The Paradox of a Gesture, Enlarged by the Distension of Time: Merleau-Ponty and Lacan on a Slow-Motion Picture of Henri Matisse Painting

Abstract

In his lecture series The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), Lacan refers to a �delightful example� that Merleau-Ponty gives in his Book Signes (1960). Lacan describes it as a �strange slow-motion film in which one sees Matisse painting.� This is a scene from the documentary entitled A Great French Painter, Henri Matisse, by director Fran�ois Campaux, a 16mm black and white film shot in 1946. Merleau-Ponty points, as Lacan puts it, to �the paradox of that gesture which, enlarged by the distension of time, enables us to imagine the most perfect deliberation on each of these strokes.� In fact, Merleau-Ponty underscores that this is an illusion, due only to the technique of the slow motion picture. In this paper I will present the different ways in which Lacan and Merleau-Ponty refer to the slow motion picture of Matisse painting. I will do so in order to consider, comparatively, the ways in which Merleau-Ponty and Lacan define the gesture in reference to film technologies and to the process of subjectification. Both of them refer to the gesture in order to find a new balance in the relationship between subject, rationality and media technology. And it is exactly at this site where the question of an ethics of gesture appears.