Magical relation of the image

The Magical relation of the image names the peculiar bond through which an image makes an absent subject appear present while continuing to posit that subject as absent. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s account, a portrait is neither merely a sign pointing away from itself nor simply a physical object of paint and canvas. Its visible features act on the viewer’s sensibility and, at the same time, refer to the person depicted. The imaging consciousness holds these functions together in an experience that is compelling but not reducible to ordinary perception or logical inference.

Portrait, subject, and image

The contrast with a sign clarifies what is distinctive about the image. A word can direct thought toward something beyond itself: its signification passes through the word and goes to the thing. A portrait works differently. Looking at it, a viewer’s attention returns to the image, and details newly noticed in the picture can enrich the imagined person. A wrinkle first seen on Pierre’s portrait, for example, is attributed to Pierre rather than treated simply as a mark of colour on the canvas. The picture’s physical features become determinations of the person who appears through them.

The case of the portrait of Charles VIII at the Uffizi in Florence makes the resulting doubleness especially clear. The viewer knows that Charles VIII is dead and that the lips in the picture are coloured marks on a surface. Yet those lips also provoke an affective impression directly, as lips appear to the eyes. They refer to the king’s real lips, long since turned to dust, while exerting their own immediate effect as painted features. The two functions merge: the viewer sees Charles VIII, not merely a picture, although Charles VIII is apprehended only through the picture and is posited as not being there.

This appearance has two opposed dimensions. Here, the subject is present in a reduced and relative mode: the image lacks determinations such as relief and mobility, and may also lack colour. There, in the past to which the portrait refers, the subject is grasped as absolute. The image does not erase the distance between these positions; its distinctive effect is to sustain them together. The absent person seems to descend into the picture, while remaining ontologically prior to it.

Why the relation is called magical

The account calls this bond magical because the subject seems to emanate into its image and incarnate itself there. In the unreflective imaging attitude, the viewer does not first take the portrait as a separate object made by a painter and then infer the person from it. The person appears through the portrait as its subject. Reflection can disclose two distinct objects—the picture and the person—but the imaging attitude treats the picture as the way the absent person appears.

The examples of a wax effigy pierced with a pin and a wounded bison painted on a wall to make a hunt more fruitful show how this structure can support practices of magical action. They are not presented as proof that a picture physically contains or harms its subject. Rather, they make vivid a way of experiencing the bond between image and model: what is done to the image is treated as connected to the person or animal represented. The book argues that this structure has not disappeared in modern thought. Rational explanations may be laid over it, but the image relation remains irrational in the sense that its basic synthesis is not derived from a reflective chain of reasoning.

The image also differs from a sign in how its intention can be fulfilled. A sign, empty by itself, can be joined to a perception: someone identifies Pierre, and the sign’s reference is fulfilled in the perception of Pierre. An image consciousness is already full in its own way. If Pierre appears in person, the imaging consciousness disappears rather than being completed by his presence. The portrait gives Pierre as absent; it does not merely leave an empty reference waiting for the real Pierre to fill it.

The viewer’s activity and the schematic image

The account of schematic drawings further shows that an image is not simply a collection of marks whose meaning is fixed in their physical arrangement. A few lines can first be seen as an arrangement of segments and points, organized by the eye as a figure against a white ground. They can then be read as a face: one segment becomes a forehead, another an eyebrow, a descending line a nose, and a point an eye. This shift requires a change in intention and an active bodily contribution from the viewer.

In that face, the space to the right of the lines can function as volume while the paper to the left recedes as empty ground. The viewer’s eyes trace the marks, supply a missing connection between separated lines, and enact a direction that is not physically drawn. The representative elements are therefore not only the marks themselves but also the movements projected onto them. If an image crystallizes, the viewer sees a man running in the lines while retaining the sense that the directional qualities have been freely projected there.

This process is distinguished from the perceptual organization of the Müller-Lyer illusion. There, the eye’s movement is attributed to the perceived segments as a quality of the object: one line appears to extend while another gathers in, and the lines acquire vector-like force within perception. In a schematic image, by contrast, the movements are treated as imaged properties, and knowledge helps direct the eye so that a figure may appear. The difference prevents the magical relation from being confused with a property of the material marks alone: the image depends on an intentional act that makes something appear through them.

Art as irreality

The theory of the image extends to the work of art. The painting’s canvas, frame, pigments, brushstrokes, and varnish are real; the aesthetic object apprehended through them is not another real object hidden beneath the surface. It appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude. The material work functions as an analogon through which an irreality can be grasped. The artist does not first make a complete mental image and then transfer that same image into reality. The real marks are arranged so that an imagined object can appear to a spectator who takes up the relevant attitude.

This distinction explains why the aesthetic object cannot be illuminated by shining a beam onto the canvas: the light illuminates the canvas, not the object of aesthetic appreciation. It also clarifies the role of sensory pleasure. A red may be pleasing as a real colour in isolation, but in a painting its aesthetic force belongs to the irreal whole in which it appears. A red understood as the colour of a woollen rug carries the rug’s tactile character; its relation to surrounding forms and colours also matters. What is appreciated is not bare pigment alone but the depicted red as part of the imagined scene.

Even a cubist painting that does not represent familiar objects need not be treated as a self-sufficient real object in the act of contemplation. Its forms can appear as things with density, matter, depth, and relations of perspective, although those things exist neither on the canvas nor elsewhere in the world. The canvas remains the material analogon through which this irreal ensemble is manifested. Aesthetic enjoyment is real as an experience, but it is directed through the painting toward the imagined object, which consciousness posits as irreal.

The same structure applies to fiction and performance. A novelist, poet, or dramatist presents irreal objects through verbal analogons, while an actor’s body serves as an analogon for Hamlet. The actor need not posit himself as actually being Hamlet to be wholly mobilized in the role: feelings, strength, gestures, and even real tears can be apprehended as the character’s irreal conduct. The relation is not that the character becomes a real person inside the actor; rather, the actor is irrealized in the character. Across portraiture, schematic drawing, painting, and theatre, the material or bodily medium remains real while the subject it makes present belongs to the irreality of imaging consciousness.