Disembodiment and the total body: A response to Enwezor on contemporary South African representation

Third Text

Volumn 12, Issue 44, 1998, Pages 3-16

  Axel, Brian Keith ^a  

^a Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0003389275     PISSN: 09528822     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09528829808576747     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. The phrasing is Paul Silverstein's. See Paul Silverstein, 'Between Muhammad and Michael Jordan: Bodily Practice, Social Reproduction and Algerian Immigration in France', forthcoming
2. See James Fernandez, Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991
3. 'Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representations', Third Text, 40, Autumn 1997 (1997a), p 23
4. Enwezor's Third Text essay is a slight restructuring of an earlier essay, for which I will also give citations. Okwui Enwezor, 'Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Art' in Contemporary Art from South Africa. Catalogue for an Exhibition (curated by Marith Hope), Oslo, 1997 (1997b), p 23. Following the editor's request, in order not to be excessively cumbersome, I am not providing footnote-citations for each quotation from Enwezor's works. I ask the reader to please consult these two respective articles
5. Lauren Berlant, 'National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life', in Bruce Robbins [ed]. The Phantom Public Sphere, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993
6. Okwui Enwezor, 'The Body in Question: Whose Body? "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art"', Third Text, 31, 1995, p 68
7. Louis Marin, Food For Thought, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989, pp 192-194
8. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 2, Penguin Books, London, 1978, p 136
9. See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, Vintage Books, New York, 1978, p 88
10. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, London, Routledge, 1991 [1907], pp 186-187
11. Martin Jay, 'Scopic Regimes of Modernity', in Hal Foster [ed], Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, Seattle, 1988, p 15
12. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986
13. I discuss the category of fantasy at length in my 'The Restricted Zone: Space, Difference and Fantasy', in Arjun Appadurai [ed], Space, South Asia, Globalization, forthcoming
14. Jean Comaroff, The Portrait of an Unknown South African: Identity in a Global Age', in Macalester International, Vol 4, Spring 1997 (special edition: The Divided Self. Identity and Globalization), pp 119-143
15. Jane Taylor, 'People's Portraits: Some Meditations on Identity,' n d
16. Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991
17. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Books, London, 1994
18. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, Routledge, London, 1995
19. Enwezor's use of Homi Bhabha is unclear. He does not show how Bhabha's theory of the stereotype, developed in an analysis of a historically specific form of colonial domination, might be transposed onto the questions of contemporary South African art. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994, pp 66-84
20. The artist's words: "The South African subject... is a violently constituted exquisite corpse, fragmented and scarred, traversed by race, gender, class and language. Currently de rigueur notions of hybridity both recognisè and romanticise such a body. At a time when discrimination is allegedly a thing of the past, a time when porn is (relatively) freely available in South Africa for the first time in decades, a time when inner Johannesburg maintains the dubious distinction of having one of the highest rape rates in the world (though the latter is by no means causally related to the former), this series is a perverse gesture at the composite subject making up the imaginary tribe which populates the New South Africa." Candice Breitz, 'Rainbow Series', Interzoncs: A Work in Progress, catalogue for exhibitions in Copenhagen and Uppsala, curated by Octavio Zaya and Anders Michelsen, 1996, p 50
21. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, op cit, pp 1-7
22. J Laplanche and J B Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, W W Norton & Co, New York, 1973, p 251
23. Another review of Breitz's work has also missed this important possibility. See Clayton Campbell, 'Candice Breitz, David Levinthal and David McGee: Craig Krull, Santa Monica', Flash Art, Vol XXX, no 195, 1997, p 99
24. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1989, p 21
25. Jacqueline Rose, 'Sexuality and Vision: Some Questions', in Hal Foster [ed], Vision and Visuality, op cit, p 125
26. For alternative approaches to the category of whiteness, see Mike Hill [ed], Whiteness: A Critical Reader, New York University Press, New York, 1997
27. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, New York, 1989, pp 33, 45
28. See Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", Routledge, London, 1993, pp 187-222
29. Laplanche and Pontalis, 'Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,' in Victor Burgin, et al [eds], Formations of Fantasy, Routledge, New York, 1986; Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psychoanalysis, Hogarth Press, London, 1949
30. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994 [1959], pp 23-36
31. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978; Marrianne Hirsch, 'Object-Relations Oriented Criticism', in Elizabeth Wright [ed], Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, pp 280-284
32. Klein, op cit; Juliet Mitchell, 'Introduction I', in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose [edsj, Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, W W Norton & Co, New York, 1982, pp 1-26
33. Maria Ramas, 'Freud's Dora, Dora's Hysteria', in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane [eds], In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysleria-Feminism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1985, pp 149-180
34. It should be noted that Enwezor does not cite Kahane directly, but uses a 1996 quote from David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West, Routledge, London and New York, 1995. Sibley's use of Kahane's summary of object relations theory does not take into account her critique; indeed, Kahane's critique leaves any reliance upon object relations theory difficult to maintain. See Claire Kahane, 'Object-Relations Theory', in Elizabeth Wright [ed], op cit, pp 284-290
35. For a more compelling discussion of the Hottentot Venus, see Sander Gilman, 'Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature', in Henry Louis Gates, Jr [ed], "Race", Writing, and Difference, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985, pp 223-261
36. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Duke University Press, Durham, 1997
37. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat, Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997