I the Restlessness of the Imaginary by Pietro Bianchi Department Of
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The Restlessness of the Imaginary by Pietro Bianchi Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ David F. Bell, supervisor ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ Anne-Gaëlle Saliot ___________________________ Roberto Dainotto Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 i v ABSTRACT The Restlessness of the Imaginary by Pietro Bianchi Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ David F. Bell, supervisor ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ Anne-Gaëlle Saliot ___________________________ Roberto Dainotto An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 Copyright by Pietro Bianchi 2019 Abstract Psychoanalysis has always been based on the eclipse of the visual and on the primacy of speech: this is evident in any clinical experience where the patient lies on the couch and never looks the psychoanalyst in his/her eyes. The work of Jacques Lacan though, is strangely full of references to the visual field and to images: from the text on the “mirror stage” in the Forties to the elaboration of the visual dimension of objet petit a (gaze) in the Sixties. As a consequence, a long tradition of film studies made reference to Lacan and used psychoanalysis as a tool in order to explain the inclusion of the subject of the unconscious in the experience of vision. What is less known is how the late Lacanian reflection on the topic of analytic formalization opened up a further dimension of the visual that goes beyond the subjective experience of vision: not in the direction of a mystical ineffable (the Real-as-impossible) but rather toward a subtractive mathematization of space, as in non-Euclidean geometries. The outcome sounds paradoxical but it can have major impacts on the way we understand the visual field and we represent it in visual studies: sometimes abstract formalization can help us to look at the space even better than with our eyes. VII Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... VII Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 Visual Field and Reality: the Imaginary.............................................................................. 2 Visual Field and the Real: the Object-Gaze ........................................................................ 4 The Realism of the Gaze ........................................................................................................ 7 The Real of Cinema ................................................................................................................ 9 1. The Restlessness of the Visual............................................................................................ 11 1.1 The Imaginary as One.................................................................................................... 11 1.2 From Lack to Phallus ..................................................................................................... 23 1.3 For an Erotic of Vision ................................................................................................... 27 1. 3. 1 The Unrest of Vision. H. G. Wells and The Country of the Blind.................... 29 1.3.2 The Lacanian Screen ................................................................................................. 34 1.3.3 Looking with No Eyes .............................................................................................. 39 1.3. 4 Godard and a non Imaginary Cinema .................................................................. 40 2. A Gaze Without Eyes ............................................................................................................ 44 2.1. Traversing the mirror.................................................................................................... 44 2.2. A Vision as an Arrow (Geometral optics).................................................................. 51 2.3 Velázquez’s Las Meninas I. Michel Foucault ............................................................. 56 2.4 Merleau-Ponty and the corporeal dimension of vision ............................................ 67 2.4 Velázquez’s Las Meninas II. Jacques Lacan................................................................ 72 2.5. The Story of Zeuxis and Parrhasios............................................................................ 86 VIII 2.6. Politics of Formalization............................................................................................... 92 3. The Formalization of the Moving-Image .......................................................................... 97 3.1. The Three Gazes ............................................................................................................ 97 3.2. A Vision of the Universal ........................................................................................... 101 3.3 Cinema and the Machine............................................................................................. 106 3.4. Deleuze and becoming-passive................................................................................. 110 4. Conclusion............................................................................................................................. 120 Appendix A: Lacan and the Discourse of Science. Notes for a Further Discussion on Psychoanalysis and Formalization ....................................................................................... 123 The Lacanians vs. Science.................................................................................................. 123 The Cartesian subject of the unconscious ....................................................................... 127 Jean-Claude Milner – letter and contingency................................................................. 134 Jacques-Alain Miller and Suture ...................................................................................... 142 The Axiomatization of Psychoanalysis ........................................................................... 149 Appendix B: The Cinema of Straub-Huillet and the Presenting of the Object-Gaze 158 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 180 Biography .................................................................................................................................. 186 IX Introduction It is common in Lacanian Studies it is common to say that Jacques Lacan’ reflections on the visual field are contained in two seminars of the mid-Sixties: The Four Fondamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis of 1964 and L’objet de la psychanalyse of 1965-66. However if we take into account the entirety of his teaching, his reflections on the visual experience looks significantly different then if we limit our reflections only to his explicit references to the visual experience. Before introducing Lacan’s conceptualization of the object-gaze – which is commonly considered the most innovative meditation Lacan developed on the topic of vision and also the most explicit one in his teaching – it is necessary to make a detour into what was until the Sixities the dominant interpretation regarding the visual field in Lacanian psychoanalysis, i.e. the visual as imaginary. This intermediate step is necessary in order to underline how the visual was for years in Lacan the constitutive principle of reality in its phenomenological given to the experience of an individual. It is only with seminar of 1964 that Lacan made an audacious U-turn through which the visual becomes the bearer of – what is almost the opposite principle -: an emergence of a dimension irreducible to both reality and to the mediation of the subject of cognition. The gap that separates reality and the real is redoubled within the visual field: on one hand the visual field is the cornerstone of the 1 consistency of reality, as imaginary, on the other hand it is an element which is irreducible to this very reality, as object-gaze. Visual Field and Reality: The Imaginary When Lacan develops the concept of the imaginary we are in the first phase of his teaching. We are in the years of the so-called Lacanian structuralism where the dimension of the causality of the signifying chain is at the forefront in the analysis of the formations of the unconscious. Contrary to a psychoanalytic doxa that considered the unconscious an archive of passed and repressed experiences which belongs to the dimension of the profound and of the irrational – to what in the subject eludes any rational grasp – Lacan rather defines the unconscious rather as a logic deployed on a surface: a subject is constituted in language and by language. Beneath the level of communication that would aim at reducing the signifiers to an instrumental denotation of objects of reality, there is a bizarre and arbitrary logic: signifiers are ambiguous, they are connected through opaque homophonies,