by Olivier Beuvelet | Vol 29 (3/4) 2011
“First of all, on the surface I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want…”. From the origin of modern representation dated to 1435 with Alberti’s finestra aperta and which sets the sovereign choice of the painter (as well as his taste) as the founding principle of the opening of a representational field, we are invited to observe through the free-handed and poetic framings of Mondovino — Jonathan Nossiter’s documentary – how the ethics of the subject is voiced at the image-frame level. The image, conceived as an opening between the space of representation and that of the spectator, gains an ethical dimension as it moves from its status as apparatus to that of the figure of that apparatus. This is achieved by virtue of its enunciative origin being brought into play – in this case the film-maker’s body in the movie, through his presence, his voice, his hand and ultimately through the expression of his taste, notably borrowing the zoom figure to the point of a visual allegory. And so, Jonathan Nossiter’s ethic – expressed by means of the frame choice the measure of the imaging subject’s taste – meets up with that of Alberti.
by Dieter de Grave | Vol 25 (3/4) 2007
Human sexuality manifests itself in the unfolding of an opposition between universal procreation and individual enjoyment. In this opposition the author detects the knotting of two drives in an apparent juxtaposition: Eros and death drive. On the basis of the three tragedies of the Theban cycle of Sophocles, he investigates how the (un)knotting of this drive culminates in a (death)desire in its purest form. The themes that follow (subjective death wish, blinding ignorance, unconscious transgression of the Law, lethal enjoyment, impossible femininity, impotent masculinity, unbreakable blood ties,…) are linked to the management of this desire within the ethics of contemporary psychoanalysis, more specifically with regards to the end of the cure. From the impasse that comes with this end, the author traces the shift in answers to the questions regarding the end of analysis in the work of Jacques Lacan, from subjective death in the cure, through the traversing of the phantasm, to the last approach to the passe and the creation of the sinthome. In these times of the pluralisation of the Names-of-the-Father he demonstrates how the tragedy in Greek Antiquity still delivers us a solid mythical foothold, now that the object a is climbing into the zenith.
