Representation

When I first came ‘home’ again from India, I looked at my library and saw that almost nothing in it interested me anymore. What had happened? What is in this library and what is not?

My library is that of a philosopher and art historian who taught in Europe and the USA. It contains many books concerned with discourses of modernity and postmodernity—theoretically, historically, analytically, comparatively… Often it is about the subject of representation. What is depicted how, for what purpose, and in what context?

But in this structure of representation lies a fundamental misunderstanding, an evil. It is what Plato calls a lie. After all, I cannot eat the painted apple. The still life serves reflection. Yet what I take as an object of reflection is an image, a representation, stands for something else that is ‘truer.’ Why, then, I ask myself, concern oneself with representation?

Buddha

This question became more acute for me when reading Sri Aurobindo. For him, art is essentially devotion (Bhakti):

“Not only the face, the eyes, the pose but the whole body and every curve and every detail aid in the effect and seem to be concentrated into the essence of absolute adoration, submission, ecstasy, love tenderness which is the Indian ideal of bhakti. These are not figures of devotees. But of the very personality of devotion. […] Yet while the Indian mind is sized and penetrated to the very roots of its living and embodied ecstasy, it is quite possible that the Occidental, not trained in the same spiritual culture, would miss entirely the meaning of the image and might only see a man praying.” (Sri Aurobindo on Indian Art)

Plato’s cave dweller left the cinema when he or she was freed by the philosopher. She turned around and left. My library now stands in a place where I no longer live.