‘Painting cannot deceive us since it does not have about it the genuine hue of light’, wrote Schlegel in his nineteenth-century work Die Gemählde (see Schlegel 1996: 33 [Trans.]). What are we to say today of the deception wrought by the live television image except that it possesses this ‘genuine hue’ thanks to the light-speed of wave optics – a genuine hue that is simply the ‘real time’ of TV transmissions, which lights up the reality of the scenes observed. Where pictorial representation could not claim to match the effects of immediate lighting – since every past pictorial fi gure is inscribed in ‘recorded time’ – televisual presentation, thanks to the techniques of live coverage, possesses this light of immediacy, this sudden verisimilitude that painting, photography and even cinema lacked completely – whence the emergence of a last ‘horizon of visibility’, as soon as the optical depth of the human environment is reduced.

Currently, though the televised event certainly takes place, it nonetheless makes us aware of its ultimate limit, that of the absolute speed of light. Human beings are now no longer merely putting the relative speed of the animal or the machine to work; they are using the speed of the wave-packets of the electromagnetic domain, without even noticing that here they run up against an insuperable barrier, which is no longer the barrier of sound or heat, such as is encountered by supersonic or hypersonic vehicles, but the barrier of light, the last frontier of an energy intensity that forever limits human action and perception. In fact – and we forget this too often – if the event takes place here and now, it also takes place ‘in the light’ of a positive or negative acceleration. For example, the chance meeting of two passers-by who greet each other on the pavement is not of the same nature as the unexpected encounter in which two slow-moving motorists wave to each other as they pass on the road that runs alongside that pavement.