Narrative, Memory and the Crisis of Mimesis: the Case of Adam Elsheimer and Giordano Bruno

The triangular space between memory, narrative and pictorial representation is the terrain on which this article is developed. Taking the art of memory developed by Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) and the art of painting subtly revolutionised by Adam Elsheimer (1578 – 1610) as test-cases, it is shown how both subvert the norms of mimesis and narration prevalent throughout the Renaissance, how disrupted memory creates “incoherent” narratives, and how perspective and the notion of “place” are questioned in a corollary way. Two paintings by Elsheimer are analysed and shown to include, in spite of their supposed “realism”, numerous incoherencies, aporias and strange elements – often overlooked. Thus, they do not conform to two of the basic rules governing both the classical art of memory and the humanist art of painting: well-defined places and the exhaustive translatability of words into images (and vice-versa). In the work of Bruno, both his philosophical claims and the literary devices he uses are analysed as hints for a similar (and contemporaneous) undermining of conventions about the transparency and immediacy of representation.

Kirurgisen operaation teatteri : Teatterillinen kuva ja ihmismuodon esitettävyys avantgardistisen väkivallan näkökulmasta

Dissertation considers the birth of modernist and avant-gardist authorship as a reaction against mass society and massculture. Radical avant-gardism is studied as figurative violence done against the human form. The main argument claims avant-gardist authorship to be an act of masculine autogenesis. This act demands human form to be worked to an elementary state of disarticulateness, then to be reformed to the model of the artist's own psychophysical and idiosyncratic vision and experience. This work is connected to concrete mass, mass of pigment, charcoal, film, or flesh. This mass of the figure is worked to create a likeness in the nervous system of the spectator. The act of violence against the human figure is intended to shock the spectator. This shock is also a state of emotional and perceptional massification. I use theatrical image as heuristic tool and performance analysis, connecting figure and spectator into a larger image, which is constituted by relationships of mimesis, where figure presents the likeness of the spectator and spectator the likeness of the figure. Likeness is considered as both gestural - social mimetic - and sensuous - kinesthetically mimetic. Through this kind of construction one can describe and contextualize the process of violent autogenesis using particular images as case studies. Avant-gardist author is the author of theatrical image, not particular figure, and through act of massification the nervous system of the spectator is also part of this image. This is the most radical form and ideology of avant-gardist and modernist authorship or imagerial will to power. I construct a model of gestural-mimic performer to explicate the nature of violence done for human form in specific works, in Mann's novella Death in Venice, in Schiele's and Artaud's selfportaits, in Francis Bacon's paintings, in Beckett's shortplat NOT I, in Orlan's chirurgical performance Operation Omnipresense, in Cindy Sherman's Film/Stills, in Diamanda Galás's recording Vena Cava and in Hitchcock's Psycho. Masspsychology constructed a phobic picture of human form's plasticity and capability to be constituted by influencies coming both inside and outside - childhood, atavistic organic memories, urban field of nervous impulses, unconsciousness, capitalist (image)market and democratic masspolitics. Violence is then antimimetic and antitheatrical, a paradoxical situation, considering that massmedias and massaudiences created an enormous fascination about possibilities of theatrical and hypnotic influence in artistic elites. The problem was how to use theatrical image without coming as author under influence. In this work one possible answer is provided: by destructing the gestural-mimetic performer, by eliminating representations of mimic body techniques from the performer of human (a painted figure, a photographed figure, a filmed figure or an acted figure, audiovisual or vocal) figure. This work I call the chirurgical operation, which also indicates co-option with medical portraitures or medico-cultural diagnoses of human form. Destruction of the autonomy of the performer was a parallel process to constructing the new mass media audience as passive, plastic, feminine. The process created an image of a new kind of autotelic masculine author-hero, freed from human form in its bourgeois, aristocratic, classical and popular versions.

Luce Irigaray's Philosophy of Feminine Being : Body, Desire and Wisdom

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born philosopher, psychoanalyst and linguist. Irigaray s concept of woman is crucial for understanding her own work but also for examining and developing the theoretical and methodological basis of feminist theory. This thesis argues that, ultimately, Irigaray s exploration of woman s being challenges our traditional notion of philosophy as a neutral discourse and the traditional notion of ourselves as philosophizing persons or human beings. However, despite its crucial role, Irigaray s idea of woman still lacks a comprehensive explication. This is because the discourse of sexual difference is blurred by the ideas of essentialism and biologism. --- Irigaray s concept of woman has been interpreted and criticized from the perspectives of metaphysical essentialism, strategic essentialism, realist essentialism and deconstructionism. This thesis argues that a reinterpretation is necessary to account for Irigaray s claims about the the traditional woman , mimesis, the specificity of the feminine body, feminine expression and sexual difference. Moreover, any reading should account for the differences between women and avoid giving a prescriptive function to the essence of woman. --- My thesis develops a new interpretation of Irigaray s concept of woman on the basis of the phenomenology of the body. It argues that Irigaray s discourse on woman can and must be understood by an idea of existential style. Existential style is embodied, affective and spiritual and it is constituted in relation to oneself, to others and to the world. It is temporal, it evolves and changes but preserves its open unity in its transformations. Stylistic unities, such as femininity or philosophy, are constituted in and by the singulars. -- This study discusses and analyses feminine existential style as a central theme and topic of Irigaray s works and shows how her work operates as a primary and paradigmatic example of the feminine style. These tasks are performed by studying the mimetic positions available for women and by explicating the phenomenological background of Irigaray s conceptions of the philosophical method, and the lived, expressive and affective body. The critical occupation and transformation of these mimetic positions, the inquiry into the first-person pre-discursive experience, and the cultivation of feminine expressivity open up the possibility of becoming a woman writer, a woman lover and a woman philosopher. The appearance of these new feminine figures is a precondition for the realization of sexual difference. So Irigaray opens up the possibility of sexual difference by instituting and constituting a feminine subject of love and wisdom, and by problematizing the idea of a neutral and absolute subject.