by Jon Lackman | 23 November 2010 | Theory
Various art historians owe a debt to Jacques Lacan. Did he himself owe one to Russian-icon theorist Pavel Florensky? In the latest issue of Word & Image (Jan-Mar 2010), Joseph Masheck makes the suggestion:
[W]hat is most Florenskian, or most conspicuously Florenskian, in Lacan is precisely the sense of an image as but a special case of something one finds oneself gazing back at … Lacan was theorizing his three-way Borromean knot [the intertwining of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary] just about when Florensky’s longest and most formidable text appeared in French with Maksimovic’s emblem of three interlocking wreathes … Like other Western intellectuals interested in modern art, Lacan no doubt had some interest in icons; and once Florensky became available in French he could have come to know inverse iconic perspective and the projective iconic appeal to the spectator, all the more with images purporting to be conduits of divine, unconditional love.
Ad fontes!