Video essay made with Allan Deneuville for the international online conference “The circulation of images” (15-18 June 2020) organized by the Center of Excellence Jean Monnet IMAGO (Paris, École normale supérieure) and the the University of Geneva (Chair of Digital Humanities), in partnership with Purdue University and the Beaux Arts de Paris.

Abstract:

If digital technology has profoundly changed the codes of seduction and the representation of sexuality by everyone, our contribution will question the paradoxical nature of certain private images of sexual content linked to public affairs – among others, the Spanish case of La Manada and that of Benjamin Griveaux – and the regime of visibility that we will call “porno-politics of the virtual visual”. By circulating through the public sphere without materiality, they gain speed, and do not suffer any deterioration: on the contrary, their power of fascination and action increases as “ghosts of an image”, escaping the fetish of visibility thanks to another fetish, that of the forbidden, in the form of parasites of the unconscious. Faced with the impossibility of seeing, we create them ourselves, then imagine them floating, temporarily, somewhere in the dark territories of the deep web. It is thus the whole dialectic of the visible and the invisible or unrepresentable, but also the very categories of image and vision that are questioned in the virtual ecosystem. How do these virtual images acquire a political agency, not through their aesthetic qualities but through their exchange value and their rarity, having “almost no other consistency than that of their ability to pass from one look to another”? What position do they occupy in the class society of images?