The Naked one

Since the model of perfection is repatriated in subjective interiority, the human body profanes can itself become the vehicle of the Image in conformity. This moment, we saw it, is that of the Rebirth. With the research of the harmony and proportions, the thought of the image enters thus what one called “the era of the Beautiful”. Through the dialectical one enters outside and the interior, the Beautiful can indeed be read like a secularization of the diagram of the Image in conformity. As physics galiléenne undertakes géométriser space and to reduce the objects to vectors of force, painting proposes to base the visible beauty of the human body on an interior harmony.



It is in the Naked one that this search of the Beautiful finds its ground privileged. The Naked one, contrary to nudity, is indissociable of a spiritualization of the body, because just as there is science of the proportions only human body (and not of the animal body), there is Naked the only human one. The Naked one is not thus nor the nudity of the creature, nor the opacity of the animal body, nor flesh of the sexué body; it is quite to the contrary denial (or the refusal) most extremely. Like beautiful ideal, the body escapes organic time and crystallizes in an immutable presence subjected to the only law of the form (thus with the only law of the model). The Naked one becomes thus, like François Julien (Julien, 2001) recalls, the theatre where come to abolish all the oppositions, all tensions, in which is taken the report/ratio that Europe maintains with the body and the image: sensitive vs spiritual, matter vs form, temporality vs eternity, perception vs Idée.
But this decorum of Naked and the imitation of the “beautiful nature” is worried by the “other body” and another image which do not cease following the ideal body and the image in conformity like their cursed share. If the beautiful ideal falls under the filiation of the ascending way like spiritualization of the body, what arrives when the image of the body borrows the down line?
What arrives it, for example, when the body takes figure under a wishing glance, thus when it is sexué? It then ceases being placed under the glance of spiritual interiority and is put under that of another body: the beautiful ideal is replaced by the trade of the body placed under the sign of the scopic impulse. The sexuation of the body - and particularly of the female body - from time immemorial was thus a danger to the Naked one, that of the risk to see the beautiful image déchoir in pornography.
Sometimes it is the idea even of the existence of a subjacent model which becomes source of interrogation: and if, instead of being the sign of an internal harmony, was the appearance of the body - the image - only the trace immanente this to appear itself? The photographic image is one of the places where this possibility of an image without depth did not cease levelling. Its double nature of print and analogical image to some extent predestines it with that. By technical need it is indeed a print of the body in its physical being, sexué and social most immediate and most opaque. Each time it remains faithful to this specificity which characterizes it, it demolishes the idea even beautiful ideal, giving to see the body in the been obstinated being. On another side, counting on the effect of reality induced by knowledge that we have of his statute of print coupled with the effect of its analogical power, the photographic image is able, better than any other image, to give the exchange, to make up reality: insipidity of the skins of the erotism “software”, assuaged bodies of the advertising ideals, sanitarianism of the nudity celebrated by totalitarian propaganda…, as many fictions which singent the image in conformity, celebrating the improbable coincidence of reality and ideal.