LACAN AND MEANING

SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS

CHAPTER 2

WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING

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only effects, but for that very reason they are intrusive and must be eliminated. This is accomplished with the diagram. Just as the Kantian schemata mediate between chaotic sensibility and unifying understanding, the diagram is a bit of two extremes. It is catastrophic for the figurative givens, but also a germ of rhythm for the new order of the painting. A painting thus integrates its own chaotic abyss, something which the painter experiences as an oscillation between a beforehand and an afterward. This abyss could certainly be reduced to a minimum by transforming abstract form into a visual transformation (Lyotard). Or else by deploying the abyss to a maximum so that the diagram merges with the totality of the painting (Rancière). But Deleuze undertakes the two strategies at once, conceiving the diagram simultaneously as a purely external abstraction and as eating away at the entire painting. Summarizing in step-like fashion, the subject is first confronted with the figurative form. Then the diagram intervenes and scrambles it. What emerges is a form of a completely different nature: the Figure. This Figure is no monster. It only appears so from the perspective of a lingering narration. Effectively, the Figure is a realization of the schematic diagram, constructed both as a gradual series and as a sudden whole. Such a sublime object must necessarily exist to hold open the subject’s frame for the painting. Otherwise, there is no accounting for why it does not immediately collapse onto the field of meaningful narration.

A slightly different formulation of the sublime object is had with Nancy. He too finds a monstrous dimension in art. But this time dwelling in the depths of photographic images. Again the monster draws its strength from the violence commensurate with the failure of imagination. So if the viewer finds the encounter with the image threatening, this is due to a perspectival illusion which fails to take into account one’s own subjectivity. For there is no image without the subject also being in its image. As Nancy speculates, the very ground of the image disappears in the encounter, forcing both itself and the subject into the image. The ground is therefore not an all-encompassing structure. It is instead schematic precisely in the Kantian sense. Expressed otherwise, Nancy argues that it is of the very nature of the image to disrupt meaning. But within its affirmation of sense there exists a bit of intelligible nonsense. This can be read as the collapse of the schematic ground into a mediating point. It is from this point that the subject can sustain monstrous disruptions to meaning. Yet another expression is had with Nancy’s analysis of Pontormo’s Visitation. Does the site of the sublime object lie with the painting, the viewer, both or neither so as to be decentered with respect to each? This ambiguity is experienced in the way the painting seemingly ensnarls the subject into its web. The gazes of the painting’s figures overlap with the viewer’s own, condense, and then settle into what is perhaps the sublime object, depicted in the painting itself: the presence hidden in Mary’s womb. As if unsatisfied, however, the gesture repeats, the overlapped gaze settling on other elements equally as indiscernible. In a final

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