Retrait de l’image et syncopolitique

This chapter is an attempt to think further about the notion of syncopolitics, a neologism coined by the author. This term points not so much to the syncope as spasm, convulsion or even collapse of political representation, but to the very conception of politics as syncope. Catherine Clément paves the way in her book Syncope: the Philosophy of Rapture (1994) by urging her readers to take time to experience and think the in-between, the time lag, the “radical surprise [where] one remains syncopated.”(Clément 1994, 125) Syncopolitics calls thus for a rupture, a fracturing of thought. However the thinking here is first and foremost framed by an image, or rather by the recess of an image – “an image that must be unimagined, that is, thought, if thought is considered a commotion, a syncope, and a bedazzlement.”(Nancy, 2005, 79) This recess of the image is considered as a condition for thinking politics. The chapter draws on performance and visual arts examples to address the unpresentable and how the syncope of the image can inform the transitory nature of thought.