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Anamnesis

Painting struggles, it labors in the strong sense of the word, that used by obstetrics and psychoanalysis, to leave a trace or to make a sign in the visible of a visual gesture that exceeds the visible. Such is the paradoxical idea that we need to explore. A double paradox: first, of a chromatic matter that one cannot see because it exceeds the visible, and which nevertheless is, if I may say so, already colored. And, then, of a gesture in this matter and of this matter, and thus also in and of the space-time that it deploys through the gesture itself –– the paradox, in other words, of a gesture that is not the doing or not simply the doing of a conscious subject, namely, the painter. More than anything else, the painter, like the woman or the analysand in labor, would have to leave open a way through which something that has not yet happened, a child, one's past, or in this case a color phrase, and that nevertheless is already potential human life, possible memory or eventual chromatism, can happen. The conscious subject works on itself, with and against itself, to keep itself open to this eventuality. The pictorial gesture reaches the eye, thus prepared to be unprepared, as an event. Not because it would arise unexpectedly, since on the contrary, it will have been awaited and violently wished for. But it is an event insofar as the subject giving issue to it did not and does not know what this event is or of what it consists, so to speak. The painter does not control it.

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Elisabeth Weber –– In your book, Heidegger and "the jews", you attempt to analyze something you call a paradox, or even a scan dal. You describe it:

“[H]ow could this thought (Heidegger's), a thought so devoted to remembering that a forgetting (of Being) takes place in all thought, in all art, in all "representation" of the world, how could it possibly have ignored the thought of "the jews," which, in a certain sense, thinks, tries to think, nothing but that very fact? How could this thought forget and ignore "the jews" to the point of suppressing and foreclosing to the very end the horrifying (and inane) attempt at exterminating, at making us forget forever what, in Europe, reminds us ever since the beginning that "there is" the Forgotten?”

You have been attempting for several years now to think this figure of the Forgotten under several names: the infans, childhood, the event, the condition of the hostage, to name but a few. If the thought of "the jews" reminds us that there is a Forgotten, it also introduces the law and a thought of the law, a law that, as you write in a text on Kafka, inscribes itself "onto a body that does not belong to it. ...This inscription must necessarily suppress the body as outlaw savagery.”

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In 1967, Michael Snow presented Wavelength, his fifth film, for the first time. Jonas Mekas has recalled this initial screening of the first completed lab print, for a private gathering of Snow's friends in New York City, saying, "I had no doubt we had just witnessed a landmark event in cinema."' The history of experimental film has borne out Mekas' belief, and while a viewing of Wavelength today remains unlike any other cinematic experience imaginable, Michael Snow is still an artist commonly admired from afar, respected in the United States but not exactly well-known, and afforded inconsistent attention by recent academic cinema studies. In the brief essay cited above, Mekas compares Snow to Andy Warhol and laments the fact that Snow has not attained the same degree of notoriety. The comparison is instructive. While it would be reductive and inaccurate to call Snow "the Canadian Warhol," he is without a doubt the most important Canadian visual artist of the twentieth century. Like Warhol, as well as Marcel Duchamp and Yoko Ono (another of the century's major artists, equally ignored but for very different reasons), Snow has built a body of work astonishing in its range of media, encompassing major contributions in painting, sculpture, photography, and jazz, as well as cinema.

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I. Psychoanalysis and Early Modernity

Whenever the subject arises of the relation between early modernity and psychoanalysis among post-new historicist Renaissance scholars, one inevitably returns to the early (non)manifesto on the topic represented by Stephen Greenblatt's "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture."' Indeed, there, in the groundbreaking collection of essays entitled Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, it was still a question of the applicability of the 'new' currents of post-structuralist, often French, theory and criticism to the texts of pre-modernity. The most common objection at the time was that the Renaissance itself did not recognize the terms by which post-structuralist theory analyzed and interpreted texts and thus that current theory and criticism were anachronistic, which usually meant inapplicable, or at the very least, 'inappropriate'. New historicism, inaugurally attributed to Greenblatt, came to be seen as the compromise formation between the parodic poles of a strictly historicist, or explanatory hermeneutic approach to early modern texts untainted by the modernity or post-modernity of a late twentieth-century interpreter, and approaches that welcomed the anti-humanist, post-structuralist linguistic and rhetorical 'turns' characteristic of such current theories and interpretive methodologies.

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Antonioni's The Passenger is a film about a British Press journalist named David Locke, whose most recent project has been to document a rebellion taking place in Africa. The film opens with a series of images of Locke attempting to get directions and to secure a guide to the rebel encampment. After his truck breaks down in the desert, the frustrated Locke returns to his hotel, to discover a man lying dead in an adjacent room. The man is Robertson, a fellow traveler from England with whom Locke has become acquainted, and whom Locke resembles physically to an uncanny degree. In a flash, Locke decides to trade in his identity for Robertson's, to exchange his journalist's clothing and equipment for his double's blue shirt and appointment book.

After a brief trip to London, Locke embarks upon the itinerary laid out in Robertson's calendar, heading for Munich. In the airport there, he discovers that a key which was part of Robertson's personal effects opens a locker, in which a packet of diagrams for weapons has been stored. Posing as Robertson, Locke then goes to a meeting in a nearby baroque church, where he completes Robertson's weapons deal with a rebel leader named Achebe. Back in London, Locke's wife Rachel has heard the news of her husband's alleged death. 

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When David 0. Selznick's 1939 Gone With The Wind (GWTW) was re-released in Technicolor in the summer of 1998, Rolling Stone's endorsement urged, "Catch GWTW in a dazzling, digitally re-mastered version." It seems that although 90% of the North American population has seen the film, and sales of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel have been rivaled only by the Bible, still there is something that the dominant cultural imaginary continues to attempt to master through the reproduction of this story, some fantasied fugitive who escapes no matter how many times she is captured on celluloid or in print. I would like to suggest that the longevity of dominant cultural interest in GWTW may be in large measure attributed to the appearances of the character Mammy in both the book and the film. The mammy stereotype may seem archaic, but the continued market success of Aunt Jemima products, as well as the proliferation of mammy-isms across literary and visual cultural forms, attest to its continued activity.

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I. The Subject of Melancholia

In "Mourning and Melancholia" Freud asserts that a "good, capable conscientious woman will speak no better of herself after she develops melancholia than one who is in fact worthless; indeed, the former is perhaps more likely to fall ill of the disease than the latter, of whom we too should have nothing good to say." More likely to succumb to the disease than her worthless counterpart, the good woman, Freud intimates, might indeed be a melancholic woman. Throughout his 1917 essay, Freud describes melancholia as a debilitating pathology, one leading to "a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment" (244). Here, Freud suggests this melancholic condition might not be aberrational but normative of 'proper' female subjectivity. Is the good woman the 'proper' subject of melancholia?

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The three excellent papers included here provide a compelling dramatization both of the heterogeneity of psychoanalysis, and of its relevance to the issues which most concern us today. Maria St. John has used Kleinean theory to interrogate the obsession of white Americans with the figure of the Mammy, and to account for how it is that we deny our unconscious racial multiplicity. Homay King has drawn upon Lacanian theory to think about the formal consistency of the ego and its objects, and to fantasize about an alternative subjective aesthetics. Finally, David Eng has turned to Freudian theory for the purpose of thinking about the unification of Hong Kong and mainland China, along with the affective coordinates both of femininity and Hong Kong subjectivity.

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A review of Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetry as Experience. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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