El ver que excede la vista en Maurice Merleau-Ponty y Jean-Luc Godard

Merleau-Ponty said that our relation to the world is situated in the order of the «insoluble mystery». It is the invisibility of the gods that guarantees the visibility of the world. This invisible verso –«le Dieu caché», «Dieu insondable», «Être muet», «arrière-silence», «membrure cachée», in Merleau-Ponty’s terms– is the very texture of the visible recto. In extreme or visionary cinema this apparently antithetical language is no less present for
expressing what exceeds all visibility. It is a vision that surpasses sight; it is voyance (Merleau-Ponty), which emerges from invisible but is not the opposite of sight: «vision [est] ek-stase...». So the invisible is not the absolute opposite of the visible but, as Merleau-Ponty says, its «secret counterpart» without which visibility cannot exist. Similarly, according to Derrida, the cinema image has a fantasmatic structure; it is suspended between presence and absence, since invisibility determines the logic of the images. Cinema is an eye; but we only see well when we relate with this inner eye, the «vision» of the visionaries. Equally, for Jean-Luc Godard, one of the leading film-makers of contemporary cinema,
the real image is the one we do not see. What we see in the film is of less importance than what we do not see. The violence of the act of looking, the unveiling of another light, which reinstates the image of the sacred.