{"id":6638,"date":"2011-02-14T15:35:14","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T20:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=6638"},"modified":"2011-02-14T15:58:17","modified_gmt":"2011-02-14T20:58:17","slug":"6638","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/02\/14\/6638\/","title":{"rendered":"thing vase of emptiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.<\/em><\/p>\n

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What gratification can we derive from images of the footwear a peasant has discarded? Where is the pleasure in a painting of these clumsy, graceless and worn shoes, he wonders. What, after all, do they mean? Not walking, not fatigue; neither passion nor a human relationship. On the contrary, Lacan<\/strong> continues, they mean no more than \u2018that which is signified by a pair of abandoned clodhoppers, namely, both a presence and a pure absence\u2019 (1992: 297). No one wears these shoes: they are empty. They thus indicate a temporal relationship, a difference from the past, a loss of the wearer, just as a wooden reel symbolizes the loss of the organic relationship with a beloved mother. <\/strong>73<\/p>\n

In the same way, a still life implies a temporal relationship with the future, a potential for loss there too. Milk or fruit, cream, oranges or grapes, depicted at a moment of perfection, depend for the pleasure they give on our awareness that the moment can\u2019t last.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does the satisfaction culture affords depend on beauty in the conventional sense, the kind of beauty we identify with high culture? Not necessarily. The archetypal cultural object, Lacan argues, is the work of the potter, who creates a space by making a vase to surround it (120\u2013 21). And here he echoes another of Heidegger\u2019s essays. What holds the liquid in a jug, Heidegger asks. Not, as it might appear, the sides and floor of the jug. On the contrary, the indispensable element is the hole at the centre. \u2018The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel\u2019s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel.\u2019 The potter \u2018shapes the void\u2019<\/strong> (Heidegger 1971: 169). And Heidegger adds,since only human beings are aware of death, and specifically their own mortality, \u2018Death is the shrine of Nothing<\/strong>\u2019 (178). Lacan appropriates Heidegger\u2019s interpretation of the potter\u2019s work for his own specifically psychoanalytic account of culture.<\/p>\n

Whenever the signifier makes a magic circle round the absent Thing, we are entitled to find a kind of beauty. In a certain context, a collection of empty matchboxes encloses and inscribes the lost real (Lacan 1992: 114)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Death is the inevitable fate of the human organism. … But death is alien to the subject of Western culture, constituted as it is in the symbolic and divided in the process from the organism that we also are.<\/p>\n

Our languages, with their continuous present and their future tenses, enable us to imagine eternal life but, while culture survives (always subject, of course, to the effective control of weapons of mass destruction), the real withholds the possibility of immortality in this world for the individual human being<\/strong>. The monument, unable to make him present, alluding to loss and motivated by the annihilation of Simson himself, acknowledges that too. At the same time, however, it offers a certain consolation<\/strong>, in so far as it shares with A Pair of Shoes and Dutch painting, jugs, matchbox collections and macaroni the creation of a barrier to the experience, impossible for the subject, of pure absence<\/strong>. And perhaps, in its paradoxical signifying exuberance, the monument to the obscure apothecary (Stimson) also shares with all culture an existence as a pleasurable, pacifying alternative to renunciation,<\/strong> on the one hand, or aggressivity on the other<\/strong>. 80<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. What gratification can we derive from images of the footwear a peasant has discarded? Where is the pleasure in a painting of these clumsy, graceless and worn shoes, he wonders. What, after all, do they mean? Not walking, not fatigue; neither passion nor a human … Continue reading “thing vase of emptiness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,125,24,40,119,72,15,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-drive","category-lacan","category-lack","category-language","category-objet-a","category-subjectivity","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6638"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6644,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6638\/revisions\/6644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}