance that has opened up, an outside in relation to which the
self can become meaningful as a self.
Nancy’s reflections on the origin of the painted image are inseparable from his
understanding of the origin of selfhood. The ability to create and see images
is, according to him, a fundamental sign of our strangeness as humans, a mark
of ‘the constant crossing over, the mutual intrication and distancing, in the
fundamental structure of the “self”’ (Nancy, 2000: 204). However, while focusing
on the ‘differencing’ that is constantly at work in the structure of selfhood,
Nancy’s treatment of the image seems to disregard what is, for him, an essential
dimension of the singular plural: our being-with-one-another. Nancy develops his
understanding of the image’s being in analogy to the irresolvable tensions that
are constitutive of the human being-there. Yet, in the last resort, he only follows
halfway the analogy to Heidegger’s Dasein and, thus, never opens his account of
the image’s singular plurality to the question of the image’s being-with.

Painting and Being-With: Questions to Jean-Luc Nancy

In Being Singular Plural (2000), Nancy’s thinking develops on at least two
separate levels of abstraction.While elaborating his understanding of the singular
plural as an abstract metaphysical concept or as an ontological principle, Nancy
also discusses the singular plural in a manner that seems to be motivated by
the ordinary experience of relating to the alterity of the other person whose
singularity is, always already, part of a ‘we’, a crowd, a city, a people.
The relationship between the ontological and the phenomenological dimensions
of the singular plural is not always made clear. But, at the same time, it is not
difficult to see that Nancy’s ontological formulations are often grounded in – or at
least intimately tied to – structures of ‘transindividuality’, alterity and difference,
‘spacing and division of presence’ that are fundamental to the experience of our
being-there as a being-with.
This very humble layer of our everyday experience contains another rudimentary
attestation: what we receive (rather than what we perceive) with singularities
is the discrete passage of other origins of the world. What occurs there, what
bends, leans, twists, addresses, denies – from the newborn to the corpse – is
neither primarily ‘someone close’ nor an ‘other’ nor a ‘stranger’ nor ‘someone
similar’; it is an origin; it is an affirmation of the world, and we know that the
world has no other origin than this singular multiplicity of origins (pp. 8–9).
When it comes to the ‘singular multiplicity’ of painting’s origins, however, the
concrete presence of others seems to recede and disappear into the darkness of
the cave in which Nancy locates the primordial appearance of the image. Nancy
has created for the image a murky, imaginary, dreamlike space of appearance
that he then illuminates with one spotlight so as to allow the presentation of
 What Makes an Image Singular Plural?  Kenaan 9

a surprising event – a single gesture of a single human being. Reading Nancy’s

description of the first painter, we may easily forget that the animal–man in
the cave is not alone in the world and that he is, most likely, not even alone
in the cave itself. According to anthropological research on this early type of
prehistoric images, hand-prints are typically understood in the context of
communal rituals in which the first image-creators presumably had a distinctive
role. As such, the hands used to create the hand-prints we see today in the caves
are often understood as belonging to the painters’ fellow humans rather than to
the painters themselves.3 Is the first painting born, then, as Nancy argues, out
of the complex encounter with one’s self(hood) or, rather, with the living, often
disturbing, presence, the hand, of the other? What exactly is the first painter
facing and what does he see? Does he ‘see … the coming of the stranger’ that he
himself is or is it the ‘you [who is] absolutely strange because the world begins
its turn with you’? Is the first painting ‘the trace of the strangeness that comes
like an open intimacy, more internal than any intimacy, deep-set like the grotto’
(Nancy, 1996: 70, emphases in original), or is it a trace of a different, albeit a
closely connected, kind of ‘strangeness [that] refers’, as in Being Singular Plural,
‘to the fact that each singularity is another access to the world ... [that] there is
nothing but the manner, the turn of the other access which conceals itself in the
very gesture wherein it offers itself to us’ (Nancy 2000: 14)?
These two options are, of course, not mutually exclusive. And yet, in his work on
the origin of painting – as well as in much of his work on the visual arts – Nancy
seems indifferent to the relevance of the ‘you’, the other whose ‘alterity is its
being-origin’.This is not to say that Nancy’s work on the origin of art overlooks the
possible presence of others, but that the unique character of this presence and its
relationship to the image is never taken up and addressed in its actuality. In this
respect, Nancy’s thinking of the image’s being seems to miss the potential of his
ontological thinking.Thus, in spite of his critique of Heidegger, Nancy ultimately
seems to reproduce the Heideggerian elision of the possibilities opened by the
existentiale of being-with.4 To be specific, he approaches the image’s being-
there without allowing its being-with to open up as a genuine question, without
grappling, to use Nancy’s own words against Heidegger, with the ‘possibility of
an explicit and endless exposition of co-originarity and the possibility of taking
account of what is at stake at the togetherness of the ontological enterprise’
(Nancy, 2000: 26).

The Singular-Plural Origins of Painting

The call for an ‘endless exposition of co-originarity’ is primarily – that
is, prior to its ontological implications – an ethical imperative. It reflects
philosophy’s commitment to the ethical in the sense that ethics begins with
an acknowledgement of the ‘unending’ enigma that the other person presents
to us in his or her very being. This is one of the central themes in the writing of
Emmanuel Lévinas for whom the fundamental form of our acknowledgement
of the other’s alterity is that of responsibility. For Lévinas (1998), the presence of
the other person
10 journal of visual culture  XX(X)

signifies an irrecusable order,a command which puts a stop to the availability

of consciousness … What is at stake here is the calling of a consciousness
into question and not a consciousness of calling into question. The I loses
its sovereign self-coincidence, its identification, in which consciousness
returns triumphantly to itself to rest on itself. Before the exigency of the
other, the I is expelled from this rest …[the other’s] presence is a summons
to answer.The I does not only become aware of this necessity to answer …
it is in its very position a responsibility … To be an I then means not to be
able to escape responsibility. (p. 97)

The questioning that concerns Lévinas is not one that can be solved conceptu-
ally or, better, it does not belong to the order of the conceptual. It does not offer
itself to a knowing or an understanding, but ‘summons to moral responsibility.
Morality is the enigma’s way’ (p. 72). Consequently, Lévinas offers a vision of a
philosophy whose task is an endless response to the unsettling presence of the
other – endless in that it brings to the fore but never exhausts the enigma of a
person’s alterity.5 Nancy has a complicated relationship with Levinas’s thinking
which deserves a separate discussion.6 However, for the purposes of this article,
I think that the kind of Lévinasian sensitivity towards the irresolvable enigmatic
presence of the other person is necessary if we wish to make the singular plural
the fundamental ground of our understanding of the image.
To begin taking the first step towards such ‘an explicit and endless exposition
of co-originarity’, I suggest we turn to a figure, an image that would allow us to
illuminate the origin of painting in a manner that embraces the condition of
being-with as fundamental. What I have in mind is a mythical, age-old, image that
appears again and again in the history of reflection on painting, from Quintilian to
Alberti to Leonardo and Vasari to Rousseau and Romanticism and, in 20th-century
French philosophy, from Merleau-Ponty to Derrida.7 This image – tale or myth –
of the origins of painting (or of drawing) is first found in Pliny’s Natural History
which provides two versions of the myth. While both versions describe the
first act of painting as a tracing of a man’s shadow on a wall, the more detailed
account locates the first painting in a story of love and abandonment.This more
elaborate account is given by Pliny precisely at the moment he moves away from
painting to a discussion of a different art form, the modelling of clay.
Enough and more than enough has been said about painting. It may be suitable
to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the
service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented
by Butades, a potter from Sycion, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter,
who was in love with a young man; and she, when this young man was going
abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp.
Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure
to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved
in the shrine of the nymphs (Pliny, 1952[77–9]: 43).
Nancy is acquainted with this tale of origins and, although he does not seem
to be interested in its details, he touches briefly on it in ‘Visitation: Of Christian
Painting’ (2005), and offers the following reading:
 What Makes an Image Singular Plural?  Kenaan 11

The legend of its own origin that painting made for itself – the Greek story
of the girl who traces the outline of her fiancé’s shadow on the wall as he
leaves for war – should not be understood as a parable of representation.
This girl is not seeking to reproduce an image of the one who will no
longer be there, in order to recollect it later: rather, she fixes the shadow,
the obscure presence that is there whenever light is there, the double of
the thing – of everything – and its invisible ground. (p. 121)

For Nancy, the gist of Pliny’s story is found in its affirmation of one of Nancy’s key
positions: the being of an image calls for a non-representational understanding
that releases the image from its traditional servitude to the order of the actual.
The painted image is not a form of representation. It has nothing to do with a
reproduction or a recollection of the world but, on the contrary, with an opening
towards what he terms ‘the immemorial’: painting ‘opens onto the immemorial:
presence always-already there and always there again, inexhaustibly withdrawn
into itself, relentlessly exposed before us … ourselves before being born, after
dying … the immemory of a dawn or a twilight of the world’ (p. 121).

For Nancy, the first painter ‘is not seeking to reproduce an image of the one
who will no longer be there, in order to recollect it’. This is because what she
faces and responds to is ‘ the there of a beyond’ (p. 125, emphases in original),
an invisibility in which painting, itself, is grounded. The painter responds, in
painting, to the invisible grounds, the transcendental conditions of visibility. But
does this really capture the drama of the first painting or the significance of the
first gesture of drawing? Even if we agree with Nancy that what is at stake here is
not at all a representation, can we begin to understand the ‘girl’s’ image without
coming to terms with the fact that the inner form of her painting is a response
to the complicated presence of another person? Pliny’s account provides a rich
and concrete setting for the legendary birth of painting, one that integrates
the allegedly technical act of the tracing of a shadow into the particularity of a
painful and dramatic moment. Butades – who, in the tradition takes on the name
of her father – becomes the first painter through a gesture directed towards her
lover’s imminent departure.

Painting, as such, originates at an intersection: it takes place at the crossroad of

desire and the experience of loss, of wanting to hold on to what one loves in a
familiar way and of letting go. Once we recognize desire and loss as the twofold
root of the act of painting, we shall also see why the predominant way of speaking
about the first painting as a form of ‘replacement’ or ‘substitution’ cannot suffice.
Butades is not creating a substitute because she has no need for a substitute. Her
love is real and she cannot sell it short.The young woman is in love. She wants to
love and she wants one specific love, but she also knows she has been abandoned.
Desiring, she faces the object of her love. Yet, she also faces, just the same, the
impossibility of fulfilling that love. Butades faces her limits and limitations, her
finitude – herself. In other words, the first painter is a woman who experiences
the world without collapsing the experience of desire and loss into one another,
without replacing one for another. In this sense, her act of painting is not a means
for construing a stand-in for her lover, a surrogate or a substitution. To use the
12 journal of visual culture  XX(X)

common rhetoric of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, we should notice that the issue here
is not the alternation between these two poles. Butades is not concerned with
filling up and eliminating the absence which has pervaded her life. Her act is not
an attempt to replace absence with a new form of presence but, on the contrary,
it reflects an attempt to create a new place for herself in between the opposite
poles of absence and presence. Indeed, the notion of the ‘in between’ is helpful.
It is precisely a domain of ‘in between-ness’ that the act of the Corinthian maid
opens up. As she faces her situation, Butades could have responded in a variety
of ways. The field of options is there for her, characteristically arranged in pairs
of oppositions. Yet, in her response, she resists the appeal of the ‘either-or’. She
neither tries to prevent her lover from leaving nor does she insist on joining him.
She neither holds on to her object of love nor does she renounce or turn her back
on it. She is neither active – practical, goal-oriented – nor passive. She opts for an
option that has no significant objective consequence, no real effect in the world,
but she clearly does not retreat into the privacy of the purely subjective. The act
of the Corinthian maid is neither a something nor a nothing. It is, to use Vladimir
Jankelvitch’s expression, a presque rien.And it is in this location of infinitesimality
that painting originates.This is where the image opens up.
Furthermore, we need to notice that, in the act of painting, Butades not only
reorients herself in the world, but she is, more specifically, taking a new
stance in relation to the person she loves.8 The primordial act of drawing is
thus inseparable from her response to the other person whose presence has
become elusive and which can no longer be taken for granted. To put this more
generally, we may understand the making of the first image as an expression of
an unresolved tension which is characteristic of our relationship with others.
This is a tension between the other’s existence as opening for us a meaningful
world of things that affect us – that we want and love and care about – and, at
the same time, as marking a world that remains forever elusive, unexpected and
impenetrable: a world whose ‘strangeness refers to the fact that each singularity
is another access to the world’ (Nancy, 2000: 14).
In this context, Butades’ act of tracing should also call for our attention.9 Butades
traces the shadow of another person who, having being close and intimate,
now loses its grounding in the common domain of the familiar and the known.
Butades no longer relates to the ordinary figure of the person she loves, but only
to a trace found at the limits of his shadow. What can this teach us about the
origin and the essence of painting? Should we understand Butades’ gesture in
Lévinasian eyes as a tracing of the trace of the other, ‘a trace [that] obliges with
regard to the infinite, to the absolutely other’, and that ‘establishes a relationship
with illeity, a relationship which is personal and ethical’? (Lévinas, 1998: 105).
Pliny’s tale of origins deserves a more comprehensive reading than the one I
can offer here. But, what we are already in a position to see is that his image
of the first image is, in fact, an invitation: the tale of Butades and the origin of
painting invites us to come to terms with the senses in which the singularity of
the image is always already pluralized by the human condition of being-with. In
responding to this invitation, we shall be taking the first step towards a thinking
of the ethical dimension of the image.
 What Makes an Image Singular Plural?  Kenaan 13

Notes
1. In Being Singular Plural (2000), the question of the image is not central; and yet, when
touched upon, the image–symbol appears to be a clear case in point: objecting to ‘the
critique of the image … which has become a sort of ideological trope in theories of the
‘spectacle’ and in theories of communication’, Nancy argues that ‘the sole criterion of
symbolization is not the exclusion or debasement of the image, but instead the capacity
of allowing a certain play, in and by the image–symbol with … the opened interval that
articulates it as sym-bol.’ For Nancy, the term symbol (with its prefix sun = with) already
suggests that ‘the dimension, space and nature of the “with” are in play here … the
symbolic is not simply an aspect of being-social … it is this Being itself’ (p. 58).
2. In ‘Painting in the Grotto’ (Nancy, 1996), Plato’s allegory of the cave is a recurring,
albeit a criticized, point of reference. For Nancy, the Platonic cave – with its
topography of high and low, beyond and under, open and enclosed – is an image
of that Platonic space of thinking which he attempts to subvert. Nancy inverts the
platonic order of meaning and, refusing to privilege the transcendent realm of bright
daylight, locates the roots of the meaningful in the depth of the dark cave.
3. See, for example, David Lewis-Williams (2002) on the hand print in the cave of
Gargas:
This co-operative mode of making at least some of the prints seems to be
confirmed in the case of Gargas where the hand and the forearm of a child
were held against the rock by an adult, whose grip on the child’s arm can be
seen: it was not the child who was blowing the paint. (p. 220)

4. An interesting question in this context has to do with how Heidegger’s avoidance

of the ‘being-with’ bears on his understanding of the visual? Is there a significant
connection, for example, between his blindness towards the experience of alterity
which is always part of Dasein’s world and his blindness towards the personal
dimension of Van Gogh’s famous painting of shoes? On Heidegger’s failure to respond
to Van Gogh’s painting of shoes, see Kenaan (2005). In this context, we should ask
further: is there a connection between Heidegger’s elision of the singularity of Van
Gogh’s shoes and the neglect of the concrete presence of the other’s alterity in
Nancy’s ontology of the image?
5. On the relationship between the enigma of the other person and the grounds of the
meaningful, see Kenaan (2006b).
6. It can be shown that Nancy is not only well acquainted with Lévinas’ central positions
but that he is also very influenced by Lévinasian formulations.At the same time, his
mentioning of Lévinas is almost always critical. In Being Singular Plural (2000), Nancy
hardly mentions Lévinas, but he explicitly criticizes positions that ‘assume surreptitiously
that “Man” is entirely a question of the Other’.This is, according to him ‘what is most often
at work in the call to “ethics”: a transcendental unrepresentability of the most concrete
presence’ (pp. 48–9). Nancy explains that ‘something “unrepresentable” or “unfigurable”
runs the risk of revealing itself as completely oppressive and terrifying, if not terrorists,
open to anguish of an originary Lack. In contrast, the “figure” proves itself to be capable
of opening onto the “with” as its border, the very limit of its outline’ (p. 48). Is Nancy
criticizing Lévinas or Lacan or perhaps both? In any case, Nancy’s turn to the ‘figure’ as
that which ties the ‘with’ to the question of an outline will be particularly relevant to our
discussion of the origins of painting.
7. In this context, the work of Robert Rosenblum has a unique status in the way it sets
the field for an investigation of the origin of painting as an iconographical problem.
Rosenblum (1957) is primarily concerned with the manner in which Pliny’s tale is
turned into a prevalent pictorial theme by romantic classicism. He is interested in
14 journal of visual culture  XX(X)

explaining the surprising abundance of pictorial images of the Corinthian maid –

the first painter – in the last third of the 18th century.Yet, as he proceeds with an
anatomy of this image of origin and of the significance it carries for late 18th-century
painting, Rosenblum also provides a condensed history of Pliny’s tale – from late
antiquity to the 18th century – that enables us to appreciate the complex matrix of
versions and interpretations which presented itself to the imagination of romantic
classicism. A more recent interpretation and analysis of Pliny’s tale, to which I am
indebted, is Stoichita (1997), which underscores the significance and role of the
shadow in this tale of origins.
8. I notice that Pliny’s story of the Corinthian maid, positions the first painter in relation
to two male figures: her lover and her father.
9. For a more comprehensive discussion of the phenomenological implications of
Pliny’s tale and, particularly, of the significance of the act of tracing, the line and the
shadow, see Kenaan (2006).

References
Heidegger, M. (1996[1927]) Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh. New York: SUNY Press.
Kenaan, H. (2005) The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Kenaan, H. (2006a) ‘Tracing Shadows: Reflections on the Origins of Painting’, in C.
Versar and G. Fishof (eds) Pictorial Languages and Their Meanings. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv
University, Faculty of the Arts.
Kenaan, H. (2006b) ‘The Plot of the Saying’, Etudes Phenomenologiques: Lévinas et la
phénoménologie XXII(43–4). Louvain: Ousia.
Lévinas, E. (1985) Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R. Cohen.
Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne: Duquesne University Press.
Lévinas, E. (1998) Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA:
Dusquesne: Duquesne University Press.
Lewis-Williams, D. (2002) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art.
London:Thames & Hudson.
Nancy, J-L. (1996) The Muses, trans. P. Kamuff. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, J-L. (2000) Being Singular Plural, trans. R. Richardson and A. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Nancy, J-L. (2005) The Ground of the Image, trans. J. Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Nancy, J-L. (2006) Multiple Arts: The Muses II, trans. S. Sparks. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Pliny, (1952[77–9]) Natural History, XXXV, 43, trans. H. Rackman. Cambridge: Loeb
Classical Library.
Rosenblum, R. (1957) ‘The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic
Classicism’, The Art Bulletin 39(4): 279–90.
Stoichita, V. (1997) A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books.

Hagi Kenaan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Tel-Aviv

University. He has published essays on phenomenology, aesthetics and the philos-
ophy of art, on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Derrida and Lévinas. He is the
author of The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language
(Columbia University Press, 1995) and of Otherwise than Seeing: The Ethical
Optics of Emmanuel Lévinas (forthcoming).
Address:Tel Aviv University [email: kenaan@post.tau.ac.il]