Christopher S. Wood - Image and Thing
Christopher S. Wood - Image and Thing
Christopher S. Wood - Image and Thing
WOOD
It seemed to her that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too quickly.
This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had had the impression that
something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around
everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines
of persons and things and revealing itself.
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
a b s t r a c t This paper argues that the anthropomorphizing discourses that attribute agency to
images and things, stressing their efficacy and power, are motivated by a perception of a lack in the
artwork, or in art itself. R e p r e s e n t a t i on s 133. Winter 2016 The Regents of the University of
California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 13051. All rights reserved. Direct
requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California
130 Press at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?preprints. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2016.133.5.130.
The thing decenters personhood and is at the same time anthropomorphic,
in the sense that it stands in for something that is prior to or outside the
human, but is customized by the story for human apprehension. The anthro-
pomorphism of animal or artifact in romance is uncanny because partial.
In the last several decades the device of partial anthropomorphism, or
attribution of some human qualities to nonhuman entities, has been
favored within critical and historical writing across several disciplines. The
project signaled by the phrase Images at Work, title of the conference
from which the present special issue arises, is a good example. Someone
who writes or speaks about what images want, the life of things, or
things that talk would seem to be making a claim, against common sense,
about reality. I am personally unconvinced that pictures desire anything, or
that images think, or that things live. Awaiting better demonstrations of
such unlikelihoods, I can only speculate about what people really mean
when they speak this way.
In the literary mode of romance, partial anthropomorphization signals
not only an awareness of the limits of narrative to convey the whole of
personhood but also an awareness of the limits of a persons ability to
control his or her own destiny. Similarly, the modern critical trope of
anthropomorphization signals a recognition of, perhaps even a resignation
to, the limits of personhood. To speak about nonsentient things as if they
were almost persons is to ironize the concept of the person. It is a way of
speaking that calls attention to the way persons win unearned prestige by
inserting themselves in advantageous positions within sentences. Sentences
create subjects by associating substantives with predicates, including verbs.
The subject is the source of the movement produced by the predicates.
Grammar invites anthropomorphism, for inside a sentence or a plot you can
simply replace she with it, and the verb does the rest. Sentences and plots
threaten to expose the human subject as an artifact of grammar. The trope of
misanthropic anthropomorphism is basically contending that people are
things that have been activated by grammar. The trope is antifictional, dis-
crediting modern storiesnot just romances, but any story that exaggerates
the autonomy of the person. The trope is antihumanist, if humanism is
defined as the attribution of too much humanity to people. Writing reveals
that from a standpoint outside writing, things would look more like persons
and persons would look more like things. To redescribe reality as a series of
interactions among persons and things is to replace the hierarchy of animate
and inanimate entities with a nonhierarchical network.
The discourses of the life of things, actor-network theory, and object-
oriented ontology restore credence to pre- or nonmodern anthropomor-
phisms and animistic psychological habits. The tactical, calculated anthro-
pomorphisms of modern scholarly discourse overturn the modern
132 Representations
the flux of experience inaugurateseven from within an artworka resis-
tance to the open-endedness of the artwork demanded by hermeneutics.
Excerpts from the perceptual field reappear inside the pictorial work of art
isolated and immobilized, as forms.
Painters painting in a certain modern mode isolated things from the
environment and, by flattening and framing them, made them things once
over. By delivering apples or houses as things, and extending this treatment
to people, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and Vincent van Gogh introduced
closure, opacity, and nonresponsiveness as contents of art. Painting in this
central, not marginal, tradition hyperbolized its own simplifying, condens-
ing operation by reproducing reifying operations in the modern environ-
ment. Collage and pop art revealed the ways that media or consumer
cultures already created still lifes. These developments ran in tandem with
the autonomization of the artwork. Painted canvases translated out of the
inhabited environment and into galleries and museums became themselves
more like things, opaque and dense. The artwork became a thing more
thingly than any literary text could ever be. The thing predetermined the
form of the modernist artwork, in the sense that it was the telos of the work.
And then it reappeared within the work as content.
Paintings or photographys leveling of everything in the perceptual
field invites convertibility. Because depiction, like plot but more intensely,
levels persons and things, all art and literature acquire what Susan Sontag
called an epicene, or promiscuous, potential. Sontag described camp as
the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of man and woman,
person and thing.). From this observation she drew the conclusion that
all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene.3 The epicene quality that
Sontag identified encourages a proliferation of subjects and objects of
desire. Gender convertibility makes two into three or more. The binary that
turns out to be a triangle or a polygon is the engine of the romantic plot.
The other is first a person, then a thing, then a person again, and so on. The
plot of romance is driven by lack: persons pursue something they lack,
objects are perceived to have something that the subject lacks, and what
makes them desirable is their lack of lack. They are desirable because they
are not needy. Things both symbolize unavailability and permit reroutings
that enable communication among people, even if the content of the com-
munication is only to agree that they each lack the same thing.
Depictions make a static picture of a plot. The convertibility of person
and thing is visible all at once. In a picture, the person is a thing and a person
at the same time. The epicene convertibility of depictions dramatizes a con-
dition of desire-driven plots generally. Images and plots are places where
things come into focus. The image or plot diagrams the effect of simulta-
neous presence and unavailability that accounts for the prestige of things in
It is not stone that will cry out in praise of Jesus, but the stones, the round
stones of the street or perhaps the walls of Jerusalem, stones like little heads.
The stoniness of stonethe real unlikelihood of it ever expressing its
thoughtsis manifested by the conceit of an exceptional outburst of
unstony behavior. The thing is an artifact of discourse, or a precipitate of
depiction, demanded by the minds inability to grasp matter. The biblical
passage reveals the hidden anthropomorphism of the thing. Minds have
access to matter only through things that act out materiality and at the same
time screen matter. The self-sufficiency of the thing is marked by its discon-
tinuity with the rest of matter. But this discontinuity also pushes it in the
direction of closure, shapedness, and organicism.
The thing is prestigious because it is remote and self-sufficient, deaf to
human pleas, resistant and so indispensable to human therapies and inqui-
ries. The thing talks, but it does not listen, and that is the source of its
apparent sovereignty over us.
The physical sciences recognize matter, not the thing. The dissolving of
the margins of things experienced by Elena Ferrantes character (see the
epigraph with which this essay began) is the onset of something like a sci-
entific picture of reality described as a delirium. Lilas vision of the appa-
rition of something absolutely material that is present all around us all
along, even if imperceptible, and that breaks down the outlines of per-
sons and things, brings loss of orientation.
The thing is prestigious for nonscientists because science does not recog-
nize it. Modern humanistic and critical thought is often shaped by attempts to
find the lacunae in the scientific picture of the world. Martin Heidegger, for
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example, said that Western thought understates the thing. The thing is
wrongly understood, according to Heidegger, as an unknown X to which
perceptible properties are attached. Another common but fallacious defini-
tion of the thing, Heidegger says, is the unity of a manifold of what is given in
the senses.4 Still another false understanding sees the thing as a fittedness of
matter to form.5 Heidegger replaces these scientific or logical concepts of the
thing with something like a religious concept; the thing is something that
gathers the fourfold: The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and
sky, divinities and mortals. The person who understands the thing merely as
an attractor of attributes, as a bundle of percepts, or as a conformity of matter
to form will misrecognize this gathering: Everything that already belongs to the
gathering nature of this thing does, of course, appear as something that is after-
ward read into it.6
Where does Heidegger think one is likely to meet the thing as gather-
ing? We have noted that one of the places that things are made available to
apprehension is the image, and Heidegger would agree with this, with an
important qualification that will be addressed later. Things appear in images
as objects of perception. Van Gogh painted fishing boats on a beach (fig. 1).
Boats are not self-sufficient, sovereign, alien entities. When they appear not in
a painting but on a beach, or in the water, they are not things. The boat is
a technical object designed to realize human ambitions (floating, sailing,
catching fish) and to compensate for human shortcomings (inability to swim
in the ocean for long periods of time). It is continuous with the human body.
These boats have already been zoomorphically shaped. Their fish-like quali-
ties have been elicited by the boatwrights, with curves and paint. Van Goghs
treatment of the beached boats augments this effect and then moves beyond
into an extramarine sphere. The masts and spars splay like limbs. They seem
to quiver, as they do notas on the boats at sea at the rightwhen they
support sails. The spars seem to generate the concentric rippling of the cloud
cover. On this extension of the boatmakers zoomorphisms the painter over-
lays a secondary thing-quality. The boats are flattened; their colors isolate
them from their environment. The animation of the boatstheir slight
mutual displacement, as if aware of one anotherexceeds reality.
The boats are determined by their image-host. But things are also locked
in rivalry with images. Within the projects of material cultural studies or
thing theory, the concept of the thing often serves to ironize the concept
of the image. The thing mounts a critique of its host, the image, from within.
The thing interferes with the evidentiary pretensions of the image. The
image pretends to show something plainly, more plainly than a mere lin-
guistic message could say it. From the point of view of thing theory,
modern thought is overly impressed by the capacity of images to depict and
represent and insufficiently attentive to the ways images behave like things,
that is, fail to behave at all and simply sit there. It is not enough that images
are mute; they are still accused of being too semiotic. An image is a produc-
tion or reproduction of appearance. Because an apparition points beyond
itself to something absent, the image is too easily employed as a sign. Sig-
nifying is also a mode of doing or acting, and yet one that many theorists,
critics, and historians no longer take to be the most important thing that
images or art do. The anthropomorphizing discourses often aim to move
beyond representation, by noting, for example, the ways that the material
signifier reasserts itself and so defers or disperses messages. The materiality
of a sign ensures that the sign does not always say what it was meant to say.
The resistance of material to semiosis is the basis for the role of the thing in
recent models of cultural exchange. Materiality interferes with dreams of
perfect translatability between cultures. Communities meet one another in
things, but the thing foils any drive to identification. Culture is therefore
best understood as a dynamic process of exchange and hybridization of
meanings carried unreliably by things.7
Because things can only be shownthey cannot be explainedthey are
dependent on the very image that they seek to ironize. The thing is
esteemed as something that reveals images and other signifiers to be overly
functional, too narrowly adapted to human requirements. But van Goghs
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boats were exactly thatequipmentbefore the image transformed them
into things. The boats, if they are to become things, depend on the image
they will then, once they are things, supposedly, reproach. They will reproach
the image for failing to invite its beholders beyond the horizon of human
concerns. Van Goghs boatsand all sorts of other boats encountered on
beaches or in harbors, once you have seen van Goghs paintinghint at
some principle of animation beyond commonsensical understanding. The
uncanny zoomorphism of the boats becomes a figure for someones (van
Goghs) special insight or feeling.
Something similar happens in romance, where plot focalizes and frames.
Birds, stones, swords, and other things, insofar as they function as actants
within the story, are interchangeable because they are all less than persons
and yet manifest some principle that is more than human and to which
storytellers have access.
The thing needs an image or plot in the sense that it does not begin to
exist until it appears within an image or plot. But the story or the depiction
also needs the thing, especially if it functions within a system of art, as
a literary or pictorial work. Heidegger would not concede that a mere image
is capable of bringing out the thingly quality of a thing. Only artworks can
do this. Van Goghs paintings, to be sure, are not just any images. They are
works of art; that is, they signify within a complex system of relations among
images and beholders memories of images, where showing and saying,
making and matching, are counterpoised, recalibrated, in every image;
where the historical position of each work within sequences of works span-
ning both time and space is an element of the meaning of that work. An art
system is a web that stretches across families of artifacts and communities of
human recipients. The system hosts an infinity of interpictorial relations,
past, present, and potential. No system that generates and shelters meanings
will function well if it has constantly to check signification against a reality
outside the system. The system, to work, requires a high degree of detach-
ment from reality. And yet it will also need to be tethered to some stable
points outside itself, just as a language is tethered to reality by names and by
deictic markers. The system identifies its own other, which cannot be pro-
cessed by the system and which underwrites that system. The thing that
shows up inside an image is the placeholder and the figure of that external
guarantor. Art needs the boat.
Many tendencies within twentieth-century modernism indulged
a reproachful fascination with the indifference of the thing. Jose Ortega y
Gasset said in his Dehumanization of Art (1925) that modern art surrounds us
with objects with which human dealings are inconceivable. He described
the unapproachable, alien entities as ultra-objects. What those ultra-
objects evoke in our inner artist are secondary passions, specifically aesthetic
138 Representations
Modernist art of the sort analyzed by Ortega revealed the anthropomor-
phism of the thing by conceiving of the thing as an object. The object is
unthinkable apart from the human subject, a grammatical origin point.
There is no access to the object except through subjects. By naming objects,
the subject ensures that the object is conceived as limitation. Modern ethics
are based on this imbalance. The core precept of modern humanistic ethics
is: do not objectify, that is, do not treat other subjects as if they were objects.
The word object always designates an undesirable condition of subjection.
The object-world is an alienated world. In the psychoanalytic context, the
object-relation designates merely partial apprehension. Phobia operates
through cathexis of an object to be avoided. Ortho Stice, a character in
David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest, finds it difficult to adjust himself to
objects: Do not underestimate objects, [Lyle] advises Stice. Do not leave objects
out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly
of objects. Later Stice is confronted by a therapist:
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was itself designed on the model of the person. And yet the artwork was also
different from the person; it had no voice or mind, and so it served equally as
a model for the nonhuman aspects of the thing.
The image, meanwhile, emerged as a surrogate both for the thing and
for the artwork. The image is made to play the role, in some discourses, that
the artwork used to, as the Other of the thing. In other discourses, the image
plays the role that the thing used to, as the Other of the artwork. The
capacity of the thing to relativize humanness was dramatized as a triangular
romance, in which a third, absent term is replaced by a second term that
enters into rivalry with a first term. The image shows how much the thing is
like an artwork. The thing shows how much the image is like an artwork.
Both amount to the same thing: image and thing together reproach the
artwork for being too human. Image and thing, supposedly, are sovereign,
not as dependent as the artwork on a subject of creation. Their sovereignty is
sustained by a forgetting of their origins in art.
Art is the scene that produces the thing in the first place, but is then
occluded by the thing as the thing enters into partnership with the image.
The scene of art is the source of the romances inquiry. Art is a place where
questions about the effects of things (including but not only artworks) on
subjects (embodied minds) are posed. The art/nonart frontier and the life/
nonlife frontier run straight through the scene of art. The artwork predicts
confusion about the relation of image and thing to art. Art responds to
questions about agency, efficacy, and the limits and extent of personhood.
What is art other than a working on minds and bodies through a balance of
conventional and invented forms, in space and time, that takes the form of an
expression or message mediated by forms that escape convention and there-
fore interfere with or retard communication? That is, art is a place where
inquiry is initiated, but the results of the inquiry are scrambled.
In an essay on nineteenth-century aesthetics, Whitney Davis discusses
the writer and theorist Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her engagement with
the so-called empathy theories of her day. Some theorists had proposed that
artworks work their effects by inviting bodies to imitate the work or, through
the work, the creative bodily gestures of the artist: In taking pleasure in an
artwork, Davis paraphrases, in judging it to be beautiful, or in performing
it perfectly, then, one responds naturally as a well-adapted body, moving and
flexing himself or herself in motor-muscular and visual-kinaesthetic modal-
ities as a human being is naturally selected to move and flex. Davis credits
Lee and her partner Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, however,
with the recognition that the observer of the statue does not conduct an inner
imitation of the represented gestures, as Karl Groos and other empathy theorists
would have to suppose. The observer responds not to a real human bodily motion
but to a sculpted figure, and therefore his or her empathy must include the
142 Representations
figure 2. Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005. Photo: Author.
reality because it is fictional. Art, hiding behind the axiom of its own unde-
rivability, is unrealisticsupposedlyabout its own relation to power. In an
academic context where real embeddedness in history and in materiality is
expected, art is therefore seen to be lacking. Image and thing, proposed as
substitutes for the artwork, are used by art historians as levers against the
aestheticist presumptions, in fact much diminished by now, of an academic
discipline once but no longer sustained by an alliance with art museums and
the art market and centered on art made in Europe between the early
Renaissance and the early twentieth century. The standings of image and
thing in this new discourse of the image, which replaces the older, suppos-
edly aestheticist, discourse, are not lowas they were in modernismbut
high. The image, for a historian of medieval European art, for example, is
now the place where all the things happen that art used to make happen,
but now these happenings are finally relieved of the philosophical, histor-
ical, and social burden of the concept of art. Medieval images and artifacts
propose fictions, project futures, shape pasts, make absent persons appear
to be present, interfere with evidentiary or semiotic ambitions, and shelter
as a privileged content beauty, even when the work depicts something
144 Representations
thing in its opacity, is seen as the substrate of art. The artwork, in this view,
was the result of an imposition, in modernity, of attributes upon this sub-
strate that were meant to elevate the image or thing but in fact neutralized it.
Is the image or thing really the substrate of the work of art? It might be
possible to think of prose as the substrate of poetry, and poetry as a pat-
terned enhancement of prose designed to endow linguistic formulations
with an aura of finality but that in fact only extract language from the to and
fro of life and drain it of its force. One might therefore wish to undo
poetry, just as dancing, a patterned kind of walking, could be undone,
restored to its substrate of walking.
Image or thing would seem to be ways of driving art out of its shelter
within the concept of the artwork. The artwork is the creature, in this view,
of aestheticism. Aestheticism is defined by its protagonists as a high estima-
tion, and by its antagonists as an overestimation, of arts priority. Aestheti-
cism has several ready responses to the challenge mounted by the image and
thing. First, art cannot be undone. The artwork cannot be reverse engi-
neered or restored to some simpler state because it is not derived from
anything. Second, art is uncircumventable: you need to go through (and
not back through) art to get to life. Third, the image or thing is already
stationed inside the artwork as its own internal horizon. Art overwhelms its
other by recreating it as its own core. But the image-like or thing-like quality
of an artwork never covers the work; there is a remainder.
The invocation of image or thing as a more stable alternative to the
artwork is an attempt to discredit that remainder as a fantasy. Stressed
instead are the ways artworks operate, work, act, live, and in general are
continuous with the rest of reality. Admired are the ways art delivers knowl-
edge: art thinks, art is intelligent, art is technical. If artworks fail to do
these things, if they demur, if they hesitate, if they decline to affirm, then
they are lacking, they fall short, they shirk.
In stories or pictures, we have seen, a thing masks a lack. The object of
desire cannot be expressed, so the desire is sustained through converse with
a thing. The thing is a phallic object imposed on a plot, in the sense that it
stands in for the real, unquestioned object of desire, which is in fact
a phallus is designed to hide this factabsent. The phallus brings symbolic
order by marking a possible location of the source of power, a marking that
defers the identification of the real source of power. Because the recent shift
in emphasis in the discourses of art responds to an apprehension of a lack in
art, I am inclined to describe the discourses of the power of images, the
image-act, image as presence, the efficacious image, the technical
image, iconoclash, the pictorial intelligence, the intelligence of art,
and art as a machine for thinking as phallic discourses. They identify
phallic substitutes that mask a perceived lack in the artwork.
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aspect of its content.16 The artwork is always converting the opposition
between art and nonart into its own signified. These are stable plots that need
never come to a close. Artin the Christian West and in the modernity that
succeeded itstages its own demise but never retreats. The plot is further
stabilized when nonart splits by fission into image and thing, forcing the
artwork to defend itself on two fronts at once, creating romantic triangles.
This creates the picture of image and thing as a rivalry: the image made by the
thing to look too much like an artwork, or the artwork made by the thing to
look like a mere image. Triangularity sets in motion the endless phallic switch-
ing. The rivalry between image and thing is sustained and stabilized by the
positing of a third term, the artwork, an ideal construct that did not exist
before modernity and that always disappoints. The absent object of desire
that image and thing stand in for is an artwork that works, that is efficacious,
that is finally legible. This is just what everyone wants from the artwork: that it
reveal its contents either all too plainly (qua image) or not at all (qua thing).
Compare Lacans confidence in the decisive orientation which the subject
receives from the itinerary of a signifier, that is, the material, indivisible
letter.17 The access to signifieds that artworks offer, however, does not lend
itself either to the orientation of subjects or to the resolution of plots, such as
histories of art. The lack of the artwork is its irresponsible failure to resist, as
matter, division and so to function as a stable object of desire. It displays its
own lack and invites imposition of the substitute, the efficacious image.
The diagramming of binary rivalries (queen vs. minister, minister vs.
Dupin) into stable triangles (queen, king, minister; minister, police, Dupin)
is the work of psychoanalysis as well as of a genre, like romance. Lacan
asserts that Poes story delivers the truth of psychoanalysis.18 He believes the
story functions like an image: it illustrates; it really does show. But Barbara
Johnson, developing Jacques Derridas analysis of Lacans text, critiques
Lacans geometrical analysis of the efficacy of the letter. Johnson shows that
the stable triangle sought by psychoanalysis systematically excludes the con-
text of the triangle, namely, literariness or the scene of writing.19 Lacan,
in Derridas and Johnsons readings, forgets the involvement of Poes nar-
rator in the content of the story he narrates. The narrator, for example, sees
himself doubled in the figure of the clever detective Dupin. The narrator
mentions Dupins recent triumphs, such as the affair of the murders in the
rue Morgue, which is also the subject of a story by Poe. Lacan eliminated the
literary frame of the internal narration, the story about the letter. He forgot
the framethe narrator, the signature, the parergal edges of the storyso
that he could treat the real narrative as if it were true, like a patients
narration. The psychoanalytic reading of the embedded story, in order to
create balanced triangles, lopped off the fourth corner of a quadrangle, the
point outside the plane of the story from which literature comes. But no
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The scene of art cannot be accused of lack because it is constituted by
lack. The scene of art hosts a condition so impaired, seemingly so unbearable,
that even its occupants (artists) must envision arts own internal horizons
image, thing, and artworkcreating false contours and closure, just as they
envision a source, an abyssal inwardness, creativity. The scene of art pro-
vides this and other placeholders for arts own singular, dimly perceived
source.
The phallic discourse is the fallacy that the rivalry of image and thing,
which is really the rivalry of a straw man, the artwork, with its various
Others, succeeds in escaping the scene of art by connecting with experi-
ence. Image and thing serve successfully as phallic substitutesthey
become phallusesfor the missing phallus of (queenly) art because they
are believed to have phalluses, namely, naturalized relations to power
and knowledge.
The discourses are unwilling to let artworks cease to be screens for the
supposed lack in art and instead let them begin to be artistic, that is,
unframeable. To do that would bring an end to the cascading plots of art
history that leave artwork, image, and things intact.
By describing all style as epicene, Sontag was pointing to the chains of
substitutions, conversions, and transformations, man to woman, person to
thing, that make art unframeable. The discourses of anthropomorphism are
precisely not epicene, or queer, because they are unable to recognize art
itself as the site of its object of desire, the place where that object is most
likely to appear, even if fleetingly. Why is the scene of art the site of the
object of desire? Because art is the working through of a principle of
unknowability, situated on a horizon between two kinds of knowing, knowl-
edge through experience and knowledge beyond experience. Knowable to
whom? That is the wrong question. Art does not become, as a site of
knowledge, a site of desire for this one or that one; rather, it is structured
as such a site, which may or may not include surrogate objects such as art-
works, images, or things. It answers, in its own incomplete way, to a lack (of
understanding, of contact, of participation in nature of which beauty is the
symbol). The discourses of image and thing are expressions of impatience
with arts enigmatic answer to these lacks, calling instead, prematurely,
upon the opaque surrogates to cover the lack. As Lacan says elsewhere,
the letter amounts to, comes back to Being, that is, to the nothing that
would be opening itself as the hole between womans legs. Such is the
proper place in which the letter is found, where the minister believes it to
be in the shadows and where it is, in its very hiding place, the most exposed.
Possessing the letter in the shadows, the minister begins to identify himself
with the Queen (but must not Dupin, and the psychoanalyst within him, do
so in turn?).21 The minister is like an art historian who, because he holds
The older brother is unframed, disorienting the sister. The sister learns,
and she experiences this learning as a breakdown of contours. The brother
had functioned as a brother through his quality of containment. Until then
the sister had falsely seen her brother as a thing. But this was already an
artistic way of seeing. And to revert to a reifying way of perception would be
again artistic. Artists (van Gogh) and philosophers who want to think like
artists (Heidegger) persist, even after having learned what Lila learned, in
seeing the world parceled into things, entities gathered and bounded and
possibly even ensouled. Lila sees artistically and undoes her own unreal
enhancements of the thingliness of things around her. There is no progres-
sion from illusion to reality, from the idol to the true god. Lila comes to us
from the scene of art: Ferrantes novel, which itself comes to us from a hidden
scene. Lilas being extends beyond the edges of the novel, we feel sure, even
though the real source of the novel is occulted (the identity of the author has
been concealed). The novel and its characters have no stability, their edges
are always crumbling away. This is not a lack that needs to be covered. The
stable image, the stable thing, are shown to us only from within the novel, as
elements of the experience of one of the characters. Only one who misrecog-
nizes the very process of reading a novel would think to turn the experiences
of a literary character, for example the image of a person as framed and
integral, as a thing, against the novel itself, which pretends to a spurious
boundedness. The experience of the dissolving margins of a person, or
a thing, can be turned against the novel. But not against writing.
150 Representations
Notes
1. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (1988; reprint, New York, 1993), 32.
2. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972; reprint, Chicago, 2000), 140.
3. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (1964), in Essays of the 1960s and 70s (New
York, 2013), 263.
4. Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, in Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1975), 153. A better translation than
understates of his phrase zu durftig ansetzt is underrates or even holds
an impoverished idea of.
5. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, trans.
David Farrell Krell (New York, 1977), 156 and, generally, 15166.
6. Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, 153.
7. Good recent examples of studies that make this case are Finbarr Barry Flood,
Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval Hindu-Muslim Encounter
(Princeton, 2009), and Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo
History of the Arts in New Spain, 15001600 (Austin, 2014).
8. Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (1925; reprint, Princeton, 1948),
2223.
9. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 132.
10. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston, 1996), 395, 550.
11. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cam-
bridge, MA, 2006), 112.
12. An early usage is Maurice Rheims, La vie etrange des objets: histoire de la curiosite
(Paris, 1959): the objet dart, basically, minus the art. Two recent and distin-
guished usages are Flood, Objects of Translation, and Edward Sullivan, The Lan-
guage of Objects in the Art of the Americas (New Haven, 2007).
13. Whitney Davis, The Sense of Beauty: Homosexuality and Sexual Selection in
Victorian Aesthetics, in Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to
Freud and Beyond (New York, 2010), 17778.
14. Jacques Lacans Seminar on The Purloined Letter was published in 1957 and
then again in 1966 as the first of his Ecrits. The text was translated into English
in Yale French Studies 48 (1972).
15. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York, 1960).
16. See Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash (Karlsruhe, 2002), espe-
cially the essay by Joseph Leo Koerner, as well as Amy Powell, Depositions: Scenes
from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York, 2012).
17. Lacan, cited in Jacques Derrida, Le facteur de la verite, Poetique 21 (1975),
translated under the same title in Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago, 1987); citations from the translation, here 426.
18. See Derrida, Le facteur de la verite, 42526.
19. Barbara Johnson, The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida, Yale French
Studies 55/56 (1977): 457505. The number of the journal was reprinted as
Shoshana Felman, ed., Literature and Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, 1982). Johnsons
essay was also reprinted in The Barbara Johnson Reader (Durham, 2014), 5798.
20. Johnson, The Frame of Reference, 484.
21. Derrida, Le facteur de la verite, 439.
22. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (Lamica geniale), trans. Ann Goldstein (New
York, 2012), 176; the passage used as an epigraph to this article appears on
pages 8990.