The Threshold of the Visible World

Silverman, Kaja

doi:10.4324/9781315811581

Cited by 182 publications

(113 citation statements)

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“…Its proponents claim that a postmodern awareness of the false promises of historical reproduction puts readers and viewers in possession of potent tools to scrutinize what they can know of the past and how they come to know it. Novels, photographs, and films can generate “historiographic metafiction,” “postmemory,” “heteropathic recollection,” and “empathetic unsettlement,” processes that emphasize experiential and temporal dissonance and cultivate self‐awareness (Hutcheon 5; Hirsch 8; Silverman 185; LaCapra 41). Dominick LaCapra summarizes the main methods and goals of this theoretical and creative work: “Trauma,” for LaCapra the inaccessible content of history, “brings about a dissociation of affect and representation; one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel.” The act of “working through trauma,” for LaCapra the key function of history writing, “involves the effort to articulate or rearticulate affect and representation in a manner that may never transcend, but may to some visible extent counteract, a reenactment, or acting out, of that disabling dissociation” (42).…”

Section: “Ours Now Because We Bought It”: Drunk History As Revisionarmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Like those who study traumatic testimony, theorists who locate a related therapeutic process in historical representation usually stop short of claiming resolution or cure. The outcome of a historiographic practice attentive to the ongoing work of articulation amounts instead to “dialectical relation” that pronounces no final word (Silverman 189). Instead of healing, such a process opens “wounds”; instead of seeking repair, it acknowledges “rupture” (Silverman 189; Hirsch 33).…”

Section: “Fuck You Limitations”: Drunk History As Talk Therapymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Talking Past: Drunk History's Promising Failures

Wagers

2020

The J of Popular Culture

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Section: “Ours Now Because We Bought It”: Drunk History As Revisionarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: “Fuck You Limitations”: Drunk History As Talk Therapymentioning

confidence: 99%

Talking Past: Drunk History's Promising Failures

Wagers

2020

The J of Popular Culture

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“…While the Bergsonian and Lacanian indictments of the adequacy of perception are restricted to individual observers, and thus leave few critical options for political response, Kaja Silverman provides a collective version of the Lacanian distinction between the eye and the gaze in a way that gestures toward a useful metapolitics of perception. She treats what is prior to the eye, as a ''cultural screen'' or ''repertoire of representations by means of which our culture figures all those many varieties of difference,'' which mediate not only how we see the object world but also how we locate ourselves (Silverman 1996).…”

Section: The Limits Of Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Presence of War: “Here and Elsewhere”1

Shapiro

2011

International Political Sociology

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After reviewing conceptual contributions that address the blurred boundary between the war and home fronts and the complexities of contemporary political topologies in general, I turn to a reading of three artistic texts—the photomontages of Martha Rosler, Paul Haggis’s film In the Valley of Elah, and Annie Proulx’s story, “Tits‐Up in a Ditch”—to analyze the war front–home front relationship. I end with some reflections on the analytic contributions of montage techniques in terms of the way they establish equivalences that revalue our perspectives on the locations and actualities (presences) of war.

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“…In a prior book, Threshold of the Visual World, Silverman (1996) sought to develop a psychoanalytic understanding of love, an expression that has been sorely neglected by that genre. In that book, love is described as an ethical act, a traversal of egocentric knowledge that allows the Other to exist as a fully formed subject, one wholly capable of eclipsing our own selfhood.…”

Section: Orpheus Lack and Re/turnmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Possibilities of Analogy, Finitude, and Love: An Oceanic Curriculum

Burdick

2011

Curriculum Inquiry

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In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud (1961) warns us that any deep connection we feel toward one another is nothing more than the vestigial remnants of our egos' immature past. These statements serve as a response to, and a refutation of, his colleague Romain Rolland's conceptualization of the oceanic feeling-the embodied sense of a vast, intrinsic connectedness between all people. Freud argued that Rolland's sensation stems not from true limitlessness, but to a prior, puerile state of the ego, one that might only ultimately seek "the restoration of limitless narcissism" (p. 20). For Freud, our capacity to coexist comes at the cost of sublimating this primal desire-it is the classic formulation of the reality principle, the very brokerage of civilization, a claim that serves as the bedrock of much of Freud's most influential work, and one that continues to manifest in several elements of contemporary thought regarding subjectivity.In her most recent book, Flesh of My Flesh, film scholar Kaja Silverman seeks to resuscitate the oceanic feeling, suggesting it still has much bearing upon our psychosocial lives and that the repression of this feeling-of our analogous relationship with one another-drives the modern conditions of apathy and alienation. Silverman, herself theoretically committed to (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, unearths and develops contradictions within Freud's work that, despite his strong position, help to illustrate this point. In doing so, she establishes a critique of the Western obsession with individuality that places the radically differentiated subject at the epicenter of the social imaginary. Flesh of My Flesh is organized in two sections, titled simply "Then" and "Now," designating two chronological moments in which the notion of analogy was taken up by various artists and philosophers. "Then" centers on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, taking up the Freudian strand, as well as work by Nietzsche, Rilke, and Salomé. Silverman links this diverse assemblage of individuals via an extended meditation on the myth of Orpheus, rather than Oedipus, as the foundational heuristic for the psychoanalytic condition of lack. Focusing on three modern artists' work-Terrence Malick, James Coleman, and Gerhard Richter-"Now" illuminates how analogy has fared throughout the horrors of the 20th century, as well as how it might inform a means for rescuing forgotten elements of history and illuminating the shadowy corners that plague social and psychic existence.

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The Threshold of the Visible World

Cited by 182 publications

References 0 publications

Talking Past: Drunk History's Promising Failures

Talking Past: Drunk History's Promising Failures

The Presence of War: “Here and Elsewhere”1

The Possibilities of Analogy, Finitude, and Love: An Oceanic Curriculum

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