#cf.gaze

[rebecca-comay]

Anxiety teaches us how to mourn in advance. To “stare the negative in the face,” ..I confront a death that through my own gaze acquires a face, a shape, a human countenance, thus reflecting back the image of my own freedom.

REBECCA COMAY citing HEGEL

[rebecca-comay]

in my zeal to see through appearances, to render the world transparent, i have all the while been staring beyond it: what i have been gazing at with such fascination is the virulence of my own denunciatory desire.

in “seeing through” the object, i have already twice destroyed it: first, by reducing it to an object of utilitarian consumption (in using the object, i overlook its singular claim to existence); next, by peeling away its patriotic veneer (in unmasking its treacherous interior, i deprive the object of the very right to exist). Whether utilizing or scrutinizing the object, i reduce it to the transparent vehicle of my own self-encounter. Absolute freedom thus reveals itself as pure speculation—nothing but the “gazing of the self into the self, the absolute seeing of itself doubled” (PhG §583). - HEGEL, cited by REBECCA COMAY 

[rebecca-comay]

The stain is the blind spot generated by insight’s own phobic drive to purity (§548)

REBECCA COMAY paraphrasing from Hegel’s Phenomenology

[rebecca-comay]

The painting we look at reflects back at us that of which our eyes will never be sated. That which fulfills the [original] desire ..would be the very thing on which this desire incessantly feeds.

REBECCA COMAY citing WALTER BENJAMIN on the aura of a painting

[rebecca-comay]

in a sense aura is nothing other than the structure of every loss. Its loss would be therefore the loss of loss-a dissimulation of dissimulation or a decline of decline.

REBECCA COMAY

[rebecca-comay]

there can be no ''nostalgia'' for the aura, for it had never in the first place offered itself in the immediacy of a ''lived experience.'' Its presence would have been indeed just the absence that marks the order of time itself.

REBECCA COMAY citing WALTER BENJAMIN

[rebecca-comay]

if the auratic perception of nature's gaze involves a humanization, or perhaps, still better, a socialization of the natural, Benjamin carefully resists the obvious inference. That is, that a massive anthropocentric subsumption is at work.

[slavojquotes]

The frame of the painting in front of us is not its true frame; there is another, invisible, frame, implied by the structure of the painting, which frames our perception of the painting, and these two frames do not overlap there is an invisible gap separating the two.

The pivotal content of the painting is not rendered in its visible part, but is located in this dislocation of the two frames, in the gap that separates them. Are we, today, in our postmodern madness, still able to discern the traces of this gap? ========== zizek. The Universal Exception