The weight of a portrait: Caricatura and industrial violence after the Charlie Hebdo attack

Abstract

‘It’s vital’, Luz told his friend the publisher Alain David in mid-February 2015, when he called him. Luz’s book Catharsis, written in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, was completed in record time. The book revolves around an impossible drawing. It is the proper name of the event called ‘attack on Charlie Hebdo, January 7, 2015’. ‘The’ drawing, ‘ le dessin’ is what Luz cannot draw and translate, cannot express and figure without re-engaging the very nature of figurability. Luz converses with ghostly visitations, and while doing so, he re-enacts a foundation of the figuration process that Georges Didi-Huberman calls the ‘dialectique du visuel’ (1992: 53–84). The image breaks down the usual distinction between watching and being watched. This powerful act of refiguring after a violent de-figuration, this artistic redemption, is a political response to a political assassination that targets a regime of visibility while raising central questions about what it means to create a portrait in the age of industrial violence. In a way, Luz’s Catharsis is not a ‘testimony’: it is an attempt to redeem a visual horizon that was torn by the attackers of 7 January.