Abstract
‘It’s vital’, Luz told his friend the publisher Alain David in mid-February 2015, when he called him. Luz’s book Catharsis, written in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, was completed in record time. The book revolves around an impossible drawing. It is the proper name of the event called ‘attack on Charlie Hebdo, January 7, 2015’. ‘The’ drawing, ‘le dessin’ is what Luz cannot draw and translate, cannot express and figure without re-engaging the very nature of figurability.
Luz converses with ghostly visitations, and while doing so, he re-enacts a foundation of the figuration process that Georges Didi-Huberman calls the ‘dialectique du visuel’ (1992: 53–84). The image breaks down the usual distinction between watching and being watched. This powerful act of refiguring after a violent de-figuration, this artistic redemption, is a political response to a political assassination that targets a regime of visibility while raising central questions about what it means to create a portrait in the age of industrial violence. In a way, Luz’s Catharsis is not a ‘testimony’: it is an attempt to redeem a visual horizon that was torn by the attackers of 7 January.
Nous sommes dit, le dessin et moi, que nous ne serions plus jamais les mêmes. (Luz, 2015: 4)
The author of these lines turned 43 on 7 January 2015. This sentence occupies the position of what is usually called a ‘foreword’, and it is this foreword that opens Catharsis. After celebrating his birthday the night before, Luz arrived late at the editorial board meeting of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. On his way into the building in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris he crossed paths with the Kouachi brothers, the two killers who were leaving the scene of the massacre. Luz was among the very first people to enter the offices on rue Nicolas-Appert following the attack. There he discovered his friends, the dead and the wounded.
‘It’s vital’, Luz told his friend the publisher Alain David in mid-February, when he called him. At that time, the creative process had already begun: ‘He was drawing mechanically, in a way, he could not speak’, says David. 1 Only six weeks later, at the end of March 2015, Luz’s 120-page book was ready to go to press. The publication was kept entirely secret until its completion. This discretion was also vital to Luz. Catharsis came out in May 2015, a little over four months after the cartoonist had witnessed the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack.
‘The drawing left me’
The foreword paves the way for ‘le dessin’ (my italics), ‘the’ drawing. And to make things even more complicated, what the foreword announces here is that ‘le dessin’ is gone. So, this foreword announces that not just words, but a hidden, invisible, missing drawing, will be the core of the book, or at least the book’s main protagonist (this drawing also constitutes the front cover). Within the work, this is how the history of ‘the’ drawing begins; this is how ‘le dessin’ takes leave of the artist:
Un jour, le dessin m’a quitté. Le même jour qu’une poignée d’amis chers. À la seule différence qu’il est revenu, lui. Petit à petit. À la fois plus sombre et plus léger. Avec ce revenant, j’ai dialogué, pleuré, ri, hurlé, je me suis apaisé à mesure que le trait s’épurait. Tous deux, nous avons essayé de comprendre. Nous nous sommes dit, le dessin et moi, que nous ne serions plus jamais les mêmes. Comme tant d’autres. Ce livre n’est pas un témoignage, encore moins un ouvrage de bande dessinée, mais l’histoire de retrouvailles entre deux amis qui ont failli un jour ne plus jamais se croiser. (Luz, 2015: 4)
‘Le dessin’ is gone with his friends, his co-creators. Immediately after the foreword, on a single page, a title states: ‘36, Quai des Orfèvres, mercredi 7 janvier 2015, 18h00’. This location is where Luz was interrogated by the police about what he saw at Charlie Hebdo on that day at around noon. The police officer’s face is half hidden by a computer screen, while, seen from the back, Luz is barely visible, but easily recognisable by his hair and glasses: this is the first drawing of Catharsis. But ‘the’ drawing is not yet to be seen. The performance of drawing has already begun, in lieu of ‘le dessin m’a quitté. Le même jour qu’une poignée d’amis chers’, and what will follow is the birth of ‘the’ drawing, ‘le dessin’, in the office of the Quai des Orfèvres after the police officer asked Luz ‘Racontez-moi ce que vous avez vu.’ On this very first page of Catharsis, we see the character of Luz take a piece of paper and a pen and start to draw, so that the first appearance of what will be ‘the’ drawing, in the book, is heterodiegetic. What we first see is Luz’s character drawing the second, third and fourth drawings of the page; then, in the fifth drawing, it becomes homodiegetic. It moves from the story of a drawing being drawn on the page of the book to a document, the drawing itself, that becomes the book entitled Catharsis. And this drawing-in process is what the foreword expresses as ‘gone’. What is gone begins with one, then two attached circles. Eyes.
It is also crucial that ‘the’ drawing makes its first appearance as a response to a question asked by an officer during a deposition: that is, in a legal context involving law enforcement agents. This trace will forever count as a judiciary archive, registered by an enforcement institution and put in a criminal court folder and not in a national library or an art gallery. If the drawings of Catharsis are not a ‘testimony’, as Luz stipulates in the foreword, in the first scene of the book, this drawing – ‘le dessin’ – legally testifies to something at a very basic level, in this context where the testimony involves a ‘third party’, registration, the machinery of a recording device and a wound, an injury: everything that comes from trauma (physical and mental) and leaves a scar – a physical or mental impression. In this sense, this drawing is as oppressive and performative as a testament as far as a testament implicates a vulnerability (vulnus, the wound), i.e. the possibility of death and its practical consequences. Luz saw injuries, he is injured by what he saw, he saw death, the death of the others, of course, but also the spectre of his own death. There is no testament without this vulnerability, and no vulnerability is thinkable without the horizon of someone’s death. It is trivial, made for the police, but also testifies in a deep way that the heterodiegetic–homodiegetic tension of the scene builds right from the beginning of the book. ‘Le dessin’ is a document and a trace, but it is also performative, constituting evidence or a testament.
LUZ©Futuropolis, 2015 (Luz, 2015: 6).
As such, the testimony is drawn in a foreign, cryptic language. The idea that a testimony would be written in a recognisable language would indeed be in contradiction to the unicity and non-iterability of the event. In his book Schibboleth pour Paul Celan, Derrida writes that ‘Une date désigne un événement singulier. Elle est le nom propre, la marque détachable de ce qui n’a eu lieu qu’une fois’ (1986: 59). In Derrida’s reflection on the work of the poet Paul Celan, this non-iterability defines the cryptic nature of the poem. In a sense, this drawing by Luz encrypts its date as it keeps a secret; it is both untranslatable and universally legible as it helps us decode the traumatic event, as a poem or a work of art speaks to everyone, but never makes everything explicit. The drawing, ‘le dessin’, the unique drawing, is the proper name of the event called ‘attack on Charlie Hebdo, 7 January 2015’. 2 This date, which has no equivalent in the history of cartoonism, is the proper name of what Luz cannot draw and translate, cannot express and figure without re-engaging the very nature of figurability. A testimony is always borne by this idiosyncrasy, the unicity of ‘what happened’, of the event. It is expressed in a wounded language, it is the language of the wound. Having the strength and talent of inventing this language is the hallmark of great art and poetry. This complex structure is also codified in the obscure but nonetheless direct relationship that Luz’s work has to the unthinkable event of his friends’ death, as well as his own.
The fact that Luz insists on his inability to draw in the foreword is not a peripheral difficulty that would be comparable to a lack of visual vocabulary, of competency or strength. It is rather that this inability is at the core of the event and reveals what lies at the heart of the act of drawing – an act of drawing that is contemporary, in this case, with an act of killing, of a killing performance, which, for Luz, also appeared to be an unbearable live, visual performance. This entire public scene of the attack is at stake along with the desire of the attackers to create a spectacular visible wound while hitting a newspaper known for its visual interventions. This is where Luz’s trauma lies. It lies in this visual horizon of the Charlie Hebdo attack, and a global fight over the control and repression of a certain status of the visible. In a way, when Luz testifies to the impossibility of his vision, of ‘the’ drawing, he testifies to the impossibility of testifying, which is the impossibility of accepting the visual war that the Kouachi brothers and other attackers set on the destruction of cultural icons try to implement in today’s world. This is how Luz’s refusal to consider Catharsis a ‘testimony’ in the foreword should be read. It is a powerful act of refiguring after a violent de-figuration, and as such, this secular, artistic redemption is a political response to a political assassination that targets a regime of visibility. It serves as a visual redemption for Luz himself, for readers, for witnesses, and probably for millions of people who felt personally attacked by the killers. 3 The drawing, ‘le dessin’, is the people, the crowd.
LUZ©Futuropolis, 2015 (Luz, 2015: 6).
In a way, Luz sees himself not so much as a simple ‘witness’ who testifies to the attack, or as an artist cut off from the people. Luz’s approach defies the traditional opposition between seeing and acting that still tends to dominate the conception of art and of the spectacle today, as Jacques Rancière has shown in Le Spectateur émancipé (2008) (discussed below). This is one of the hallmarks of cartoonism in its long political tradition as a popular art that played an important role in revolutionary movements and the process of democratisation in France (Dagen, 2015; Baridon and Guédron, 2015: 292–303). According to this perspective, cartoonism is an artistic form of expression that serves as a strong embodiment of the people, both real and imaginary, that populate cartoons, including Luz’s own cartoons, which are always on various political levels, populated by social actors. The spectators who appear on the pages of Catharsis featured above are not only watching; they are also being watched.
What is powerful in this watching crowd is that the image breaks down the usual distinction between watching and being watched, between being a spectator (passive) and being an actor (active) in the sense that Jacques Rancière makes explicit in Le Spectateur émancipé:
L’émancipation … commence quand on remet en question l’opposition entre regarder et agir, quand on comprend que les évidences qui structurent ainsi les rapports du dire, du voir et du faire appartiennent elles-mêmes à la structure de la domination et de la sujétion. Elle commence quand on comprend que regarder est aussi une action qui confirme ou transforme cette distribution des positions. Le spectateur aussi agit, comme l’élève ou le savant … [Les spectateurs] sont à la fois ainsi des spectateurs distants et des interprètes actifs du spectacle qui leur est proposé. (Rancière, 2008: 19)
The violent visual performance created by the Kouachi brothers appears in an overwhelmingly intense scene of Catharsis that is at once light and heavy, disturbing and funny, and brutal. It features a dance, a choreia, which operates like the truth of theatre when it redeems the simulacrum of the attack, of the bloody spectacle delivered by the Kouachi brothers whose goals were driven by the media, by the mimetic impact of their action, which is one of the defining elements of various attacks perpetrated over the past years. To this mimesis, Luz opposes his catharsis. Against the passive theatre (mimesis) in which the attackers turn the crowd into powerless bystanders/spectators of the visually orchestrated crime, Luz emancipates the crowd and turns its members into historical actors, such as those who spontaneously showed up at the Place de la République and elsewhere even as the attacks were still occurring on 7 January. Luz builds a drama, an action (catharsis). 4 The ‘tac-tac-tac’ scene of Catharsis is the signature of this drama, that turns the entire attack, the killing, into a grotesque choreography, a macabre pas de deux in which the two brothers ‘dance’ their crime under the rhythmic, musical soundtrack of their kalashnikovs’ ‘tac-tac-tac!’ At the end of this bitter, sarcastic, satirical and gruesome scene, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi bow together for an audience that applauds enthusiastically.
Drawing the ghost
In his foreword, Luz announces that the drawing ‘le dessin’ ‘left him’. This is a symptom insofar as the symptom, in the Freudian tradition, replaces an impossible transformation of the world (the fatality of the attack), while attesting to an unbearable, profound visual shock that, in this specific case, is related to violence perpetrated against the visual, against the iconography itself. Luz is confronted with this gruesome de-figuration that is the murder of cartoonists when he talks on 13 January 2015 about his inability to draw for that day’s Charlie Hebdo: ‘J’ai pensé à tout ça, à en devenir dingue. On n’avait pas la une’ (Hanne, 2015). During his oral account of the impossible search for this issue’s now-famous front cover image, he evokes what he saw upon entering the editorial room where he found the bodies. Just ‘culs’. No faces.
Ça a été très dur. J’ai fait un premier dessin pour la couv jeudi soir, mais il portait plus sur l’attentat lui-même. On voyait le cul de nos copains à terre, avec écrit ‘Liberté d’expression, mon cul!’ Je pense que c’était un dessin cathartique. Il fallait que je dessine ce que moi j’avais vu en arrivant dans la rédaction de Charlie, mercredi. Parce que la première chose que j’ai vue c’était ça : des culs à terre, des corps face contre terre. C’est ça qu’il a fallu que j’évacue. Un dessin cathartique pour débloquer ma capacité de dessiner. Franchement, il y a un moment où je me suis dit que je n’allais plus être capable. Après celui-là, j’ai pu commencer à redessiner. (Hanne, 2015)
In this passage where the notion of ‘catharsis’ appears for the first time, the missing faces of the victims are the evidence of the visual shock, of the destruction of the visible from which there is no escape. The drawing, ‘le dessin’, is deferred, it is missing; what is there is something that tears apart any attempt to figure out, to figure, to give form and visibility to what was seen, which tears the horizon of the visual. This destruction of the visible is what the attack attempted to do. And this is also what was at stake in ISIS’s iconoclastic rage in 2015, in Mosul (Iraq) in February, in Palmyra (Syria) in August. The fact that this rage is always visually documented and widely broadcast by ISIS groups, militants and camera operators is not ironic. It reveals that ISIS has perfectly understood that the biggest war consists of attacking a certain regime of the visible – while visibly documenting and broadcasting it.
Meanwhile, Luz’s drawing waits. It ‘weights’. It is heavy. Portrait, self-portrait, caricature? Who knows. It is gone, forever, and this is what returns to the author of the drawing, as a lost drawing. What we ‘see’ is what is gone. What comes back is ‘that’. That is a ‘revenant’, Luz writes, in the foreword of the book, the first words of Catharsis. In French ‘revenant’, the one who returns, refers to someone who appears concretely, physically, after having left definitively. This ‘physical’ dimension of the ‘revenant’ distinguishes its status from that of the spectre. But Luz’s use of the term also sounds like a ghostly irruption, since the ‘revenant’ refers to the ‘walking dead’ in long cultural tradition, including a cinematic one, where the revenant can also be seen as a kind of ghost. The fact that this revenant is neither walking (it is standing) nor physical stricto sensu – it is a drawing – might confirm the idea of a ghostly appearance who embodies more the act of figuring than just a body. The drawing of the revenant sits in between: on the one hand, a body not made of flesh, on the other hand, not quite a ghost, but with many of the ghost’s characteristics. Luz converses through this book, and not only ‘in’ this book, with what haunts, with these ghostly visitations, and while doing this, he re-enacts a foundation of the figuration process that Georges Didi-Huberman calls the ‘dialectique du visuel’. Luz deals with the void – the drawing ‘left’ – and with the default of image – inability to ‘see’ the crime – that the visual trauma implies. This scene of the inability to draw described in the 13 January interview, from which Luz’s last drawing of the prophet Muhammad would emerge, is haunted by what Georges Didi-Huberman refers to as the ‘défaut de figure’ that is so crucial in art history. ‘La dialectique du visuel’ (Didi-Huberman, 1992: 53) is a commentary on Sigmund Freud’s famous ‘Fort-Da’ text in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1955: 14–15), in which an 18-month-old child’s game deals with cruelty and fear (Schreck) of absence (of the parents) in the traumatic context of the First World War to which Freud explicitly refers. In Didi-Huberman’s idea the void, the absence analysed by Freud as a constitutive element of language, reveals the need for an image.
An image, in this sense, would always be a mix of alteration and openness, a sign of uncanny destruction and a sublimation. The presence of this image, of the drawing – ‘le dessin’ – is directly related to a missing part; it comes from an event that was experienced as a missing experience (trauma), as a lack of figure. In Didi-Huberman’s footsteps, then, one could say that ‘the’ drawing has the formidable energy of an object that can disappear at any time; the drawing bears the power of a visible subject that appears as a void, in a void. Figuring implies giving a trait to this original lack, this tear, this rip of what is visible. Luz confronts himself with the constitutive ‘défaut de figure’ from which any act of figuring arises (Didi-Huberman, 1992: 53; 1990: 171). While confronting the de-figuration, the act of figuring is the conjuration of the iconoclastic violence perpetrated on 7 January. Drawing what has left, figuring what is ‘gone’, rendering it in its presence as a missing element, is what gives energy and power (sublimation, conjuration) to an image way beyond its imitative, mimetic condition. The ‘défaut de figure’ is surpassed by Catharsis.
The character is composed of half circles, then two big circles with small eyeballs set in the middle, with barely any hair, no face, a very small standing body, just eyes, all eyes – the eyes of a witness? – the eyes of a character who stands and watches us, the readers, with a hypnotic gaze that seems petrified in a mix of fear and interrogation. This is also hypnosis transformed into a face.
LUZ©Futuropolis, 2015 (Luz, 2015: 6).
The character, the drawing is not to be watched. ‘He’ (he or she? – it is hard to tell and it is not anodyne) watches his creator, watches the artist watched by the reader. The eyes watch us, but they are also the artist’s eyes, watching the crime scene. This would imply that we, the readers, are also the victims, seen by the eyes. We are victims turned into actors by the drawing, if we follow Rancière’s powerful argument of ‘des spectateurs distants et des interprètes actifs’, which is in this instance a typical structure of cartoonism. This little ‘bonhomme’, as Luz names what he was attempting to draw for the front cover of the first post-attack issue of Charlie Hebdo, has barely any body but s/he is not a no-body. The fact that there is no definite answer to any of our questions about this character, the fact that the character does not talk, that it is difficult to decide what the character is watching, this non-responsive identity of the character – which might define death here – is the essence of this drawing, and what makes it impossible for Luz to draw. What is at stake here is the torn nature of what is ‘seen’ in a radical re-founding and reaffirmation of ‘the seen’ in Rancière’s analysis (le voir). When the police officer asks Luz what he saw, the cartoonist does not ‘answer’ the question, he requests a piece of paper. The drawing is the answer to what appears to be a failure to respond, or what Émmanuel Lévinas calls the ‘sans-réponse’ (1991: 20), something between words and a drawing, perhaps. The ghost suddenly appears, it is a manifestation, a ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, an epiphany. It is the sudden comprehension of something cryptic involving a phainesthai, a sort of phantom, in the terms that Jacques Derrida suggests in a number of texts, most notably in Échographies de la télévision:
Dans la série des mots à peu près équivalents qui désignent justement la hantise, spectre, à la différence de revenant, dit quelque chose du spectral. Le spectre, c’est d’abord du visible. Mais c’est du visible invisible, la visibilité d’un corps qui n’est pas présent en chair et en os. Il se refuse à l’intuition à laquelle il se donne, il n’est pas tangible. Fantôme garde la même référence au phainesthai, à l’apparaître pour la vue, à la brillance du jour, à la phénoménalité. Et ce qui se passe avec la spectralité, avec la fantomalité – point nécessairement avec la revenance – c’est que devient alors quasiment visible ce qui n’est visible que pour autant qu’on ne le voit pas en chair et en os. (Derrida, 1996a: 129)
In this reinvention of the seen, the revenant is watching his author as if he were an uncanny epiphany of himself, a stranger who has just entered the room on the surface of the paper. The revenant begins to appear on the page of the book in a mise en abyme, while Luz takes a piece of paper and a pen, his shaky hand making the revenant appear very uncertain, improbable and metaphoric. One revenant then multiplies infinitely. A spectre haunts the Place de la République. This character is Luz, and also his friend Charb (Brunner, 2015). 5 It reminds us of Jules Feiffer’s drawings, of Cabu’s and so many others; it is the dead, the wounded, the people, everybody who is shocked, as well as the scary no-body who enters the room like a faceless dead friend. ‘The’ drawing is everyone’s incredulity, dismay and fear. It is also their revolt. The two eyes that Luz drew when the police officers asked him to tell them what ‘he saw’ were in fact the revenant eyes. He saw what destroys the drawings and reinvents the act of figuring as explained above, an event that cannot be seen. What is made visible is a contemporary trace of the moment when the destruction of the ‘seen’ occurred, generating a wave of ghostly appearances, of people. Catharsis is a ‘fantomachie’ as Derrida defines it in Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance. This kind of fantomachie is political: it announces the emancipation theorised earlier.
This drawn legal testimony, a response to a question framed within a criminal investigation, is also linked to what obstinately resists the materiality of the legal process. If it serves as a piece of evidence, it also testifies to what resists and defies the regime of materiality. On the one hand, the revenant, this drawn character, cannot serve as evidence of anything. The revenant with his big eyes, is the metonymy of the attack. This being could be a phantom, a ghost, the revenant, the one who comes back, who returns in lieu of those who did not, who will not. Not a person, not ‘himself’, not necessarily a phantom, in spite of what it is not, ‘the’ drawing could be all of the above and everything else. With this revenant/phantom, this other self, his friends’ selves, Luz conversed, cried and laughed. This allowed him to find peace with himself, as the image took shape. What is figured is neither human nor non-human; it is partly a picture, partly a de-picture, the depiction of an impossible picture. This whole scene whence the revenant arises is a crime scene, and the scene is more than heavy, it is unbearable. Luz saw what he could not see. At the end of this first sequence of Catharsis, he tells the police ‘À vrai dire, j’ai pas vu grand-chose’ (Luz, 2015: 7).
This is why the arrival of ‘the’ drawing, the heaviest and most enigmatic ‘thing’ (concrete evidence) that any archival folder could possibly hold also makes it ‘À la fois plus sombre et plus léger’, writes Luz (2015: 4). Not being able to see, not being able to say or to express anything is a law of what happened, and as such, this is what Luz sees: he sees that he did not see. This deconstruction of the visible is the (impossible) subject of Catharsis. This is also, probably, what explains Luz’s auto-ritratto, his recessio, his rather radical retreat, or even his ‘retirement’ a few weeks after the 7 January attack. It informs his decision to refrain from drawing certain portraits, more specifically a certain portrait, that of the Prophet Muhammad, which appeared to him in very similar terms to the ones he uses when he writes about ‘the’ drawing in Catharsis. My hypothesis is that this retreat/retirement from a certain regime of the portrait, from a kind of figurability that can be understood as a simulacrum, is not separable from what happens when Luz draws ‘the’ drawing. It deals with the impossibility of figuring that is the source of the portrait when the very act of figuring is targeted and torn apart by the killers. This is precisely the moment when Luz draws another kind of portrait, portraits, because, interestingly, ‘the’ drawing is a portrait.
The work of portrait and caricature in the age of industrial violence
D’un coup, mon dessin s’est dissocié de Charlie. On en a parlé avec un de mes psys, à un moment donné le cerveau refuse d’intégrer ce que tu as pu subir ou voir. Il se coupe en deux: dans une moitié, les images tournent en boucle, dans l’autre, il ne s’est rien passé. Mon dessin a fait une dissociation entre le dessinateur d’avant et celui qui a changé. Et moi, j’étais au milieu, me demandant où était ma place. (Brunner, 2015).
Dissociation, scission, retreat – this is Luz separated from his drawings after the attacks when the drawings reveal his own broken dissociated self to him: a broken self that the act of drawing helps to rebuild. This is the art of replacement. The little character drawn by Luz at the police station replaces something unbearable; this is the original replacement, the replacement of the deadly origin.
This substitution is not a secondary event in the history of the portrait or in the history of Luz’s trauma. On the contrary, it might be found at the very origin of the tradition of the portrait itself, including the tradition of the representations of the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, in an intriguing way, this breakthrough replays all the apparent contradictions of what Montaigne circumscribes as the ‘portrait’ in the course of writing the Essais, which he announces in the famous address to the reader (‘Au lecteur’): ‘car c’est moi que je peins’. When Montaigne confronts his own writing process in an attempt to faithfully ‘paint’ himself, or, to be more precise, to paint his ‘self’ at the heart of his Essais, he deals with the art of the replacement that every portrait engages: the pro-tractus of a ‘pro-traict’, ‘pourtraire’ as the old French word indicates, contains this ‘pour’, ‘for’, meaning ‘in lieu of’, ‘instead of’, etc., that carries the idea of replacing, of doubling, which opens the space for a whole politics of representations, between fidelity and treason, between the drive for recognition (hagiography) and uncanny appearances. The portrait is inseparable from a culture in which the figurability of the self defines subjectivity, whether it is in art history or in the history of philosophy. As old as the invention of the self-portrait, of the selfie, it is in the very notion of painting a face that the ‘traict’, the ‘trait’ will betray no matter what. It betrays an attempt at ‘portraiting’, if I might invent this verb as a neologism for the untranslatable French word ‘portraiturer’, known as the act of making a portrait: that is, the art of designing a portrait. This is what yields the concept of portraiture in English.
Art and act: making a portrait involves the double, the substitution (art of the replacement), as well as the performance, an act of creation that is at work every time a portrait is made, even when it is a photographic portrait. As soon as there is such a thing as a ‘portrait’, there is a screen, there is opacity, there is ‘more than one’, there is a ‘third’, there is intrusion, a betrayal, a symbolic, and even physical violence, there is always a potential for a criminal performance on the one hand, and surveillance or voyeurism on the other. Instead of a substitution for the face, the portrait appears as a prosthesis that at once reveals and masks the figure while opening the space of the replacement, of the simulation, even of the simulacrum. There is a displacement of signs that contaminates every representation of oneself, whether it is human or non-human, immanent or transcendent, persona or god. This is why, in French, we can ‘tirer un portrait’, which literally means ‘take a portrait’, or even ‘shoot a portrait’ (!), an expression that contains the idea of theft, of an expropriation that is deeply involved in the history of the public uses of personal pictures involving faces where individuals are recognisable. This reflection deals with the invention of the public space that I perceive as a space of (de)figuration via substitution or prosthetics. This trend increases from the invention of print to the digital age, in which the industrialisation of memory is, not by accident, also dominated by the industrialisation of the portrait – ‘profiling’, for example.
‘The’ drawing by Luz recognises something, and someone, but it also remains obscure to us, as well as to Luz himself. This is the opacity of the portrait. In Montaigne’s famous address, the image becomes text and vice versa; the textual image engages more than the Delphic and demonic ancient Greek idea known as the Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnôthi séauton), ‘Know yourself’, for it gestures towards what is developed in the Essais as ‘recognition’: an approach, an experiment, a trial, the exploration of unknown territory, which is the space of Montaigne’s coma, Montaigne’s trauma. This is reiterated in the essay titled ‘De l’exercitation’ featuring the riding accident that could have cost Montaigne his life; this could have been the murder attempt that played a decisive role in his project of writing the Essais. Montaigne’s written painting of the self, his writing of his own image deals with the mystery of his death, of ‘my’ death. 6 In a sense, any time someone deals with her/his portrait, his/her death, the intimacy of a unique and untranslatable, unshareable experience is at stake, as Luz experiences it himself: ‘Il se coupe en deux: dans une moitié, les images tournent en boucle, dans l’autre, il ne s’est rien passé. Mon dessin a fait une dissociation entre le dessinateur d’avant et celui qui a changé’ (Brunner, 2015). If we follow Montaigne’s definition of portraiture, the same gesture allows ‘portraiting’ to serve as a healing process, while no portrait would be possible without the splitting that lies at the core of trauma, of pain. This mix of wounds and therapy, of inflicted pain and reconciliation, of recognition and de-figuration, lies intensely at the core of Luz’s post-traumatic drawings, including his famous portrait of Muhammad created shortly after the attack.
This intrusion, this latency, this violence, is as old as writing, it is as old as ‘portraiting’, but it is considerably intensified by the rise of the industrialisation of the portrait that photography, and later digital media and communications, introduced. This is even more significant with photographic portraits that one can contemplate long after the persona portrayed is dead. 7 Death is an essential component of the portrait, of figuration. There is figuration, a virtual one, there is schematisation, as Louis Marin shows in an essay about Montaigne’s famous ‘c’est moi que je peins’ (Marin, 1990). There is violence, corruption and betrayal in the sense that Montaigne always deals with the radical opacification of every transparency in the representation of the self, and by extension of any ‘self’. There is scandal. This is what ‘figure’, what figuration, implies as a schema, implies as a stereotype. It charges, there is a caricatura here that is not an excess or a change of the nature of the portrait, but a prolongation of its complex essence. If the portrait keeps the memory of the self, it immediately takes something (‘tirer le portrait’), it threatens it, it is immediately a schema, a stereotypic occurrence, even in the case of portrait photography. This threat, this violence, is as old as the portrait itself but it happens today on an unprecedented scale.
Betrayal, opacity, expropriation, wounds, guilt. In other words, the portrait is never innocent. While it is striking that, by nature, a caricature is a portrait, the question remains of knowing when a portrait is actually socially perceived as a caricature. There is a burden of the portrait; it attacks, it comes with a charge, it exists at someone’s expense. Caricare the Italian word means ‘charger’ in French, as in ‘to load’ a gun; a caricatura as was practised by the most famous Italian masters of the Renaissance is a charge, it attacks, it is heavy and loaded. Even if Montaigne would not have used this term, which appeared during the seventeenth century, 8 there is no ‘caricature’ without a certain art of the portrait, of schematisation (figuration), the power of a figure, the dunamis, the transformative power inherent to figuration. There would be no portrait without a charge. The last aspect that has to be highlighted is the fact that the mix of self and image that makes a figuration implies notions of mobility, of circulation, and the instability of an identification process that occurs in the public space that the figuration opens up. These features are profoundly involved in the caricature, not only if we consider the essence of caricatures as defined here, but also the fact that, significantly, as a type of portrait a caricature is made to circulate, to serve as a charge in the movement of its pro-duction, of its conduction, of its publicity, of its political ability to affect, to change, to distort the signs and impact space. Here to impact means to press, to put pressure on, to weigh down; the publicity (printing press) of this impression revolves around the weight of the portrait. A political fight is always a semantic, and today more than ever an (icono)graphic, one. What is publicised here is the power of the caricature’s dunamis, its transformative power, as a power of schematisation, of conversion (changing the signs), of simulation, of expropriation. The crime scene is never far from the act of portraying.
The question remains, what do we do with it? What is at stake is the ethics of portrayal, beyond the debate over the acceptability of portraying any religious or sacred figure. The ethics of the portrait is, after all, a long and highly controversial scheme in the history of art in Europe and elsewhere. Portraying is an art: it is always a moral question. In a way, Luz reinstates this highly sensitive debate without denying the schematisation and the stereotypical potential of any portrait, without denying the intrinsic violence that sustains any artistic process when the portrait is at stake. Ignoring this logic is not permitted and Luz highlights it. Luz, on the one hand, defends the right of an ethics of unconditionality of the caricature in the long tradition of the genre in France’s most idiosyncratic history (and especially France’s history of religion) (Dagen, 2015), which he calls ‘irresponsibility’. Yet at the same time he calls for the responsibility of those who publish, who de-localise, who circulate images out of their original context of publication, in regions of the world where they have a potential to hurt beliefs and feelings:
Since the cartoons of Muhammad, says Luz, the irresponsible nature of cartoons has gradually disappeared. Since 2007, our cartoons are read literally. People or cartoonists, like Plantu, believe we shouldn’t do drawings on Muhammad because they go viral on the Internet. Therefore we have to be careful what we do in France as someone may react in Kuala Lumpur or somewhere else. It’s unbearable.
Why?
Since 2007, Charlie has been scrutinised and made to carry responsibility. Each cartoon may possibly be read as having political stakes or expressing internal politics. Those stakes are laid on our shoulders. But we’re simply a newspaper that is bought, opened then closed. If people post our cartoons on Internet, if the media highlight certain of our cartoons, that’s their responsibility. Not ours. (Laffeter, 2015)
Following the appearance of the front cover on 13 January 2015, Luz made the decision never to draw the Prophet Muhammad again. The age of mechanical reproduction, of massive circulation of caricatures, is also the age of an industrial borderless state, and of stateless violence that ignores, deliberately or not, the idiosyncratic context in which Charlie Hebdo existed and in which Luz played a role. In the midst of the violence that is embedded in the act of creating portraits in the twenty-first century, Luz is one of the prominent artists whose current work participates in reformulating old theoretical questions that are more pertinent and pressing than ever.
LUZ©Futuropolis, 2015 (Luz, 2015: 10).