Métaphores blumenberghiennes

The “oscillation” between the ontological polarities of language and thought, the phenomenological form of Ricoeur’s recit and Heideggers’s Andenken, characterizing the concept of catastrophe, is also what makes it waver amongst Scylla and Carybdis (navigatio mala), perception and representation “suddenly” with neither word nor image, pushing it towards the linguistic boundary, the “unrepresentable”. The aesthetics of “sublime” is the aesthetics of “unrepresentable”, of “unlimited”; the “vision” of the catastrophe as the “form of the unlimited”, as the “présentation” (Darstellung), as the “unrepresentable”, as the “unconceptual”, can be referred to the sublime. The unconceptual metaphor relates to the “rears” of Lebenswelt. By discovering the world of life, Blumenberg’s metaphor changes from “trace” of thought to “fossil”. The “shipwreck with spectator” is an intensified image of “shipwreck”, it is obtained by intensification. So the image of “shipwreck” experiences a kind of self-potentiation: it increases to such an extent that it includes in itself its extraneousness, its own alterity. The metaphor exteriorizes itself, intensifies itself in the estrangement, as self-reference, narcissism of the catastrophe, of its pure visibility. The image so intensified provides a new definition of metaphor. Intensification is the prehistory of metaphor, its archaic state, the “second narcissism” of the “visible”.