‘At the bottom of sensation there is a corporeity, […] a liberation of the subject from his own petrification as subject, […] a freedom that undoes the structure.’ ‘The word “I”, summarizes for me the structure of the world.’ The first quotation is from Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher of the phenomenological school, and alludes to Husserl; the second is from Michel Leiris, a surrealist writer and ethnologist, a friend of Sartre's and Bataille’s. Moving between philosophy and literature and over the course of a few years, I will follow the relation between subjectivisation and petrification and the way it affects imagination, the images of art, and death.

To perceive, Lévinas tells us, is not to represent but to transcend, to go out of oneself and beyond the given, to join one's own body to the flesh of the world. Perception is actionin potency and an emancipation of the subject from the mere passionof sensation, in which the ‘aesthetic effect’ of a material image is merely undergone like an anaesthetic that renders the subject insensitive, feelingless and indifferent. Embodied in a lived experience and in individual imagination, perception is, however, transformed into an image by the subject, which becomes such only through the other-than-himself and through the recounting of his own existence. For Sartre, the imagination produces ‘some petrifiable image’ of a past that has been shaped a posteriorias ‘unalterable and imperishable’, like a statue.