Some Notes on Nothing

Lili Dujourie

Pepe Espaliil

Cristina Iglesias

A h b n curated by john Murphy

bl upported by The Arts Cou I f gl d

Ch h l G ll ry L d

Chisenhale Gallery, London

Supported by

Acknowledgements

Lili DujouriePepe EspaliuCristina Iglesias

An exhibition curated by john Murphy

1.3 September - 2.9 October |995

Chisenhale Gallery, Michael Newman,Lili Dujourie, Cristina Iglesias andthe estate of Pepe EspaliuPublished by Chisenhale Gallery, LondonEdited by Sue jonesCatalogue designed by Martin BrownPhotographs by Hugo GlendinningPrinted by The White Dove Press

Chisenhale Gallery64 Chisenhale RoadLondon E3 SQZTlOl8I98| 4518Fax ot8t 980 7169

The London Arts BoardArts Council of EnglandThe Ministrie van de Vlaamse GemeenschapEuropean Commission Kaleidoscope FundCultural Office ofthe Spanish Embassy

We would like to thank the following individualsfor their encouragement, advice and practicalassistance, without which this exhibition wouldnot have been possible.

Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, Martin Brown, Pepe Cobo,Darbyshire Framemakers, Damaso de Lario, Alice EvansAlexandra Flood, Susanna Greeves,joav Hessayon,Xavier Hufkens, jonathan juniper, james Lavender,jane Leighton, Rachel Lichtenstein, Kyoko Mizuno,jacques Nimki, Emily Pringle, Robert Rogers,Signe Rosenkjaer, Kerri Sellens,jonathan Watkins,Helen Weddell, johan Witdouck

ISBN 1 901066 oz 9

CH|SE|\I|-1/-\LE

Some Notes

on Nothing,

and the

Silence of

Works of Art

]uan Sanchez Cotans still lives could be interpreted in terms of creation ex nibilo. The fruit and

I

Consider a monochrome painting as an object that is supposed to represent nothing. However muchthe viewer desires to see nothing, or at least an undifferentiated optical field, attention soon settleson the brush strokes, the weave of the canvas, the slightest modulation, whether intended oraccidental. One moment the absolute, the next sheer contingency; there is no third term, no way ofmediating between the two. That is what distinguishes the blackness of a black monochrome fromthe black of certain Spanish paintings of the r7th century, where it is supposed to be God whopermits the mediation between something and nothing, and to whose gaze the painting is referred.

1. For discussion of Cotn's still lives,see Martin S.Soria, Snchez CotnsQuince, Cabbage, Me/on and CucumberAlt Quarterly, VIII, 1945, pp,225-230;Numan Bryson, Looking at theOver-looked: Four Essays on Still LifePainting, London, Reaktion Books, 1990,pp.63~7O; and the chapter 'Snchez Cotnand Still-Life Painting in Toledo around1600 in William B.Jordan and PeterCherry, Spanish Still Life; from VelzqueztG Ld Nt` |GI|rndo uya, on on, aiona a eyaYale University Press, 1995, pp.27-35.

vegetables in Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber arearranged in a patabola slanting towards the viewers space as it movesfrom left to right, from quince to cucumber, across the shallow ledge ofthe cantarero, where the fruit is kept and hung from strings to preserve it.Depth is also implied by a series of diagonals which follow the perfectsphere of the quince - the lines of the cabbage leaf, the bisected melon andits slice, the cucumber - and intersect the parabola, thus both separatingand linking two spaces: the space of everyday reality occupied by theviewer, and the black nothingness behind. This black void renders thefruit and vegetables at once intensely real - indeed hyper-real to the pointof trompe loeil - and unreal, phantasmatic. Removed from the circuit ofuse and signification, they are rendered back to the void from which,Cotan seems to be telling us, they came in the first place. The self-certaintyof the everyday is shaken. They, as we, are created beings, utterlydependant on the creator and a part of a divine order which is at oncerational- as expressed through its rigorous underlying geometry - and yettotally and utterly inscrutable. That the top of the internal frame formedby the cantarero is missing opens the dimension of the blackness to theinfinite, to the unpresentable. In their asceticism, Cotans still lives dopenance for the presumption of recreating Gods creation, and seek toavoid idolatry by excluding any image of man or God and by showingthe visual world to be an illusory veil cast over nothingness. However,nothingness is not ultimate in such a painting, but rather appears withinthe horizon of redemption. The difference of the sense of the nothingnessin Cotns still life from that of the black monochrome is between theabsent mediator and the absence of mediation.

In modernity, the epoch of humanism and of nihilism, the nothingness that Cotan representsas beyond, and which has the same terrible yet redemptive character asthe blackness that highlights the crucified Christ in Zurbarans Crucifixion(1627), has become immanent as the negativity of the subject. The mortalhuman being, no longer able to identify with a place in the substantialorder of creation, came to be defined as in essence no substantial being:not what it is, but that it is. However, for us even that positiveexistential account of negativity is no longer tenable. When we try tothink the nothing, what we confront is not nihilation, our human thatness

7

as open possibility, but the un-negatable, the remainder - without theunity or identity of a substance - that is left after every object hasbeen negated.

The crucial question that is raised is: How to make an art of an unmediated relation with alterity orthe outside, which is now to be figured - or we might have to saydis-figured - as that which falls out of the circuit of relations, oras that which, in the terms of an ontology of determinate objects, wouldbe nothing?

II

Hegels account of the story of Pompeys entry into the Jewish Holy of Holies in jerusalem offers acritique which may be extended from the negative theology which he hasin mind to the modern art of nothingness, at which point the limits of thatcritique itself become apparent. The story, as recounted in Hegels earlytheological writings, goes as follows:

After Pompey had approached the heart of the temple, the centre of adoration, and had hopedto discover in it the root of the national spirit, to find indeed in one central point the life-giving soulof this remarkable people, to gaze on a Being as an object for his devotion, on something significantfor his veneration, he might well have been astonished on entering the arcanum to find himselfdeceived so far as some of his expectations were concerned, and, for the rest, to find himself in anempty room.

Hegel, of course, is criticising this sublime emptiness as based on an abstract, unmediated oppositionof God as the infinite subject on the one hand, and everything visible oractual on the other: The infinite subject had to be invisible, since every-thing visible is something restricted. Hence the commandment againstidolatry, since an image of God was just stone or wood to them," ratherthan a sensuous embodiment of the idea. Clearly we are intended to thinkthat Pompey assumed that in the heart of the temple he would find an

2.@,w_aHege|,ra,/y Theological wfffmgs, idol, something like a statue or an image; emptiness here is not nothing,`|fM.K ,Pfl'| Cl `,U' 7

gy|vanaiess,'i9h19fVe'$"y but the experience of an expectation unfulfilled - and had he reflected3.|bid.,p,19l. on this, we might say, what Pompey would have encountered is his own4.|bid.,p.192. temporal experience of anticipation.

Hegel is not advocating idolatry, at least not in any simple sense, but rather is implying that, if allembodiment - therefore mediation - of spirit is refused, then the dialecticof reciprocity will be blocked and the differential identity of subject andobject, the absolute knowing with which the Phenomenology concludes,will never be attained. For classical art, which is for Hegel a limited andsurpassed moment, the figure of this reciprocity is the exchange of thegaze: if the eyes are the window of the soul, then a fully spiritualisedworld would be one that returns the gaze, that becomes all eyes; in his

Fff1EAll,(YB|1S.IM.Kl1OX,OXf0fd,0Xf0Yd Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel speaks of the eyes of which all points inU `tyP ,1975, .l54.l!l`| kRLf$cffff=halfef@ne_ an the phenomenal world are to become. In other words, in Pompeys5. G.W,EHege|, Aesthetics; Lectures on

8

encounter Hegel has set up an opposition of emptiness and idol, andhas done so only to throw into question the abstractness of this opposi-tion, wherein each term is itself based on an opposition in which truth isset up over and against the subject. Hegel goes on to identify precisely theparadox of this empty Holy of Holies:

Though there was no concrete shape to be an object of religious feeling, devotion and reverence foran invisible object had none the less to be given direction and a boundary inclusive of the object.

In other words, the infinite subject, which could not be represented in an image without relativisingGod, had none the less, as an object of devotion, to be circumscribed in

e. isa some way.

However, could we not say that the temple is constructed precisely to contain neither an object, notthe absence of objects, but rather what might be called a non-object?This non-object circumscribed by the temple would have the structure ofan extimate absolute, that is to say, something absolved from relationswith anything else, an outside in the most radical sense, beyond any possi-ble horizon, which is none the less contained on the inside, at once, to

1. Iamgratefulto Ma'f take the same example Hegel uses, giving a people their consistency, theirthese distinctions, which he made during . ,a|iufeaheimhatema|A0iaiQn in identity, and yet rupturing any closure in terms of the national spirit, therelation to the account oi negation .mpsychoanaiysis, representation of which Pompey expects to find in the temple.

The temporal experience of the encounter with this alterity would be, precisely, not anticipationwhich knows in advance, but rather a waiting without anticipation, a pas-sivity that is not a deficient form of activity. Through this story, Hegel hasincluded within his dialectical account of the development of Christianityan intimation of precisely the notion of the absolute as radical outside,transcendence, that will become the alternative for a number of thinkersto his own immanent conception of the absolute as that which includesall mediations. However Hegel has also foretold what will come to bethe problem for such an approach to the absolute, which is that of whatkind of relation may be entertained with the non-relational. How can theinfinite object be circumscribed without being mediated and therebyrelativized, thus losing its absoluteness?

III

This distinction between the nothingness of transcendence and a blackness which holds the place ofthat which resists negation may become clearer when the blackness inCotans still lives is compared with that in certain paintings by Magritte.Cf La lunette dapproc/ve (1963 ), where through a window pane we seea blue sky with white clouds, while through the opening between thewindow and its frame we see undifferentiated blackness, Slavoj Ziiekwrites as follows: the frame of the windowpane is the fantasy-frame

Kant, Hege/, andthe cfnfqueof/dec/ogy, which constitutes reality, whereas through the crack we get an insight intoDurham, Duke University Press, 1993,p.103.

B. Slavoj iiiek, Tarrying with the Negative:

the impossible Real, the Thing-in-itself. This Real, an unsymbolized

9

9. This phrase comes from the poemTerre sans nuage by Andr Bosmanspublished in his book Le Soc/e de nuit,Ververs, Temps Mls, 1961, Magrittewrote to his friend Bosmans on 23rd July,1958 to congratulate him on the linel.e neant est le seul merveille du monde(Nothingness is the one and only wonderofthe world) Lettres a Andr Bosmans,ed. Francine Perceval, Brussels, EditionsSeghers, 1990, p.14. Cf, Sarah Whitfield,Magritte, London, The South Bank Centre,1992, catalogue entry no. 122 on Lalunette d'approche, where she also citesthe comparison of the painting with MarcelDuchamps Fresh widow, 1920, made bySuzi Gablik, Magritte, London, Thames

- therefore impossible - remainder, renders everyday reality unreal, yetfrom the point of view of symbolically framed reality, can only appear asnothing or an empty place. The Real falls out of the frame of reality, orseeps through its cracks, yet at the same time it is precisely that whichgives reality its consistency as a cathected substitute for that which isdesired yet forbidden. The title of Magrittes painting translates to Thefield-glass, sugesting that the visible itself is a kind of prosthesis, a stand-in for nothingness, the one and only wonder of the world. Its effect is toremind us that representations are substitutes for an unrepresentable

The imitation of the object in a painting is not simply a convincing representation, but a way of

am Hmm' m'`97` object-cause of desire, the Thing, and that the only way in which such aThing shows itself is through its representatives.

It is in terms of this structure that jacques Lacan develops a theory of art as sublimation. In hisSeminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, after considering an anamorphicmural in a monastery of the Minim order, and Neolithic cave painting,he states:

In the same way that the exercise on the wall consists in fixing the invisible inhabitant of thecavern, we see the link forged between the temple, as a construction around emptiness thatdesignates the place of the Thing, to the figuration of emptiness on the walls of this emptiness itself-to the extent that painting progressively learns to master this emptiness, to take such a tight hold ofit that painting becomes dedicated to Hxing it in the form of the illusion of space."

From the account of the representation of space as aimed not towards the creation of an illusionw_ Jacque. tam, The Seminarof of reality but towards the figuration of emptiness, Lacan moves towardsJacques Lacan: Book V//; The Ethics . .0/Psycnoana/ysf1959_19eo,e_ a theory of mimesis in which the imitation of the object IS by no meansJacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter,New york, w_w_N0n0n, 1992, p.140. ultlmatfl:

Of course, works of art imitate the objects they represent, but their end is certainly not to representthem. In offering the imitation of an object, they make something different out of that object. Thusthey only pretend to imitate. The object is established in a certain relationship to the Thing and isintended to encircle and to render both present and absent."

11. lbid., p.141.

12. Jacques Lacan, The Four FundamentalConcepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. AlanSheridan, New York, W.W.Norton, 1978,p.103: Lacan calls Parrhasios's victoryA triumph of the gaze over the eye; that is,a vision that is properly human as a functionof desire and drive, rather thana reflex of instinct.

engaging the viewers desire for something that lies behind the objectdepicted, some thing that cannot itself be represented. It is by provokingthis desire that in the Classical story Parrhasios defeats Zeuxis by paintingnot grapes so convincing that they attract the birds, but a veil or curtainso lifelike that his competitor asks W/ell, and now show us what you havepainted behind it. But if we are to suppose that there is nothing behindother than the desire to see what is behind, what is to prevent this collaps-ing into the mere reiteration of reciprocity, where the subject ultimatelyrecognises the object outside itself as its own work, its pro-ject?

It is that desire involves the desire to occupy a position from which the subject as subject is excluded,which means that the relation of the subject to this object is radicallyasymmetrical. What Lacan calls the Thing, the object-cause of desire for

IO

13. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,p. 129-30.

14. Lacan includes the nothing among thelist of ob/ets petit a; the mamilla, faeces,the phallus (imaginary object), the urinaryflow. (An unthinkable list, if one adds, asdo, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice -thenothing.) Ecrits: A Selection, trans. AlanSheridan, New York, W.W.Norton, 1977,p.315. Notice that, separated by a dashfrom the other objects ofthe drive, thenothing has an ambiguous status, bothinside and outside the series, betweenthe objects and the Thing, perhaps, justas it does in Heidegger between beingsand Being.

which all actual desired objects are substitutes, that inaccessible Thingbehind the lack that makes possible objects, Will always be represented byemptiness, precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else - or,more exactly, because it can only be represented by something else. But inevery form of sublimation, emptiness is determinativef" Notice that forLacan emptiness or the nothing is not ultimate, but is itself a substituteobject," which at once holds the place of the Thing, and keeps the Thingat a distance from the subject, protects the subject from that which is toomuch, that which exceeds the subjects capacity to bear. Such an accountrecalls the early Christian defence of the image by Origen:

through the splendour of the image we may grasp Gods glory which, like the source of light, maynot be regarded directly, but only through a glass, darkly."

In a similar way, Dionysius Areopagita gave a positive account of the veils that cover Gods pure

15. That this is Lacans dehnition of beautywas discussed by Philippe van Haute at aPub|icLecture ofthe Slade Centre for theHistory and Theory of Art at UCL on 18thOctober 1995.

16. Cl. Moshe Barasch, lcon: Studies inthe History of an Idea, New York, New YorkUniversity Press, 1992, pp,136-8.

17. Cf. lbld., |J|J.172-6.

While Lacans accoun

18. Martin Heidegger, Poet/ya Language,Thought, trans.A|bert Hofstadter, NewYork, Harper Colophon Books, 1971,p.169.

appearance as making`possible the divine revelation, both by attenuatingthe unbearable light radiating from the divine source, while at the sametime inciting the viewer to go beyond the image." In the theory of theicon, the power of the image comes to be interpreted in terms of a system-atic account of desire. To return to Lacan, who perhaps remains more of aChristian thinker than one might expect, without this distance the subjectwould be abolished in, would fade into, the object of desire, a danger Hg-ured experientially in anxious images of formless life substance, slime,teeming insect life, all that which cannot be kept at a distance becausewithout the boundaries of a determinate object, or, for Levinas andBlanchot, the unsilencable murmuring of the bare there is (il y a) heard inthe black night of insomnia. Here we may glimpse the limitation ofphilosophies which valorize nothingness as ultimate: nothingness becomesa defence against- a way of distancing - something even more terrifying.IV

t of art as the circumscription of emptiness may remind us of Hegels descrip-tion of Pompeys experience at the Holy of Holies, the source that heexplicitly points to is Heideggers essay The Thing. We will have to con-sider whether the philosophers thinking of negativity as concealment andwithdrawal corresponds to Lacans interest in extimity, in the outside onthe inside of the subject, whether Lacans nothingness is the same asHeideggers. Heidegger develops his account of the essence of the thingthrough a description of a potter making a jug, of which he writes,

The potter (___) shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form (...). Thejugs void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessels thingness doesnot lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.

The point of this description is to indicate a nothing that is not negation, as it has been understoodby the tradition based on the primacy of the presence of entities, where

II

In attempting to convey the sense of the Thing in his seventh seminar, before turning to Heideggers

nothing is the negation of a present being. Heidegger evokes, rather, theprimacy of a productive nothingness, of a nothing that makes possible thething, that makes it possible for a thing to come into presence around it.Nothing, in this case, stands for Being as different from beings, withoutserving as the negation of beings. Let us now listen to Lacans creativerepetition, in which he translates the jug as (1/lS,,'9of which he says,

It creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it. Emptiness and fullness areintroduced into a world that by itself knows not of them. It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier,this vase, that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world, neither more nor less, and with thesame sense."

And a little later, to remain with Lacan:

Now if you consider the vase (...) as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at thecentre of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presentsitself as a niloil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, createsthe vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo,starting with a hole."

The introduction of emptiness into a world that knows not of it sounds remarkably like the nihila-tion, the hole in being, that, according to Sartre, the pour soi, self-con-sciousness, introduces into the en soi, brute being; except that the nothingis not introduced into being by the subject in Lacan, but by the signiiier. Incontrast with Sartre, both Heidegger and Lacan in their different waysavoid subjective voluntarism, which derives from the scholastic doctrineof Divine voluntarism, which is in turn linked to the notion of creation exni/vilo, since it emphasized the inscrutibility of Gods will, its impenetrabil-ity by human reason, just as there is nothing outside or before God to pro-vide grounds for creation. The opacity of the act of the artist as genius,which Kant evokes in the Critique ofjudgment when he attributes thesource of genius to a gift of nature, could be seen as a rendering imma-nent of Divine voluntarism while in the very same move displacingthe source from the subject, thus anticipating Heideggers philosophyof being."

19. Possibly in allusion to the vase offlowers in his Optical schema for thetheory of narcissism in The Seminarof Jacques Lacan; Book /I; The Ego inFreud's Theory and in the Technique ofPsychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli,Cambridge University Press, 1988,p. 109. The discussion concerns man asthe vanishing point of science which Lacanconnects both to Freud`s navel of thedream as 'an absolutely incomprehensiblepoint' and to 'being' as that point whichcannot be grasped in the phenomenon,the point where the relation ofthe subjectto the symbolic surtacesf (p. 105) If whatis perceived by the subject is a memorialhallucination (p.11O) its reality-effect is

essay Lacan had described the wartime collection of matchboxes of hisfriend, the poet jacques Prvert, where a line of matchboxes snakingaround the room was created by inserting the draw of one box into thenext, suggesting a copulatory movement, but by drawers which areempty: The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasiabsurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box."3This essential emptiness of the collection is taken further in Lacans evoca-tion of the masturbatory image of the potter with his hand around thisemptiness, which is supposed to imply that the signifier is to be equatedwith the phallus as that which does not exist, but rather is always already

I2

sustained by the way in which alienationin the imaginaw is anchored in thesymbolic order, by the big Other that makesit possible to say the world is as it appears:Man gets to see this reflection from thepoint of view of the other. He is an other forhimself. This is what gives you the illusionthat consciousness is transparent to itself.We arent present, in the reflection; to seethe reflection, we are in the consciousnessof the othen (p. 1 12) The Cartesianundercurrent should be obvious, theHeideggerian may be less so; man isin between alienation into objects orentities and fading into non-objectivebeing. Howeven and here the differencewith Heidegger lies, being is in Lacaninterpreted in relation to desire ratherthan disclosure and temporality, andtherefore either radicalized, or recuperatedinto subjectivity, depending on thecommitment of the critic.

lost, thereby introducing an emptiness or lack into being, which will makepossible the network of relations that will constitute the Symbolic Order,together with a compensatory Imaginary fantasy of fullness. Implicitly,Heideggers nothing is being interpreted, in terms of the genesis of thesubject (rather than the Dasein), as primary repression, where the hole inthe Symbolic that is created by an inaccessible signifier comes to stand forthe finitude of any order, which opens it up both to the Real- which wehave seen leaking around the window frame in Magrittes painting - andto the necessity of imaginarization," of giving-body to the hole, as thepotter does, in such a way that it is not merely reduced to the image as aspecular substitute. Art, then, is not simply the attempt to convincinglyrepresent objects, which would be to pander to the egos Imaginary phan-tasy of fullness or completion, but rather to circumscribe the place of thelost object in the Real, which is where the Real, which knows no lack oremptiness, suffers from the signiIier.

Although subjectivity would be decentred in this account, as it is also for Heidegger where the fini-

zo. mia., p.12o_21. |bid.,p.121.22. For the link between Kant andHeidegger, see J.M.Bernstein, The Fateof Art: Aesthetic Al/enation from Kant toDerrida and Adorno, Cambridge, PolityPress, 1992, chapter 2, The Genius ofBeing: Heideggers The Origin of theWork of Art",' pp.66-135.23. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,p_114.

24. Cf Philippe Julien, Jacques LacansReturn to Freud: The real, the symbolicand the imaginary, trans. Devra BeckSimiu, New York and London, New YorkUniversity Press, 1994, pp.B7-89.172- 1 94.

25. This is developed by Lacan in TheFour Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, in the discussions of Holpeinspainting The Ambassadors (pp.85-90).

As a thing the jug gathers

tude of the Dasein means that it exists in relation to that which it cannotappropriate, its being-towards-death, and through that non-relationarises the possibility of a relation with Being itself, the psychoanalyticphilosophy of the subject pursued by Lacan, inseparable from theaccounts of repression, denial and disavowal in relation to the Law of theFather, is not identical with Heideggers aim, which is to think Being itselfas Being, in its sense as verb, and not in terms of the substantive, nominalbeing of the entity. Heideggers primary concern is with the articulation ofa movement of presencing as disclosure that would not be the permanentpresence of metaphysics. Rather than the supposed transparency or com-plete yielding to the theoretical gaze of the object of knowledge accordingto metaphysics, the finite coming-into-presence of things, according toHeidegger, involves a withdrawal or concealment which cannot be over-come since it is constitutive. Things depend on a horizon in which toappear, and every horizon, for Heidegger, is finite and historical; thingsare granted to experience in a finite order, without the overview of a cos-motheoros, dependant on a concealment that cannot be overcome with-out the installation of a new concealment. If all appearing is finite, theradiance (Schein) of things, their appearing as the things that they are, canno longer be thought under the opposition of illusion and reality, butrather in terms of a withholding or reserve involved in any revelation ordonation, the concealment in unconcealment. Instead of completelyoccluding or forgetting this nothing, the concealment or withdrawal inpresencing, the account of the jug will show how the gift or outpouringthat is presencing is dependant on a keeping or retaining, a reticence, and1/ice 1/ersa. The movement between the two - pouring forth and withhold-ing - takes place though the hollow of the jug.and allows the mutual appropriation of those elements or dimensions thatmake presencing possible, one of which is that of human beings as mortal:

I3

Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merelyexists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself. As the shrine ofNothing, death harbours within itself the presencing of Being. As the shrine of Nothing, death is theshelter of Being.

Human beings do not, here, carry death within themselves as the power of negation, as they do for

26. Martin Heidegger, Poetryg Language,fhought, trans. Albert Hoistadter, NewYork, Harper& Row, 1975, pp.178-79.On the nothing, see also What isMetaphysics? in Martin Heidegger, BasicWritings, ed. David Farell Krell, London,Routledge, revised edition 1993.27. Robert Bernascuni, The Question ofLanguage in Heideggefs History of Being,Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press,1985, p_56.

Hegel and Sartre, but rather the mortal has an essential relation to deathas that which is outside his or her power, as something in them thatcannot be appropriated in the form of a being or entity but which would,insofar as thinking remains bound to entities, be rather nothing.Throughthe impossible relation with their death, mortals become open to alterity.The emptiness of the nothing has now become the shelter of Being in twoways. First, Being is not a being, but rather that which makes possible thedisclosure of beings, so from the point of view of the totality of beings,Being would be nothing. Second, since Being - in its verbal sense ofpresencing - would involve an irreducible nothingness, a concealment orwithdrawal, which the Very presence that it makes possible conceals,presence thus becomes the concealment of concealment, giving rise to anontology of the object and the subject. In terms of the history of Being,Nothing is a title for Being in the time of the oblivion of Being. If

everything one can recognise remains a being, then Being itself, which isnot a being, an entity, is experienced as nothing.

cu

V

To equate the withdrawal (Entzug) of being with a blind spot, as it is tempting to do when one is insearch of a concrete example of how this withdrawal might be experi-enced, is to reinscribe the philosophy of being in the philosophy of thesubject. Heideggers concern with the nothing is with the differencebetween Being and beings, and with the withdrawal in any coming intopresence, whereas Lacans is with the prohibited absolute object of thedesiring, therefore divided, sexual subject. While Being intrinsicallyinvolves nothingness for Heidegger, since any manifestation must involvea concealment, any giving a withholding, any presence an absence, forLacan it is rather the law of the signifier - prohibition rather than anoriginary difference -that makes emptiness and fullness as such enter theworld, the emptiness that is lack opening up both the endless chain ofSymbolic substitution of which the repressed signifiers constitute the inac-cessible meaning, and the illusory Imaginary fullness of being that thesubject will thereafter pursue. Despite this dissimilarity, however, what thetwo thinkers have in common is a preoccupation with finitude, and there-fore negativity in relation to time, whether this is thought in terms of lackand traumatic aprs coup, or an original withdrawal or privation as thetemporal condition of the entwinement of human being and Being itself.The difference, perhaps, could be indicated as that between the anxiety ofbeing-towards-death, which remains productive, issuing in a relation tothe proper or the ownmost, and the absolute destitution of a trauma in

I4

28. Lacan, The Ethics olPsychoanalysis, p.13O.

29. BernasccniThe Question of Language.)op. cit. pp.56-57,

relation to which the only means of survival is defence. The problem,then, from a Lacanian perspective, for an art which seeks to transgress theprohibition of images without regressing to the mere misrecognition ofthe Imaginary, would be to combine the necessary defence with the riskof a relation with the Thing, the ultimate c_ause of desire and the DeathDrive. This would be a point, perhaps, at which beauty and the sublimecould no longer be categorically distinguished. It would also be an artwhere emptiness is determinative, which is Lacans rigorous determina-tion of sublimation.

For Lacan, the blind spot stands for the enigma that the desiring subject is for itself as the place of

30. Cf. Mary Vidal, Watteau's PaintedConversations, New Haven and London,Yale University Press, 1992. See alsothe chapter on Watteau and Reveriein Norman Bryson, Word and Image;French Painting of the Ancien Regime,Cambridge, Cambrldge University Press.1981, pp.58-88, where he claims thatthe Watteau-effect consists in the creationofa semantic vacuum which the viewer'tries to fill (...) with an inrush of verbalreverie' (p.74), and he goes on to write,'(.,.) Watteau sunders the link betweensignifier and signified (,..). The meaningsin Watteau, having no signiiier to pin themdown, are experienced mysteriously, asmoods, or atmospheres' (p,88). Whereasfor Vidal the signiied of Watteaus paintingswould be, not a topic, but conversationitself, reflected in the materiality ofthesignifier, the artful informality of the brush-strokes. am inclined to think that both areright, since the very emphasis on conversa-tion stresses the silence ofthe painting,and by extension of the traditional visualarts. In its negative form, as contrary toa fullness of presence promised bythetradition, this silence is apprehendedas melancholy. Bryson writes: ln themelancholic gaze, the world is no longerapprehended as sufficient- as completedpresence; something is missing, butwhat can never be named, because it is,precisely, absence (p.7O-71).

the (non-human) Other where language, as the unconscious, speaks. Herethe philosophy of the subject approaches, once again, the philosophy ofBeing: for Heidegger, silence, including the loss of speech in anxiety, isequi-primordial with both the absence of the word and with the reserve ofbeing as originary difference. The nothing corresponds to the thinkersexperience of the lack of a word for Being,": this lack shows up thewords as words for Being, thus marking a caesura in, if not the end of, thehistory of Being. Similarly, we might say that the coming into presenceinvolved in the work of art differs from that of other things in the world inthat it intimates the reserve or withdrawal, the nothingness and death,which makes possible any world in the Hrst place. This is the source of thefragility and pathos of certain works of art - one thinks here of the paint-ings of Watteau that are themselves based upon and seek to figure forththe art of conversation, or the sculptures of Giacometti - in which thevisual world or the figure seems to withdraw in the very artistic perfor-mance in which it is given. Silence no longer supports the fullness of visi-ble being, but makes it tremble and erodes it. More than the visualmetaphor of the blind spot, the thinking of withdrawal in terms of silencedraws attention to a mortal temporality.

The finitude of the visual arts is felt nowhere more than in their silence. There is something in thework that is not a being, and that cannot be named, but which therebydraws forth discourse by its very secrecy. Arts modernity begins, perhaps,when certain works, rather than seeking to overcome this condition, thuspositing it as a deficiency in the attempt to make pictures and statuesspeak, begin to thematize silence as an essential condition, and therebycourt the risk of oblivion, of falling silent themselves, dissolving into noth-ing. We need not think of this beginning in terms of a historicist linearsequence of movements, since it has always echoed in its own occlusions.Courting oxymoron, we could call it an historical origin, a transcendentalcondition that emerges in a moment of the history of art and literature. Inorder to be an origin such works depend upon a performative which theyseek to embody. What they enact is the declaration of their own conditionof possibility. Thus they depend upon being preceded by that which theycreate; and on creating that which precedes them. Their temporalityis thus, to say the least, paradoxical, and is approached by the future

15

anterior of the will have been. But this future anterior indicates preciselythe problem of closure that the work faces with respect to the performa-tive that enunciates the law of its being. The performative, at the level ofthe law, ties a past that was never present, and therefore that precisely wasnot anterior, with a messianic future of the other. The work, which nec-essarily as a work takes a concrete form, imposes a closure on the perfor-mative, and does so by assuming a mimetic relation to its condition ofpossibility. Creation ex nihilo becomes the mimesis of creation itself,which can only be sustained as creation against reification by destruction.From a Hegelian perspective, this would be to repeat the intrinsic connec-tion of abstract negation with terror.

This is, of course, why the work must unWork itself. The movement of creation and destruction,Romantic genesis pas excellence, is interrupted by the work which, likeMelvilles Bartleby who replies to any demand with the phrase I wouldprefer not to, withdraws itself from the work of negation, and thus canscarcely be thought of any more as a work. And because paintings andsculptures do not speak, do not remove themselves in the way that theother person exceeds any horizon by speaking, we are reminded of thelimit of the visual, or the non-visual condition of the visual, which is not,either, simply discourse. While a certain silence may make possible theformal closure of the work, and in addition give the illusion that a singlework of art can say everything that can be said, that it may finally form atotality, silence may equally prevent the closure of the visual on itself inso-far as it intimates an invisible reserve or outside that conditions the visualby interrupting it. Thus the transition from everyday visual experience inthe world, where words are supposed to refer to things and sentences cor-respond with states of affairs, to the visuality of the world, where thatwhich is positively given is experienced in terms of a withdrawal or inrelation to an outside that is not given, may at least be hinted at in suchsilence where the almost-non-object - manifest emptiness - comes tofigure, without figuring, the impossible relation to that which is Withoutrelation.

The emptiness and silence which necessarily characterise such an art evoke the anxiety from which,in various ways in our everyday lives, we seek to defend ourselves. In theirself-exposure to the viewer, such works court these defenses, such as theviolence of a look that expects to be reflected back to itself in a pacifyingreciprocity. But perhaps the work in turn has its defenses, can resist thegaze, when the mirror is broken, and the work, sheltering its alterity,unworks itself, presents a blank face, or turns away.

16

silence of works of artMichael Newman_Some Works on Nothing_1995.pdf