The aim of this thesis is to analyse the ‘opening’ power of the image in narrative texts written after the 1980s : Claude Simon’s Le Jardin des Plantes, Peter Handke’s Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht and Der Bildverlust, and Richard Powers’ Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. The category of the visual, as articulated by Georges Didi-Huberman, has allowed us to question the image from the vantage point of its power to rend open ‘visible certainty’: as a work of the between and of the other, the image disrupts the distinction between seeing and knowing, visible and invisible, actual and virtual. We have related this principle of disruption proper to the image to a double movement : on the one hand, a strategy aiming to dissociate thought and reality in order to reveal the idiocy of a real without reason ; on the other, the unstable dynamic of a psychic economy entailing a dialectic of mourning and desire, of the anxiety of loss and the opening onto the virtuality of the possible. Absence, the originary source of the image, is the motor of this tension between melancholic retention and desiring protention. The image thus harbours a temporal paradox : memory of a past that will not pass and returns to haunt the present, the image also generates a paradoxical ‘memory of the present’. It is within this discordance between two possible images of a time yet-to-come (one haunted by historical catastrophe, the other seeking to reopen the space of the present as a site of historical agency and action) that a ‘politics of aesthetic form’ can be sketched : an internally divided form founded on the refusal to close the debate between catastrophe and promise.