Corpsing the image

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 395-413

  Schwenger, Peter ^a,b  

^a Department of English ^*  (United States)

^b University   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449287302     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448972     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Roland Barthes, Camera Licida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981), p. 92; hereafter abbreviated CL
2. E. Jentsch, quoted in Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 7:226
3. Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 49
4. See also Stanley Burns, Sleeping Beauties: Memorial Photography in America (New York, 1990)
5. Quoted in Ruby, Secure the Shadow, p. 1
6. The intent of this essay is to make a theoretical argument rather than give a comprehensive survey of the recent attraction to the corpse as photographic subject matter. However, for those interested in such a survey a good starting point is E. Annie Proulx, "Dead Stuff," Aperture, no. 149 (Fall 1997): 30-35
7. Joel-Peter Witkin, "Danse Macabre," Aperture, no. 149 (Fall 1997): 38; hereafter abbreviated "DM."
8. Witkin, "The Story of the Eye: Joel-Peter Witkin," interview with Michael Sand, World Art 1 (1996): 106
9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982), p. 4; hereafter abbreviated PH
10. Kristeva, "Of Word and Flesh," interview with Charles Penwarden, Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century, ed. Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris (exhibition catalog, Tate Gailery-, London, 15 June-3 Sept. 1995), p. 22. Compare Witkin: "Everyone that I photograph, alive or dead, is really myself; I see myself in them" ("DM," p. 38)
11. Maurice Blanchot, "The Two Versions of the Imaginary," The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, Nebr., 1982), p. 256; hereafter abbreviated "TV."
12. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), p. 3
13. Witkin, "The Story of the Eye," p. 107. A similar classicism characterizes Rudolf Schafer's portfolio, "Dead Faces," Granta 27 (Summer 1989): 193-209
14. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery, in "The Primacy of Perception" and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology and the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, I11., 1964), p. 166
15. See Barthes, "Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur," The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Howard (Berkeley, 1991), p. 143: "[In Arcimboldo] everything happens as if, each time, the head were oscillating between marvelous life and horrible death. These composite heads are heads which are decomposing."
16. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1988), 2.11.17. For the came ra obscura as an optical-epistemological paradigm, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)
17. Kristeva, Black Sun, trans. Roudiez (New York, 1989), p. 136
18. Peter Greenaway, "Possible Excitements," interview with Alan Woods, in Woods, Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway (Manchester, 1996), p. 251
19. See Lacan, Ecrils, p. 3
20. Quoted in Woods, Being Naked Playing Dead, p. 18
21. Greenaway, The Stairs: Munich Projection (exhibition catalog, Munich, 26 Oct.-19 Nov. 1995), p. 39. Compare Hollis Frampton, "A Lecture," Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video Texts, 1968-1980 (Rochester, N.Y., 1983), pp. 193-99
22. See Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1967), 1:9
23. Cited in Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., 1981), p. 114
24. Blanchot, "Sleep, Night," The Space of Literature, p. 268
25. Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, bk. 2 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1991), p. 166; hereafter abbreviated EE