Claudio Rozzoni

The recent publication of Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage, the preparatory notes for Merleau-Ponty’s “Monday course” at the Collège de France in 1953, provides further evidence of the turning points of the French philosopher’s reflections during this period. This course, on the style of expression in the work of Stendhal and Valery, is interesting in that it truly reveals to us a unique perspective on the questions that, on the one hand, are related to research made during the previous period at the Sorbonne; and that, on the other hand, find a new echo, a new development in the course on “The Philosophy of Proust” given by Merleau-Ponty in the following year, also at the Collège of France. The problem of the intersubjectivity of the work of art in particular finds a crucial complement in this course. Starting from the work on literary language, this offers a path toward thinking the chiasm between author and reader in an unprecedented way that avoids falling back into the fruitless opposition between two poles: one represented by a purely subjective point of view, with its solipsistic excesses, and one that tries to take into account the communication between two subjects, author and reader in this case, by thinking them as an “already given” unity before the gesture of writing and the experience of reading.

By drawing on Husserl’s manuscripts on Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, this paper aims to shed light on some of the primary concepts defining his notion of image—such as “belief,” “presentification” and perzeptive Phantasie—and endeavours to show how such concepts could be profitably developed for the sake of a phenomenological description of film image. More in particular, these analyses aim to give a phenomenological account of the distinction between positing film images, presupposing a claim to reality—for example the ones we experience in a documentary attitude—and quasi-positing film images involved in artistic creation. The latter, despite their photographic relation to reality, are capable of giving rise to filmic “image-worlds” having intersubjective existence.

In a well-known course he gave in 1904-1905, Edmund Husserl developed a ‘threefold’ notion of image revolving around the notion of depiction [Abbildung]. More specifically, the phenomenological description allows a seeing-in to emerge as an essential characteristic of the image consciousness, in which an image object assumes the role of a representant [Repräsentant] in order to allow us to see the image subject in the image itself. Nevertheless, our paper – focusing particularly on what might be called the depictive art par excellence, that is the portrait – aims to show that it would be erroneous to read the Husserlian notion of image exclusively on the basis of this earlier course: things seem to change significantly when Husserl develops a different notion of phantasy, and artistic images, in particular, are not to be thought of as resembling something else, but rather as expressive images producing their own model.