The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Objects Beyond Objecthood

Abstract: ion' (1966), p. 39. 28. Mignon Nixon has powerfully argued how one might think the aggressive feminine subject in Kleinian terms, see 'Bad Enough Mother', October 71, Winter 1995. plaster pieces. In Bourgeois' hands, white plaster is somehow just as awkward, just as resistant to immateriality, as anything else. On the other hand, that axis between too much material presence and too little is dramatised by Kusama, another of the artists cited by Lippard as a precursor of 'Eccentric Abstraction' (though, like others ruled out because of their figuration). Like Hesse, Kusama had, since 1961, created sculptures which combined object and monochromeboth to exacerbate the sense of bodily affect and at the same time to cancel it out through serial repetition. Like Bourgeois', the work was characterized by bunching bulbous forms protruding from a slack surface which Lippard calls her 'phallus-studded furniture'.24 But her objectsa large table, a chaircovered in white protuberances, interested Judd because of their 'obsessive repetition' where the 'masses of white protuberances are more alike than the underlying forms are unlike',25 a kind of obsessive repetition that can also be linked to Lucas Samaras' pin-covered objects. Judd draws attention to the emptying out of meaning through the very serial repetition which puts the masses of phallic shapes in place. This is not just a question of emphasis, but of how we might go on to understand the work's effects in relation to the place of the subject. Andre Green has coined the term 'une angoisse blanche' to describe the anxiety of separation distinct from the anxiety of castration though both are forms of detachment.26 In French, the word 'blanc' means both white and blank and this approximation to the double function of the monochrome seems to be brought into play and set against the function of the object as body, or the bodily analogy of interior-exterior, for example, or Kusama's dresses, shed skins which hang on the wall. In what he calls the 'serie blanc' he counts negative hallucinations which Freud had first talked about in connection with the hysteric. Negative hallucinations are where portions of the field of vision may simply be cut out, scotomized. If we think of the subject in these terms she is but an imprint or stain within the scopic field. This is reminiscent of Caillois' mimetic compulsion in which a subject is rendered invisible. But the example of hallucinations gives more force appropriately here I think to that swing between an intensification of vision, the exaggeration of bits like the bulbous protrusions in Kusama, to a kind of blanking and the exacerbation of what Andre Green talks of as 'trous psychiques' in negative hallucinations. For all that 'Eccentric Abstraction' was criticised for being 'sick',27 pre-empting as it were a culture of trauma, this blanking, or effacing of the subject, was its other face. So what of Bourgeois within this economy? If one asks from what point of view is the object the object of a sadistic destructive drive then the answer has to be only from the infantile and that is the point of view Bourgeois unmasks, or more precisely, acts out in a performative gesture. And what she unmasks is the scopic drive as it might operate for a feminine subject; the scopic, that is, not the optical; the scopic, that is, not bodily empathy; the scopic, that is, as partial drive, with all the force that carries with it of a pathologized feminine subject for whom looking is a form of destruction as it is a form of pleasure. The Imaginary is that realm within the psychoanalytic field in which aggression is the necessary corollary to the narcissistic structure of the coming-into-being of the subject. This fantasy of the fragmented body became the model of disintegration in art in the 1980s, but which Bourgeois had explored in the work that I have looked at here. The Imaginary is the realm Klein described in terms of the falling to bits of the ego. Within the realm of the Imaginary, which is where Bourgeois's work has to be placed I think,28 the subject may identify with precisely what is repellent as a kind of pleasure, still within the OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999 35 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 05:52:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Transnational Feminism and Medieval Futures: The Cartographic Imaginary in Christine de Pizan's Chemin de long estude

Abstract: If the logic of imperialism and the logic of modernity share a notion of time, they also share a notion of space as territory.... Witness especially, the “war against terrorism” after the events of 11 September 2001. The borders and autonomy of nation-states, the geographies of nationhood are irrelevant in this war, which can justify imperialist aggression in the name of “homeland security” of the United States. Even the boundaries between space and outer space are not binding any more. In this expansive and expanding continent, how do I locate myself? —Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders

‘A Dubious Twilight’: Reflections on Dreams in Patristic Literature

Abstract: As Wendy O'Flaherty has argued persuasively in her recent book, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, it is possible to falsify the hypothesis that one is dreaming-by waking up; but it is not possible to verify that one is awake by falling asleep. The thought that one cannot verify the fact that one is awake but only only falsify the fact that one is asleep (by waking up) delivers something of a jolt to Western "common sense," which typically takes for granted the distinctness of such categories as "real" and "unreal," "conscious" and "unconscious," "dream" and "waking life." Yet, as O'Flaherty points out, we know that we cannot see ourselves seeing an illusion, just as we cannot verify the "reality" of ourselves in the moment when we are engaged in testing our reality.' Although the kinds of dichotomous structures that I have just mentioned (real and unreal, and so forth) may be epistemologically useful, they are ontologically suspect and, when probed deeply enough, the lines of demarcation that support such structures tend to wobble, if not disappear altogether. This is especially the case when one is considering the relationship between dreams and waking life, where, as Socrates says in the Theaetetus, "there is plenty of room for doubt."2 Indeed, across the centuries there has been so much room for doubt that, as O'Flaherty shows so well, people have insisted on tantalizing themselves with the thought that dreams are real and the "real" world is a dream: the line not only wobbles; the categories change places. In the company of such thoughts we are in a kind of twilight zone where, to borrow a phrase of Marianne Moore, there are imaginary gardens-with real toads in them.3 Unfortunately, we cannot escape this twilight zone by dismissing it as the product of exotic Indians immersed in maya; the Western tradition has its own frogs, and nowhere are they livelier than in late