Vincent Kaufmann

Transparency and Subjectivity: Remembering Jennifer Ringley

This chapter discusses the double meaning of transparency applied to subjectivity. On the one hand, transparency refers to invisibility, to a lack of subjectivity or even to psychosis. On the other hand, it refers to hypervisibility, to the exhibition of privacy, the horizon of which is indeed exhibitionism—let’s call it the Jennicam syndrome, as we will focus on one of the first lifecasters in the Internet history. We live in a media environment in which we have no choice but to swing constantly between our submission to an Orwellian Big Brother and our desire to be part of Big Brother, one of the first and most successful Reality TV shows. At the end, we might no longer know if Jenni was rather psychotic or perverse.

Payer de sa personne. Leiris entre Rimbaud et Mallarmé

Leiris writing can be considered, on the whole, as haunted by the possibility of an act which would not be a failure, which would not be only a ; semblance, a rhetorical one : how truly pay the price ? This is maybe the question Leiris has never been able to actually answer. When he attempts suicide (« Fade supreme ») , he finds himself fascinated by Mallarmes Livre (Fibrilles). And when he goes to war (in 1939) y he feels less like taking action than like entering a legend whose premature hero would he himself : a hero who has not yet acted, and who will never do so. (Biffures.)