The Essay and Its Argument
The Assassination of Experience by Painting, Monory is Jean-François Lyotard’s extended meditation on the painting of Jacques Monory, written as a philosophical essay rather than as conventional art criticism. Its title states its thesis: painting, in Monory’s hands, does not record or preserve experience but “assassinates” it. Lyotard argues that Monory’s canvases stage the disappearance of lived experience into the image — that the act of painting, and still more the act of looking, substitutes a cold, repeatable, manufactured scene for whatever was once directly felt. The essay is therefore less an account of Monory’s career than a sustained reflection, provoked by particular paintings, on what happens to experience when it is turned into a picture.
Lyotard’s approach is not chronological and does not survey Monory’s output period by period. Instead he works through the recurring motifs of Monory’s imagery and treats them as elements of a single, obsessive pictorial machine. The essay moves between close attention to the canvases and broader philosophical claims about representation, memory, violence, and the image, in the manner of Lyotard’s earlier writing on the visual arts. The painting is understood as a device that repeats: it takes a scene and re-presents it, and in that repetition the original event is lost. What remains is the image — and the image, for Lyotard, is inseparable from a kind of crime.
The Repertoire of Monory’s Painting
The essay organizes itself around the motifs that recur across Monory’s work: the scene of the crime, the revolver, the woman, the victim, glaciers, deserts, and stars. Lyotard reads these not as anecdotal subjects but as the fixed components of an imaginary repertoire. Monory’s canvases often present a frozen, cinematic tableau — a figure, an object, a landscape — rendered in a cool, monochrome palette that gives the scene the look of a photograph or a film still rather than of a directly observed event. The atmosphere Lyotard describes as “Californian”: bright, empty, synthetic, and faintly menacing.
The crime scene is central. Lyotard treats the murder in Monory’s paintings as something other than narrative violence; it is the emblem of what painting does to experience. The victim, the weapon, and the woman are the props of a ritual that is repeated across canvas after canvas, and the repetition itself is the point. Each painting re-enacts the same loss, and the viewer is placed in the position of someone arriving after the event, confronted with the evidence of something that has already happened and cannot be recovered. Lyotard’s essay is concerned with this belatedness — with the way an image always comes after the experience it claims to show.
The American Imaginary
Lyotard situates Monory’s painting within what he calls the dilemma of Americanization. Both painter and philosopher are formed by an America that reaches them through cinema, fashion, novels, and music — a mediated, exported America rather than a directly known place. Monory’s deserts, highways, neon-lit interiors, and film-like framings belong to this imaginary. Lyotard does not treat this as a matter of influence or of cultural critique in the ordinary sense; rather, it is the condition within which the work operates. The paintings take up the visual vocabulary of cinema and popular imagery and turn it into something else, a “modern contemporary surrealism” that goes beyond the masters of modernity while drawing on their procedures.
It is within this atmosphere that Lyotard locates what he calls the supreme experience of difference: desire and fear, exultation and a profound malaise. The essay argues that Monory’s painting holds these opposites together. The images are seductive and chilling at once; they attract the viewer and produce unease. Lyotard’s account of the aesthetic response is therefore not one of simple pleasure or simple critique but of a divided experience, in which fascination and dread are inseparable.
Lyotard’s Method
Throughout, Lyotard’s writing is itself part of the argument. The essay is not a neutral description of paintings but a performance of the kind of thinking the paintings demand: digressive, image-driven, and resistant to settled conclusions. It belongs to the same period of Lyotard’s work as his wider reflections on art and politics, and the Monory text is his first extended treatment of a contemporary artist after Discourse, Figure. Readers approaching it as a monograph on Monory will find instead a philosophical essay that uses Monory’s imagery as the occasion for thinking about the image, repetition, and loss.
The 2013 Leuven edition presents the French text with a parallel English translation and frames the essay with two additional pieces: an introduction by Herman Parret, which situates the Monory essay within Lyotard’s writings on contemporary art and artists, and an epilogue by Sarah Wilson. Wilson’s contribution outlines the history of the friendship between Lyotard and Monory and the intellectual and artistic climate in which the essay was written, including the Parisian art world of the 1970s. These framing texts are supplementary to the essay itself, which remains a concentrated and demanding study of a single painter’s imaginary universe.
The Scene of Representation
The essay’s central wager is that Monory’s paintings do not represent a prior experience but stage the impossibility of doing so. The “assassination” names a double operation: painting converts the lived event into an image, and in doing so it both preserves and destroys it. The image is therefore evidence and alibi at once — it points to something that has happened while blocking access to it. Lyotard follows this logic through Monory’s use of photographic and cinematic codes, where the painting is already a copy of a copy. The canvas does not restore the photograph’s referent; it turns the referent into a fiction whose only reality is the surface and the affect it produces.
The Viewer as Accomplice
Lyotard’s account implicates the spectator in this crime. Because the paintings present scenes that are complete yet unexplained, the viewer is drawn into the position of an investigator who can never close the case. The work solicits interpretation — what happened here? who is responsible? — but it also forecloses the answer by making representation itself the culprit. This is why the essay’s movement is not toward a correct reading of Monory but toward the recognition that the image is a trap for the desire to know. The viewer’s belatedness is not merely temporal; it is structural.
Painting as Thought
The book’s significance lies in its refusal to treat painting as illustration or as mere visual pleasure. Lyotard approaches Monory’s work as a mode of thought that tests the limits of representation from within representation. In this respect the essay extends the concerns of Discourse, Figure: it asks what in the image resists being translated into discourse, and it finds that resistance in the very mechanisms — framing, repetition, color, photographic reference — that make the image legible. Monory’s figurative painting is thus neither a return to realism nor an escape into abstraction; it is an analysis of the image’s power to seduce, distance, and wound.
