1The ambiguity of the way this title is phrased is plain for all to see. And it will take all of Vincent Descombes’ patience (p. 15) to show us that if the philosophers of modernity have for the most part used this concept of “subject” in nonsensical ways, its use in the title is at least correct in terms of the stated criteria: the subject is identifiable as an individual, and present in the world in the manner of a causal power. We are duly comforted: in a sense, the subject of the self-portrait L’Homme à l’oreille coupée is indeed Vincent Van Gogh, for it is he who painted it. But V. Descombes is well aware that by reducing the notion of subject to the field of action, he is merely sidestepping the problem raised by the self-portrait: what about the human “subject”, the I from which the image is produced in this picture. This human subject is a reflexive subject rather than or as much as an active one, an ego expressed in the first person and not in the third, as the author of the self-portrait. And yet, as V. Descombes notes, there are some who persist in thinking that there is a unique “subject” behind these uses, a subject supporting what is currently known as the “philosophy of the subject”.

3The difficulty of an analysis of images called “self-portraits” has to do, firstly, with the fact that we are only acquainted with them by way of the discourses we make in their regard. It also has to do with the fact that they include complex objects like mirrors, as is attested to by the self-portraits painted in 1646 by Johannes Gumpp, and in 1960 by Norman Rockwell. In the 20th century, what is more, self-portraits introduced infinitely varied techniques, which merely makes their manner of meaning even more complicated.

5Baudelaire is the person who would take the themes of the artist as buffoon, clown and acrobat to the highest level of concentration, as Jean Starobinski puts it. The Romantic writers found the vital resources, which art coopted by the bourgeois no longer offered them, in the circus, in the theatre of Tightrope-walkers, and in the bedazzlement of the track to the stars reproducing a cosmos entirely given over to the incredible. Here they rediscovered an original audience, ready to set sail for the impossible, and also, in the funambulistic exercise, a synthesis of body and mind, whose aerial verticality talked to their need for liberty and impertinence. From Degas’ Mlle Lala au cirque Fernando (1879) to Seurat’s Cirque (1891), from Toulouse-Lautrec to Picasso, the world of the parade would act as a revealer of a need for the marvellous, forever being reasserted.

6Baudelaire in fact encumbered the figure of the clown with a tragic weight that most artists who would take up the theme in his wake, with the possible exception of Seurat, would not fail to underscore: the intoxication of art was unable to shroud the terrors of the abyss haunting them. Art is just illusion, and the return to earth, after the headiness of the tightrope-walker’s prowess, a school of pain. This would produce the more or less endless series of sad clowns, melancholy Pierrots, and even the tragic and Christlike figures of Georges Rouault. And this story is still continuing; it has traversed the 20th century and reached us in the 21st in the images of Olivier Blanckart and Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux (Clowns, 1997), Bruce Naumann (Torture of Clowns, 1987), and the videos of Patrick Sorrin (The Battle of the Tarts, 1994). It emphasizes the change slowly occurring since the Romantic period through the different forms of expressionism, turning the “painter”, as traditionally conceived, into an “artist”. Having abandoned representation, the craftsman in the classical tradition makes way for the artist who is seeking less to put across a world than his personal feelings, his moods, and his passions. This latter, like Gilles or Pierrot, is condemned to gesticulation, mimicry and grimace. The “physiognomies” of Lavater, the caricatures of Daumier, and other “expressive heads” which would invade the terrain of the portrait, right down to the grin of death in Helene Schjerfbeck’s series (1944), refer in the end of the day to the actual status of the painting, aphasic art, art beyond language, which must turn its silence into an inimitable voice, if not a correct phrase...