By the juxtaposition or the intertwinement of the two arguably seminal texts on still life, Charles Sterling’s comprehensive art historical study and Gérard Wajcman’s theoretical, philosophical commentary thereon, the interpretative net is firmly established; the impression is given that all that is left is the reiteration of the well-trodden paths. However, neither the historical presentation of still life’s linear emancipation from historia nor the following ontological definition of the emancipated still life is so simple. Still life as a specific iconographic genre is shown to be, contrary to its name, in a perpetual state of becoming, of movement. And more, as soon as the goal of emancipation from the historical painting is achieved, the movement becomes inverted: a renewed relationship between still life and historia follows on another level. On the other hand, it is shown that still life is only rarely completely devoid of some narrative content.
This article examines death in visual art as a process that exceeds mere representation; death is not treated as a passive theme but as an active structure that produces knowledge about violence, history, and collective relations. The analysis focuses on three distinct visual regimes in early modern European art. In Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, death appears as a mechanized system, where the serial repetition of skeletons and the absence of transcendence generate a sense of rationalized violence. In the painting The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers, death is depicted as the brutal autopsy of the political body. Vanitas still life presents death as an introspective reminder while simultaneously concealing the material conditions of luxury and its colonial background. In all three cases, the image of death operates as a visual regime that structures vision and as an epistemological apparatus that produces knowledge of historical, political, and economic processes.
Rubens’ The Fall of the Damned (1619–1621) has been widely acclaimed by critics since the end of the 17th century. However, few studies have focused on its “material effects,” their perception and critical reception. This article starts with the materiality of the damned body falling in hell, before exploring more theoretical and aesthetic aspects. The notion of grand fracas de figures (“great clash of figures”), inherited from Roger de Piles, marks the introduction into historiography of a vision of colour as constructing pictorial forms. Rubens’s brushwork and the fluidity of his material (Focillon) encourage to re-evaluate the stains, coloured masses, and effusions that put precise forms in crisis. The “rain of fire” (duc de Richelieu) and erupting volcano (Antoine Wiertz), compared to the materiality of painting, finally manifest the unexpected richness of matter in commentaries from the 17th to the 19th century.
In a 1967 article for Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Jacques Nassif shifts the focus of Freud’s “‘A Child is Being Beaten’” from the aetiology of perversions to the question of fantasy. Nassif concludes that there is a fundamental fantasy exhibited in these cases and conducts an “archaeology” of this fundamental fantasy, locating the origin of fantasy with the origin of sexual difference: castration and the Oedipus complex. In the final lines of the article, Nassif wonders if “another fantasy,” with a different verbalization that corresponds to a “another body,” could be built on this structure, but admits his reading does not permit an answer to this question. I propose that a reading that shifts the focus in the text again provides both an affirmative answer to Nassif’s question as well as indications of an elaboration. On my reading, without abandoning Nassif, ambivalence is the conceptual focus. Ambivalence, as Freud formulates it, is not just the reversal of feelings into their opposite, like love transformed into hate. Rather, ambivalence is the co-presence of things “different in their nature,” and this co-presence modifies these things chained together. In the context of the fantasy in “‘A Child is Being Beaten,’” this shift in conceptual focus results in an alternative schema of the Oedipus complex, an analysis of drive as a linguistic representation of the ambivalent relation, and the Lacanian concept of the letter as the precipitate of this ambivalent relation circuited by the drive. The conclusion, here, is that the fantasies recorded in the text do not only express a fundamental fantasy about the origin of the sexes, as Nassif suggests, but express a fundamental fantasy about the conditions of signification tout court. The article ends on an open question—cued by Nassif’s closing question in his essay—regarding the possibility of further reconciliation between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of this analysis of ambivalence, drive, and the letter.
The article approaches Freud’s concept of the choice of neurosis (Neurosenwahl) through Jacques Nassif’s 1968 essay “Freud and Science.” In this text, Nassif focuses on the ways in which Jean-Martin Charcot influenced the development of Freud’s thought, highlighting in particular Charcot’s decisive gesture of isolating neurosis as a purely psychological affection. The article accordingly proceeds from the hypothesis that the repetition of the break—which Nassif identifies as the central methodological gesture of psychoanalysis— takes place here in the form of a repetition and radicalization of Charcot’s “choice of neurosis.” In other words, the problem of the choice of neurosis could be posed only on the basis of Charcot’s prior gesture, and if Freud wished to remain faithful to this gesture, he had to articulate the choice of neurosis as a speculative, metapsychological concept. The article shows that the choice of neurosis functions as a nodal point between empiricism, psychoanalytic technique, and metapsychological speculation, and, on another level, between ontogenetic and phylogenetic approaches: a constellation that becomes particularly clear in the analysis of the initially lost and later rediscovered twelfth and final metapsychological essay, “Overview of the Transference Neuroses.”
