You couldn't do philosophy with images alone. Because, as Merleau-Ponty puts it in La prose de monde, images are “mute,” and philosophy uses language. Images (Merleau-Ponty rather thinks of paintings than photographs) may represent a view on the world, a kind of perception, but different from our actual perception. Obviously, we will never see, in our daily life, apples as Cezanne paints them, or our friend's face as Picasso portraits. Nevertheless, Cezanne's apples represent another way of looking at apples. Real apples are the common center of all of these views, our actual perception and all the various ways apples can be painted, and all the various ways they can be described in a poem, a story, or a philosophy. Paintings are comparable to a literary description of experience. Except they are not really a description, since this relationship with reality takes place outside language. Which is, according to Merleau-Ponty, why philosophers are never entirely satisfied with paintings. They need to paraphrase them, so to speak, tell again but with words what the painting shows without words, transpose the image into language so as to take it up again in the never-ending effort towards a never-achieved transparency.

But, precisely, a video is not a painting, or a photograph. It is language with images. That is why it may be a medium for philosophy, a philosophy that must be told differently. Philosophers from Plato to Descartes, from Spinoza to Derrida have discussed the role of the medium in philosophy. Should philosophy be a dialogue or could it be told as a kind of autobiography, or should it take the form of geometrical treatise; should it be written in Latin or in vernacular languages, should it be voiced or written, and why does it matter?

So let us try and use videos as another medium for philosophy, a medium that would raise different kinds of problems. For instance, the distance towards oneself, this differance that Derrida has emphasized, which is reduced to a minimum in the voice but which writing accentuates, takes another form. For the philosopher speaks on the video: the philosopher uses a voice (not necessarily his, or hers) synchronized (or not quite so) with mute images outside language. The differance is multiform. The "a" of "differance," which recalls in Derrida's texts the temporal dimension of this difference, should be replaced by yet another character (something like "differ@nce"?). The interplay between words and images may also be comical, which is also a way to both tell and hide something, and take a step away from the transparency to which philosophy can only aspire.

The rules should be clear, the videos should be as simple as possible. For our aim is to tell stories, engage in a (slightly unusual) philosophical investigation. We are not artists. Language comes first. There are only still images, cheap photos. We want to use the simplest means of expression in this new medium.