Kaja Silverman

Bu yazıda Trinh T Minh-ha’nın Reassemblage (1982) ve Naked Spaces – Living is Round (1985) filmlerinde kadın bedeninin gösterilme, işaretlenme, haritalanma biçimlerini incelerken, Kaja Silverman’ın üretken bakış ve Hélène Cixous’nun dişil yazın (écriture féminine) kavramlarını açıklayıcı kavramlar olarak kullanıyorum.

This paper initiates a dialogue between the concept of anamorphosis (as articulated by Lacan in relation to Holbein’s The Ambassadors and later discussed by Silverman, Zizek and Sobchack) and recent developments in Polish Holocaust history and memory. Broadly, the concept of anamorphosis describes the becoming-visible of what was previously in one’s blind spot, and which destabilises the perspectival system of intelligibility, the ‘dominant fiction’ in a given society; anamorphosis is also a structure of looking which is temporal, which has duration. Such a framework, I argue, has resonance for the ways in which narratives of Polish violence against Jews during WWII (which emerged following the publication of Jan Gross’s Neighbours in 2000) have worked to disrupt long-held beliefs about Polish victimhood and martyrdom, and, more specifically, the role of Poles as rescuers of Jews. Drawing partly on the work of Polish philosopher Andrzej Leder, the paper will consider how this process of the becoming-visible of Polish history’s ‘blind spot’ continues to be fraught and fragmented, where hauntings, voids, and felt absences function as symptoms of barely repressed historical trauma and guilt. The paper will closely analyse two works of Polish visual culture in particular. First, Władysław Pasikowski’s film Aftermath (2012; the first fiction feature to extensively treat Polish-led pogroms against Jews), in which anti-Semitic graffiti in an apparently idyllic rural landscape is figured as a ‘stain’ and symptom of past violence; secondly, Łukasz Baksik’s photographic work Matzevot for Everyday Use (2013) which points to the repressed underside of everyday life in its documentation of the Jewish gravestones used to pave streets, yards and playgrounds. The paper argues that, like the stain or sardine can discussed by Lacan, these images not only dramatize our blind spot, but also constitute a ‘look back’ to the viewer, prompting a renewed ethical vision.

A brief overview of Hitchcock's "Psycho,"  the film's feminist critics, reception of the film, and a selection of the theory produced on the film. This paper is intended for instructional use to introduce Hitchcock, sex and gender in film, gendered violence, and feminist film theory, psychoanalytic film theory, and concepts such as the monstrous-feminine.

A brief overview of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," the film's feminist critics, reception of the film, and a selection of the theory produced on the film. This paper is intended for instructional use, for the purposes of introducing Lynch, gendered violence, sex, gender, and sexism in film, feminist film theory, and psychoanalytic film theory.

The reliability of John Dowell as a narrator in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier has been variously discussed; however, this essay examines the reliability of John Dowell with respect to his Oedipal motivations. The fact that Freud mostly ignored the fantasies that parents direct toward their children could be one explanation for the growing interest in recent pscyhoanalytic research. The essay addresses the social commentary in the novel through the Freudian paradigm rather than the relationships among the characters in it.

What is the state of communication in the contemporary era of globalization – what Hardt and Negri refer to as the time of 'Empire' and of its counterpart, the 'multitude'? This paper attempts to draw the implications for communication – or the lack of it – from Hardt and Negri's recent works on the emergence of a new configuration of global power at political, economic and cultural levels ('Empire'), and on the concomitant growth of what they term the 'multitude' or social groupings which hold the promise of a new global democracy. Particular attention is given to the question of the possibility of 'successful' communication between the agencies of Empire (at the level of political representation, for example) and the people comprising the multitude, and to the communicational difficulties faced internally by the latter. It is also argued, finally, that it is not sufficient to overcome a communicational 'differend' at the level of discourse, but that one should follow Silverman's suggestion that a re-evaluation of looking at images is essential if the reductive effects of strategies of seeing, promoted by Empire, are to be overcome.

Since it began in the 1970s, feminist film theory has revolutionized the way that films and their spectators can be understood. This book focuses on the groundbreaking work of Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and Barbara Creed. Each of these thinkers has opened up a new and distinctive approach to the study of film and this book provides the most detailed account so far of their ideas. It illuminates
the following six key concepts and demonstrates their value
as tools for film analysis:

• the male gaze
• the female voice
• technologies of gender
• queering desire
• the monstrous-feminine
• masculinity in crisis.

Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films as well as testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and television. She concludes that the concepts have not remained static over the past thirty years but have continually evolved with the influence of new
critical debates and developments in film production, signalling their continuing impact and relevance in an era that is often unthinkingly branded as ‘post-feminist’.

Among the many controversial themes that James Purdy has touched upon in his work, the topic  of incest might stand out as one of the most provoking. In several of his novels and short stories, characters engage in various forms of incestuous relationships. These relationships can be heterosexual or homosexual, intergenerational or among siblings, consensual or even committed unwittingly. Yet, in whichever shape or form these relationships occur, they always seem to function as a commentary on the social taboo on incest.
Striking in Purdy’s fiction about incestuous relationships is his sometimes literal use of Freud’s Oedipus complex. The literally acting out of this theory raises questions about the social construction of this complex, and the effect it has on the subjectivity production of Purdy’s characters.  In this paper, I propose to read several instances of incest in James Purdy’s work through the lens of Kaja Silverman’s reevaluation of the positive and negative Oedipus complex. She asserts that the positive Oedipus complex, which interpellates the subject into dominant fictions of the family – including its taboo on incest –, is always accompanied by the negative, or homosexual complex. It is this doubling of the Oedipus complex that constitutes a resistance to the dominant fiction of family relations. A reading of Purdy’s imagining of incestuous relations from the perspective of a double Oedipus complex allows us to rethink the social construction of the incest taboo and explore its effect on the production of marginalized subjectivities.

Per gli studi di genere in campo cinematografico il masochismo e le sue dinamiche hanno costituito una delle linee di ricerca più significative nel costruire un’ipotesi alternativa al modello teorizzato da Laura Mulvey nel suo saggio fondativo “Piacere visivo e cinema narrativo”. Se Mulvey vede nel sadismo la dinamica psichica fondamentale nel definire il rapporto di subordinazione del femminile al maschile – dinamica che nel cinema ha gli esempi più alti nell’opera di Hitchcock – il masochismo vede proprio un rovesciamento di tale rapporto. In effetti, il masochismo – nella versione proposta da Gilles Deleuze in Il freddo e il crudele – è caratterizzato da una reversibilità delle posizioni di genere, prevede lo scambio continuo dei ruoli di potere: in ultima analisi esso mette in scena questioni riguardanti la bisessualità.

Ma il masochismo è anche un’estetica particolare, in quanto presuppone strutture narrative circolari e ripetitive e attiva un regime visivo sensuale. Partendo da questi presupposti, il saggio affronta le diverse teorie psicoanalitiche sul masochismo (Freud, Deleuze, Silverman, ecc.) per passare poi a studiare le molteplici forme del masochismo cinematografico ed in particolare la sua declinazione nelle dinamiche del piacere visivo prodotte dal genere horror.

From Stallone and Schwarzenegger to Gibson and Willis, the Hollywood action star of the 1980s was a hard-bodied hero with an attitude to match. But more than this, the action hero was an ideological construct; referenced by the president, ubiquitous in popular cultural production and reception of the time, his excessive muscularity forms a complex and problematic textual canvas for reading the hegemonic desires of Reaganite America. I this paper I consider cinematic relations to the heroic body through the dual prism of Freud’s conception of fetishism and De Bord’s formulation of the spectacle. Using the work of film theorists like Metz and Mulvey, cultural historians Susan Jeffords and Yvonne Tasker and psychoanalyst Kaja Silverman, I illustrate that the hero’s spectacular body operates as a fetish for the viewer, and thus that spectacle is fetish. Films to be considered include Rambo, Terminator and the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series.

The maternal voice is a fantasy of origins: a representation of an individual’s pre-lingual, pre-cultural form, and their inauguration into subjectivity. Kaja Silverman writes that it is “a moment prior to the creation of the world”, when the infant is wrapped in the “sonourous envelope” of the mother’s voice, and unaware of its own selfhood. However, this state of “uterine night” is soon severed once the child becomes aware that it is a separate entity from the mother, thus establishing the subject-and-object.