Le corps à l’épreuve de l’image : moulage et photographie chez Maurice Blanchot
The Body and the Trial of Image: Molding and Photography in Maurice Blanchot

Summary/Abstract: In this study, I aim to examine the relation between body and image in Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence and The Most High. I will limit my analysis to two forms of image: molding and photography. I will touch briefly on the significations of molding in the context of the history of art and demonstrate how, in Death Sentence, molding transforms human body into a haunting subject and an erotic objectat the same time. Then, I will discuss the presence of a picture of the Holy Shroud in the same text, and emphasize its deficiency as visual representation, deficiency which destabilizes the function of face as the indicator of personal identity. Lastly, I will analyze the pictures in The Most High and focus on their depersonalizing force which results in the destruction of body. Throughout these examples, we will see how Blanchot’s textual mechanisms subject the human body to the trial of image, to its force of fragmentation and the impersonal.

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