by Jon Lackman | 17 September 2010 | Books, Theory
In the September 2010 Art Bulletin, Karen Beckman reviews a new book by Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh:
… For Silverman, Lacan shows us how, in response to humanism’s “impossible-to-satisfy demand” that each of us be an “individual,” we turn other beings into “rivals and enemies”: it is this transformation that blocks analogical thinking. Flesh of My Flesh unveils “another modernity–one that looks back to Ovid and Leonardo [da Vinci], instead of to [René] Descartes, and emphasizes kinship, instead of separation. “From Plato until the end of the sixteenth century,” Silverman argues, “resemblance, not difference, was the organizing principle of the universe.” …
In the book’s first half, entitled “Then,” Silverman traces the historical figures who participate in this other modernity, weaving together close analysis, biography, and philosophical argument about a series of figures, including Ovid, Leonardo, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Clara Westhoff, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Walter Benjamin, Terrence Malick, Martin Heidegger, and Gerhard Richter. “Now,” the second half of the book, examines how art and film give visual form to analogical thinking …
Silverman consistently brings to our attention things that, like analogy, we have been cautioned against, such as universally shared human experiences, a sense of a “Whole,” an “oceanic feeling” of togetherness, and heterosexuality (albeit in reimagined form). What’s more, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Analogy, she tells us, is “the structure of Being, and it gleams with promise because it does indeed have the power to save us.” The works of Malick, [artist James] Coleman, and Richter all show violence, including the violence of Auschwitz and the “war on terrorism,” to be “the inevitable result of our refusal to think analogically.”
Being cautioned against togetherness, heterosexuality, and universally shared human experiences — all too common, in my experience. Glad the fashion is apparently changing.
cf. Donald E. Brown, /Human Universals/ (McGraw-Hill, 1991)
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald-Brown/dp/007008209X