Representing the Real

Front Cover
Rodopi, 2002 - Art - 205 pages
This study offers a new perspective on the object represented by art, specifically by art that succeeds to create in its receiver a sense of "the real", a sense of approximating the true nature of the represented object that lies outside the artwork.
The object that cannot be accessed through a concept, a meaning or a sign, the thing-in-itself, is generally rejected by philosophy as being outside the realm of its concerns. This rejection is surveyed in a number of philosophical discussions, from Kant to Hilary Putnam. Turning to the psychoanalytic object, an object inexhaustible in terms of its external existence, or in terms of its conceptual status or meaning (the object is always suppressed, partly known, inaccessible), another notion of the object. The Real is suggested as what can neither be contained in language nor reduced to a linguistic referent. This solution does not lead away from philosophical interests but rather exposes this dilemma about the object of representation as fundamentally philosophical.
Cases of artistic realism discussed range from perspective painting to abstract art, from tragedies to the literary representation of minds.

From inside the book

Contents

Das Ding and the Psychoanalytic Real of the Object
2
Correspondence Truth as NonMetaphysical doctrine
44
The NonDialectical Relation of Object to Knowledge
52
INTERPRETING WITH THE REAL
58
4b Resistance to Meaning in the Interpretation of Dreams
79
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE OBJECT OF
89
THE CASE
123
Naturalism Versus Conventionalism
132
REALISM OF MIND
164
CONCLUSION
203
INDEX
Copyright

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Page 182 - She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of- to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
Page 84 - I took her to the window and looked down her throat , and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that. - She then opened her mouth properly and on the right...
Page 85 - M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was cleanshaven. . . . My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: "She has a dull area low down on the left.
Page 85 - We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls . . . propionic acid , . . trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). . . . Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly. . . . And probably the syringe had not been clean.
Page 118 - Well, take a look at this! he gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one's weapons.
Page 131 - Thus the history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self.
Page 49 - language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing ourselves as being "mappers" of something "language-independent" is fatally compromised from the start.
Page 28 - In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.
Page 108 - Clod's pleasure, And perhaps our race had angered him long ago. In me myself you could not find such evil As would have made me sin against my own. And tell me this: if there were prophecies Repeated by the oracles of the gods. That father's death should come through his own son. How could you justly blame it upon me? On me, who was yet unhorn, yet unconceived, Not yet existent for my father and mother?
Page 84 - I've got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen - it's choking me'. - I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat , and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures.