We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects--such as one's own body--situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, "The Tears of Things" is itself a collection of exemplary art objects--literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things--including paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe and Rene Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell's boxes; Edward Gorey's graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over--debris and waste--and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of "Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word," and "Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature."
0 有用 丁萌 2016-04-25 17:39:07
导论有点意思,各个篇章的具体分析就偏弱了,章节连续性也不强。
0 有用 𝑾𝒂𝒍𝒅𝒆𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒂𝒎𝒌𝒆𝒊𝒕 2023-08-23 18:42:52 江苏
“这种原初的丧失感,我们之中的这种‘物’(Thing),先于后来任何特定的实在客体的丧失感而存在。即使是我们实际占有的客体,在这种原初的意义上也已经与我们分离,甚至在我们占有它的时候就已经丧失。这既不是可以哀悼的丧失,也不是为了让我们过上自己的生活而可以跨过去的丧失:它就是我们的生活本身。”
0 有用 𝑾𝒂𝒍𝒅𝒆𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒂𝒎𝒌𝒆𝒊𝒕 2023-08-23 18:42:52 江苏
“这种原初的丧失感,我们之中的这种‘物’(Thing),先于后来任何特定的实在客体的丧失感而存在。即使是我们实际占有的客体,在这种原初的意义上也已经与我们分离,甚至在我们占有它的时候就已经丧失。这既不是可以哀悼的丧失,也不是为了让我们过上自己的生活而可以跨过去的丧失:它就是我们的生活本身。”
0 有用 丁萌 2016-04-25 17:39:07
导论有点意思,各个篇章的具体分析就偏弱了,章节连续性也不强。