Paul Smith: Jean-Louis Schefer

1. Split Color/Blur

Paul Smith
This chapter introduces Schefer's work, because the essay can be considered as a kind of foundation stone for much of the rest of the work.

2. Object of Figuration

Paul Smith
The following very general article on figuration, although not published until 1979, both arises from and leads to Schefer's book on Paolo Uccello's Universal Deluge (1976).

3. Thanatography/Skiagraphy

Paul Smith
"Thanatography/Skiagraphy" constitutes an adumbration of how the figure of death "splits" representation, or of how death can be figured only at the interstices of the body and in the body's articulations with other objects.

4. The Plague

Paul Smith
The following translation is taken from Le Déluge, la peste, Paolo Uccello (1976), a book dedicated to one of Uccello's frescoes known as The Universal Deluge and in which Schefer elaborates more fully on Uccello's resistance to the ideologies of his time.

5. Someone Writing

Paul Smith
The essay translated here, "Someone Writing," expresses Schefer's peculiar concern for the difficult place and indeed the difficult experience of the practice writing.

6. Roland Barthes

Paul Smith
The recent pages about a photograph of his mother, about his "little girl," perhaps constituted for the first time the words of a man no longer driven by anything except the mystery of profundity and the origin of an enigma.

7. Light and its Prey

"Light and Its Prey" is a complete translation of a 1980 book which was originally conceived and commissioned in 1979 as the commentary for a film by Thierry Kunzel's workshop.

8. Cinema

Paul Smith
This chapter on cinema is a mixture of translations from two different but roughly contemporaneous sources: the book L'Homme ordinaire du cinéma (1980c), and a special issue of the journal Ça Cinéma, "L'Image, la mort, la mémoire" (1980d).