EN LT
2004-05-07 Dalia : input
source_1
Gianni Vattimo. "The Transparent Society". p. 46-61. excerpt from chapter: "Art and Oscillation", 1992

source_2
Jaques Lacan. “Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis”, excerpts from chapters: "The eye and the gaze", p. 72-74. "Annamorphosis", p. 82-83. "The line and light", p. 94-95. "Of the Gaze"

source_3
Julia Kristeva. "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection" excerpts from chapter: "Approaching Abjection". p. 33-43. trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982

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source_1
Gianni Vattimo. "The Transparent Society". p. 46-61. excerpt from chapter: "Art and Oscillation", 1992

…the work of art as the 'setting-into-work of truth' arising in the strife between the work's two constitutive elements: the setting up of the world and the setting forth of the earth.
the encounter with the work of art is like an encounter with someone whose view of the world is a challenge to our own interpretation.

…aesthetic experience appears to be an experience of estrangement, which then requires re-composition and readjustment. the aim of this is not to reach a final recomposed state. Instead, aesthetic experience is directed towards keeping the disorientation alive. experience of aesthetic disorientation 'concludes' in a recuperation of familiarity and obviousness, almost as though it were ultimately the destiny of the art-work to transform itself into a simple object of use. The state of disorientation is constitutive and not provisional.

Foundation and unfounding are as constitutive of the work of art, namely, the setting up (Auf-stellung) of the world and the setting forth (Her-stellung) of the 'earth'. The world is set up as the system of significations it inaugurates; the earth is set forth by the work insofar as it is put forward, shown, as the obscure and thematically inexhaustible depths in which the world of the work is rooted. If, as we have seen, disorientation is essential to aesthetic experience, and not merely provisional, it owes far more to earth than to world. Only because the world of significance unfolded in the work seems to be obscurely rooted (hence not logically 'founded') in the earth, can the effect of the work be one of disorientation. Earth is not world. It is not a system of signifying connections: it is other, the nothing, general gratuitousness and insignificance. The work is a foundation only insofar as it produces an ongoing disorientation that can never be recuperated in a final Geborgenheit. The work of art is never serene, never 'beautiful' in the sense of a perfect harmony between inside and outside, essence and existence.

…art is namely the disorientation and oscillation connected with anxiety and the experience of mortality.

…it is the manner of the 'work of art's actualization as conflict between world and earth.
its occurrence as the nexus of foundation and unfounding in the form of oscillation and disorientation

…advent of the media enhances the inconstancy and superficiality of experience. In so doing, it runs counter to the generalization of domination, insofar as it allows a kind of 'weakening' of the very notion of reality, and thus a weakening of its persuasive force. reality presents itself as softer and more fluid, and in which experience can again acquire the characteristics of oscillation, disorientation and play.

…art is constituted as much by the experience of ambiguity as it is by oscillation and disorientation. In the world of generalized communication, these are the only ways that art can (not still, but perhaps finally) take the form of creativity and freedom.

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source_2
Jaques Lacan. “Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis”, excerpts from chapters: "The eye and the gaze", p. 72-74. "Annamorphosis", p. 82-83. "The line and light", p. 94-95. "Of the Gaze"

What we have to circumscribe, by means of the path he indicates for us, is the preexistence of a gaze - I see only from ' one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.

The gaze is present to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety.

The eye and the gaze—this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.

In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it – that is what we call the gaze.
But, in any case, the problem does not lie there. The most radical problem of mimicry is to know whether we must attribute to some formative power of the very organism that shows us its manifestations. For this to be legitimate, we would have to be able to conceive by what circuits this force might find itself in a position to control, not only the very form of the imitated body, but its relation, to the environment, from which
it has to be distinguished or, on the contrary, in which it has to merge.

If the function of the stain is recognized in its autonomy and identified with that of the gaze, we can seek its track, its thread, its trace at every stage of the constitution of the world, in the scopic field. We will then realize that the function of the stain and of the gaze is both that which governs the gaze most secretly and that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness.

…can we not also grasp that which has been eluded, namely, the function of the gaze?

The world is all-seeing, but it is hot exhibitionistic—it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.

What does this mean, if not that, in the so-called waking state, there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it took, it also shows. In the field of the dream, on the other hand, what characterizes the images is that it shows.

It shows—but here, too, some form of sliding away of subject is apparent.
From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctuation object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure. Furthermore, of all the objects in which the subject may recognize his dependence in the register of desire, the gaze is specified as unapprehensible. That is why it is, more than any other object, stood (meconnu), and it is perhaps for this reason, too, that the subject manages, fortunately, to symbolize his own vanishing and punctiform bar (trait) in the illusion of the consciousness of seeing oneself seeing oneself, in which the gaze is elided.

…gaze is that underside of consciousness.

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source_3
Julia Kristeva. "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection" excerpts from chapter: "Approaching Abjection". p. 33-43. trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982

The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-ject, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object - that of being opposed to the I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is racially excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. . A Certain "ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that "I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits it to the father's account: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste', or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them. I abject myself within the same motion through which 'I' claim to establish myself.

These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am' at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, 'as being alive, from that border

It is no longer I who expel, 'I' is expelled. The border has become an object.

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbes identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between the ambiguous, the composite.

If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject.

Abjection is essentially different from "uncanniness,' more violent, too.

The phobic has no other object than time abject.
put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based, on exclusion.

Yet, facing the ab-ject and more specifically phobia and the splitting of the ego one might ask if those articulations of negativity germinate to the unconscious have not become inoperative. The 'unconscious' contents remain here excluded but in a strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established – one that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration. As if the fundamental opposition were between I and Other or, in more archaic fashion, between Inside and Outside.

The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered. Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance. The clean and proper becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightning an operation that, if it were thought out, would involve bringing together the two terms but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder. The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth.

We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity

If, on account of that Other, a space becomes demarcated, separating the abject from what will be a subject and its objects, it is because a repression that one might call 'primal' has been effected prior to the springing forth of the ego. of its objects and representations.

We are no longer within the sphere of the unconscious but at the limit of primal repression that, nevertheless, has discovered an intrinsically corporeal and already signifying brand, symptom, and sign: repugnance, disgust, abjection.

In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. For the sublime has no object either. The 'sublime' object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory.

The abject might then appear as the most fragile (from a syncronic point of view), the most archaic (from a diachronic one) sublimation of an "object" still inseparable from drives. The abject is that pseudo-object that is made up before but appears only within the gaps of secondary repression. The abject would thus be the "object" of primal repression. But what is primal repression?

The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal.

Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis: it is witness to the ephemeral aspect of the state called "narcissism" with reproachful jealousy, heaven knows why; what is more, abjection gives narcissism (the thing and the concept) its classification as 'seeming,' Nevertheless, it is enough that a prohibition, which can be a superego, block the desire craving an other - or that this other, as its role demands, not fulfill it - for desire and its signifiers to turn back toward the 'same,' thus clouding the waters of Narcisus.

It is then that the object ceases to be circumscribed, reasoned with, thrust aside: it appears as abject

In both instances, the abject appears in order to uphold "I" within the Other. The abject is the violence of mourning of an "object" that has always already been lost. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away - it assigns it a source in the non-ego, drive, and death. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego).

The abject is related to perversion. The sense of abjection that I experience is anchored in the superego.

An unshakable adherence to Prohibition and Law is necessary if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in and thrust aside. Religion, Morality, Law
Abjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse. Several structurations of abjection should be distinguished, each one determining a specific form of the sacred.
Abjection persists as exclusion or taboo (dietary or other) in monotheistic religions, Judaism in particular, but drifts over to more "secondary" forms such as transgression (of the Law) within the same monotheistic economy.