Hanjo Berressem

Light, Camera, Action! The Luminous Worlds of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze’s complementary books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image set up an immediate conceptual relation between philosophy and the cinema. In the work of Jacques Lacan, the relation between psychoanalysis and the cinema is less evident. Although there are numerous instances in Lacan’s work that address the visual field, he is more interested in painting than in the moving image; a preference that echoes Freud who often used paintings and painters to illustrate psychoanalytic concepts but who was extremely suspicious of the cinema and the cinematographic apparatus. Even when the movie industry offered him massive amounts of money for his collaboration, Freud refused to have anything to do with the movies, and although the proliferation of moving images around him made a comparison of dreams to movies seem almost inevitable, he preferred almost stubbornly to define the dream in terms of the still image. Symptomatically, the one reference to the cinema in Freud’s work stresses its superficiality and the fact that it disseminates cliches: “The uninstructed relatives of our patients, who are only impressed by visible and tangible things—preferably by actions of the sort that are to be witnessed at the cinema—never fail to express their doubts whether ‘anything can be done about the illness by mere talking,”’ Freud notes somewhat despairingly in the Introductory Lectures to Psycho-Analysis (17).

Venus as Muse

This volume deals with the enduring presence of one of Western cultures most fascinating and influential figures in ancient, modern, and postmodern art and literature: Venus/Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality.

The Poetics of Patination in the Work of William Gibson

In Jim Jarmusch’s 2009 film The Limits of Control, a character called Molecules tells the protagonist that “each one of us is a set of shifting molecules … spinning in ecstasy. In the near future worn-out things will be made new again by reconfiguring the molecules. Pair of shoes. Tires. Molecular detection will also allow the determination of an object’s physical history. This matchbox for example. Its collection of molecules could indicate everywhere its ever been. They could do it with your clothes. Or even with your skin, for that matter.” Until that happens, however, obsolescence, generally understood as the state of being out of date or no longer in use, will remain the downside of a constantly changing world, in the same way in which nostalgia, as the feeling of longing for objects, people, or situations from the past, is its psychological effect.