Preface [chapter]

2020 Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media  
A good book," writes Jean-François Lyotard in Discours, figure, "would be one where linguistic time (the time of signification and of reading) would itself be deconstructed: that the reader could start wherever s/he wishes and in whatever order, a book for grazing" (18; my translation). Like Lyotard's Discours, figure, this is not a good book, an artist's book, but rather a book of philosophy that still dreams of signification. But perhaps philosophy can operate its own figural discourse: that
more » ... f the rhizome. In this book, the figural functions as a nomadic concept circulating by knight's moves among seven essays while mutating in its forms and dimensions through its encounters with diverse philosophers. Most of the essays included here have appeared in some published form, though all have been rewritten and most expanded to bring forward their conceptual links. These links are detachable, however. The organization of the book is somewhat nonlinear, and the ordering of chapters is nonchronological, though not random. A rhizome, then, and not a book; each chapter may be read out of order, and perhaps readers will want to find their own paths. Consider the following, then, as one map for reading the figural. Although these essays were written over a period of seventeen years, they emerged from a common research project responding to what was, for me, a fundamental intuition. Although I am a child of the seventies, and thus of a visual semiology inspired by the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, a form of structural analysis inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and a theory of ideology forwarded by Screen, my encounters with deconstruction and its critique of logocentrism convinced me early on that a linguistically inspired semiology was inadequate for the study of visual culture. Moreover, with the explosive x Preface
doi:10.1515/9780822380764-001 fatcat:teki6rae6zbafl3skku3bqrqcu