In paintings themselves we could seek a figured philosophy of vision--its iconography, perhaps. It is no accident, for example, that frequently in Dutch paintings (as in many others) an empty interior is "digested" by the "round eye of the mirror." This prehuman way of seeing things is the painter's way. More completely than lights, shadows, and reflections, the mirror image anticipates, within things, the labor of vision. Like all other technical objects, such as signs and tools, the mirror arises upon the open circuit [that goes] from seeing body to visible body. Every technique is a "technique of the body." A technique outlines and amplifies the metaphysical structure of our flesh. The mirror appears because I am seeing-visible [voyant-visible], because there is a reflexivity of the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity. My outside completes itself in and through the sensible. Everything I have that is most secret goes into this visage, this face, this flat and closed entity about which my reflection in the water has already made me puzzle. Schilder observes that, smoking a pipe before a mirror, I feel the sleek, burning surface of the wood not only where my fingers are but also in those ghostlike fingers, those merely visible fingers inside the mirror. The mirror's ghost lies outside my body, and by the same token my own body's "invisibility" can invest the other bodies I see. Hence my body can assume segments derived from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them; man is mirror for man. The mirror itself is the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself. Artists have often mused upon mirrors becaus e beneath this "mechanical trick," they recognized, just as they did in the case of the trick of perspective, the metamorphosis of seeing and seen which defines both our flesh and the painter's vocation. This explains why they have so often liked to draw theselves in the act of painting (they still do--witness Matisse's drawings), adding to what they saw then, what things saw of them. It is as if they were claiming that there is a total or absolute vision, outside of which there is nothing and which closes itself over them. Where in the realm of the understanding can we place these occult operations, together with the potions and idols they concot? What can we call them? Consider, as Sartre did in Nausea, the smile of a long-dead king which continues to exist and to reproduce itself [se se produire et de se reproduire] on the surface of a canvas. It is too little to say that it is there as an image or essence; it is there as itself, as that which was always most alive about it, even now as I look at the painting. The "world's instant" that Cezanne wanted to paint, an instant long since passed away, is still thrown at us by his paintings. His Mount Saint Victor is made and remade from one end of the world to the other in a way that is different from, but no less energetic than, that of the hard rock above Aix. Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible--a painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings. |  | ... |  | Now perhaps we have a better sense of what is meant by that little verb 'to see.' Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present at the fission of Being from the inside--the fission at whose termination, and not before, I come back to myself. |  | ... |  | the eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul--the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun |  | ... |  | more completely than lights, shadows, and reflections, the mirror image | anticipates, within things, the labor of vision. |  |