La peinture mangée. Sur Rilke, Cézanne et l’autoportrait

A singular opacity of self-representation strikes Rainer Maria Rilke when he looks at and describes Cézanne's self-portrait of 1875. In the letters to Clara, sent from Paris in the autumn of 1907, the poet captures an animal figure in the painting – namely, a dog. It is the limit figure of a material presentation of something not representable, at the same time the condition of possibility of the subject and his not representable and unconditional impossibility. But, above all, it is the visual place of a regression of the metaphor and its literary iconography to the alimentary and biological logic of animality, where a figurability of the subject presents itself and perverts the persuasive and exemplary dimension of Self-representation and corrupts the description by the force of the descriptibility. The indirect self-portrait of the poet, delegated to the painter by the rhetorics of ekphrasis, would only be what Marin calls "the universal self-portrait of everyone". We can treat this presentation, which is not static or absolutely opaque, but dynamic, which is a metamorphosis and a distortion of semiotic and hermeneutical skills, like the slow and dense work of a biological Poiesis of the Self, which ruins the meta-discourse of art or literary criticism and of the Rilke’s poetics herself. In Rilke's interpretation of Cézanne, there is an isomorphism between schauen and kauen, between seeing and chewing, reducing the act of seeing and knowing, and also painting, to the food dimension, even elementary. If Walter Benjamin teaches us that animals are the reserve and the trace of the forgotten, Louis Marin suggests a genealogy of the animality of self-representation in Rilke that allows us to probe the latency and inhuman dynamis of Cézanne's self-portrait and to grasp what dwells and haunts the present of the image of painting, its iconic act.