The image is not related to the truth. It is related to appearances. Hence its magical affiliation with the illusion of the world-as-is – an affiliation which reminds us that, whatever its content, the real (like the worst) is never a certainty and that, perhaps the world may do without the real and the principle of reality.

I believe that images affect us immediately, well ahead of, at an infra-level to representation, at the level of intuition, of perception. In that sense, an image is always absolutely surprising. Or at least it should be so. Sadly, because of that, we can say that images are scarce. The force of images, most of the time, is cut off, deflected, intercepted by everything we want them to say for us.

So you can see there is a blur in the real. Reality is not focused. The world-as-is cannot be brought into focus (which makes it very different from the real world). Bringing the world into focus would refer to objective reality, so-called reality on the side of the objects, that is to say bringing it into focus on models of representation – as it happens when we bring the lens of the camera into focus on the object, aiming for absolute precision of the image. Fortunately, this definitive level of precision is never achieved. Full control through verification and identification of the world cannot be achieved. The lens displaces the object. Or the other way around. In any case, there is displacement.

There is an aphorism by Lichtenberg that speaks of “tremor.” Indeed, all gestures, including the most assured, begin with a tremor, like a fuzziness of motion. And there is always a trace of it left behind. Without that tremor, that fuzziness, when a gesture is purely procedural, when it is brought into perfect focus, we have something of the order of madness. So, genuine images are those which attest that tremor of the world, whatever the situation or the object: pictures of war, still-life compositions, landscape, portrait, art, and documentary.

At this point, the image is something that belongs to the world, it is a part of its becoming, it participates in the metamorphosis of appearances. The image is a fragment of the hologram of the world. Every detail of it is a refraction of the whole. A nice metaphor for this is found in the movie entitled L’étudiant de Prague. After selling his image to the Devil, he breaks up the mirror of representation (that is his lost image). Only then does he find his genuine image, in the shards of the mirror – and he dies.