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| EVE'S DROPPING 1 |
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From Eavesdropping/Eve's Dropping
-And this is the process that I was trying to describe above. Courbet is trying to die before the painting, before the painting becomes theatrical, before the painting dies, ceasing to exist before the painting, a death that has always already occurred. It is a complete abdication of existence, of the autos that mobilizes and authorizes the work. The work authorizes this erasure of Courbet, mourning Courbet, witnessing Courbet's death. The painting incorporates Courbet into itself, taking part in an impossible process of mourning Courbet's death, a death that Courbet tries to bear witness to, but cannot experience. Courbet's own death is an impossible experience before the painting that the painting bears witness to, an experience of the impossible opening up a spectral economy that haunts all our attempts to account for this disappearance, which would in one sense be Courbet's death.
-And what we do through the production of a book is to try to make an account of our disappearance, our own impossible experience of death. We say, 'Look! Bear witness to my death for I cannot gaze on my dead body.' Courbet's Wounded Man would be only the most literal attempt at this impossible gaze, a gaze that experiences the death of the one who bears the gaze.
-Yes, and Fried is trying to make an account of this impossible gaze, which is the attempt to deny the existence of the painter-beholder, a project even more improbable and impossible than the one laid out in Absorption and Theatricality. Courbet is trying to paint from the grave, a zombie-like automaton. Courbet is already dead by the time he is painting. Or at least Courbet is attempting to die, but dying is impossible. Even suicide is not a possibility. So there would be a way of reading Fried's reading of Courbet as a staging/stag-ing of Courbet's impossible experience of his own death. Hence the images of dying stags and Fried's insistence on identifying Courbet with the dying stag as a surrogate for the painter-beholder. This is all quite a remarkable project.
-But I don't think Fried re-marks on how his own authorial self is marked by this project, how Courbet's work in its absence-presence, in his attempt to stage his own death, shows how Fried's own project is marked by mortality, by the ruin of the body, the fact that he too is mortal, all too mortal. Fried is doomed as we all are and there is no escape. All we are doing is writing accounts of the one who survives and is survived by others, accounts by and for the survivors in the name of those who do not survive, haunted by those who do not survive.
-We could again return to Géricault and the Raft, which serves not only as a paradigm of an inescapable theatricality, the theatricality of all representation, but also as a paradigm of the survival account, the accounts of those who survive the disaster and are marked by the disaster forever, and this would serve to tie theatricality to a problem of surviving, of going on in the face of the disaster, acting as if the disaster were not imminent. This would also be tied to how paintings and the accounts of them are subject to the work of time, how, as Fried points out, certain works that seemed to escape theatricality were later seen to be theatrical, revealing that there is no escape from theatricality, no escape from being beheld, no escape from the gaze that will look over and after our stone-cold-dead body.
-This is all becoming a bit morbid, but in the face of all this extinction, I have to raise the ethical question of why write on art? Why write on Fried? Why write on Courbet? And if I have been following all these meanderings through the texts of Fried, Derrida, Blanchot, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and others, this perhaps is tied to what I would posit as an ethics of surviving which entails a certain re-membering, an emphasis being placed on the hyphen. This would comprise a remembering of the dead which is also a re-membering of the other in mourning, a process of re-memberance. But this re-membering would also be a process of reminding ourselves of our own mortality, of how we are torn and only re-membered by an other who survives, surviving only through memory and memorial, a memorial of the other, a memory of our self as other. This would be a re-membering that is a putting back together that never quite takes place. The self is always in ruins, always torn, always separated by and from an other who will re-member us and who we re-member through a process of memory and mourning. This process is never complete because our memory and mourning of the other is always an extension.1
So this ethics of survival is at once an attempt to re-member the other, the duty of survival, a selfless act, while, at the same time, a selfish act of re-membering ourselves, mourning our own death, a re-membering through tears that nonetheless leaves the self in ruins. Even while such an ethics of finitude would seem to go beyond the discipline of art history, touching on philosophy, such an ethics of survival would seem to be called for by the study of art, not as its justification, but as its very possibility, for this discourse is precisely interested in survival, the survival of works of art, the survival of the arts, and the re-membering of works of art, even where they have not survived as is the case with the Stonebreakers. History is a survival story.
1 there are at least fours senses to the extension involved in memory and mourning: 1) the other as an extension of the self; 2) the extension of the other through our memory of her; 3) an extension of the self through surviving the other, a stay of execution; and 4) being survived by the other, executor of our (e)state. See Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man.
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