The Emptiness of the Image

by Adams,Parveen

• ISBN13: 9780415046213
• ISBN10: 0415046211
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-12-20
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. The Emptiness of the Imageoffers a psychoanalytic answer. Parveen Adams argues that, despite flaws in some of the details of the arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an overwhelming explanatory strength in relation to questions of sexual difference and representation. She goes on to show how the issue of desire changes the way we can think of images and their effects. Throughout, she discusses the work of theorists, artists and filmmakers such as Helene Deutsch, Catherine MacKinnon, Mary Kelly, Francis Bacon, Michael Powell and Della Grace. The Emptiness of the Imageshows howthe very space of representation can change to provide a new way of thinking the relation between the text and the spectator. It shows how psychoanalytic theory is supple enough to slide into and transform the most unexpected situations.

Table of Contents

Illustration	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Thanks	xiii
Introduction	1	(4)
Symptoms and hysteria	5	(7)
Per (os)cillation	12	(15)
Of female bondage	27	(22)
Waiving the phallus	49	(8)
The truth on assault with Mark Cousins	57	(14)
The art of analysis: Mary Kelly's Interim and the discourse of the analyst	71	(20)
`Father, can't you see I'm filming?'	91	(18)
The violence of paint	109	(14)
The three (dis)graces	123	(9)
The bald truth	132	(9)
Operation Orlan	141	(19)
Notes	160	(6)
Bibliography	166	(5)
Index	171