KAJA SILVERMAN

Flesh of My Flesh 

Stanford University Press, 2009

What is a woman? What is a man? How do they—and how should they—relate to each other? Does our yearning for "wholeness" refer to something real, and if there is a Whole, what is it, and why do we feel so estranged from it? For centuries now, art and literature have increasingly valorized uniqueness and self-sufficiency. The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh. Silverman shows that analogy, so discredited by much of twentieth-century thought, offers a much more promising view of human relations. In the West, the emblematic story of turning away is that of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the heroes of Silverman's sweeping new reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, the modern heirs to the old, analogical view of the world, also gravitate to this myth. They embrace the correspondences that bind Orpheus to Eurydice and acknowledge their kinship with others past and present. The first half of this book assembles a cast of characters not usually brought together: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Lou-Andréas Salomé, Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wilhelm Jensen, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. The second half is devoted to three contemporary artists, whose works we see in a moving new light: Terrence Malick, James Coleman, and Gerhard Richter. 

Cover photo of Gerhard Richter's painting, Betty (1977).

James Coleman

Cantz Verlag, 2002

That which is seen and the act of seeing have long been preoccupations of Irish-born artist James Coleman. Having rejected painting in the 1970s, Coleman turned to the reproductive media of video and film, as well as theater projects, but his preferred format remains photography displayed through large-scale slide projection. Extraordinarily precise, both pictorially and narratively, his audio visual works are reminiscent of scenes from daily life, film, and literature, offering tightly orchestrated social situations shot in in colorful, multiple fade-over stills accompanied by spoken text with a highly differentiated soundtrack--but with a narrative structure that remains enigmatic. This publication features a detailed essay by noted film theorist Kaja Silverman and a specially reconstructed version of Coleman's 1973 slide projection Seagulls. 

World Spectators

Stanford University Press, 2000

Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in highly innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and Being that has been in place since Plato’s parable of the cave. It is, essentially, an essay on what could be called “world love,” the possibility and necessity for psychic survival of a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround. Here, the author takes her cue from Freud’s assertion that the “loss of reality” associated with psychosis is a function of a disturbance not in the capacity to reason or perceive, but rather in the capacity for world love, the libidinal and semiotic circuity by means of which such love actualizes itself.

In an implicit challenge to poststructuralist thought, the author claims that this love is always in response to a call issued by the world—that the world has, as it were, a vocation: its beauty ought to be seen. We must think of our own being-in-the world as a response to a primordial calling out to respond to this beauty. We are, the author suggests, at the very core of our being, summoned to what she terms world spectatorship.

Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenological elaboration of care as the being distinctive of human being and the primarily Lacanian conceptualization of the language of desire specific to each human subject, this metapsychology of love attempts to integrate issues in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies. 

(Cover photo by Ulla Ziemann)

SPEAKING ABOUT GODARD

New York University Press, 1998

Probably the most prominent living filmmaker, and one of the foremost directors of the postwar era, Jean Luc-Godard has received astonishingly little critical attention in the United States. With Speaking about Godard, leading film theorist Kaja Silverman and filmmaker Harun Farocki have made one of the most significant contributions to film studies in recent memory: a lively set of conversations about Godard and his major films, from Contempt to Passion.

Combining the insights of a feminist film theorist with those of an avant-garde filmmaker, these eight dialogues–each representing a different period of Godard's film production, and together spanning his entire career–get at the very heart of his formal and theoretical innovations, teasing out, with probity and grace, the ways in which image and text inform one another throughout Godard's oeuvre. Indeed, the dialogic format here serves as the perfect means of capturing the rhythm of Godard's ongoing conversation with his own medium, in addition to shedding light on how a critic and a director of films respectively interpret his work.

As it takes us through Godard's films in real time, Speaking about Godard conveys the sense that we are at the movies with Silverman and Farocki, and that we, as both student and participant, are the ultimate beneficiaries of the performance of this critique. Accessible, informative, witty, and, most of all, entertaining, the conversations assembled here form a testament to the continuing power of Godard's work to spark intense debate, and reinvigorate the study of one of the great artists of our time.

Cover photo from Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville

THE THRESHOLD OF THE VISIBLE WORLD

 Routledge Press, 1996

In the Threshold of the Visible World Kaja Silverman creates an aesthetic model capable of assisting us in the seemingly impossible task of loving bodies which are both different than our own, and culturally despised. At the heart of this model is a provocative rethinking of idealization and the culturally transformative uses to which it might be put. Linking Benjamin's notion of the aura with Brecht's notion of alienation, she articulates an entirely new set of formal parameters for political representation.

The Threshold  of the Visible World also provides a psychoanalytic examination of the field of vision. While offering an extended discussion of the gaze, the look, and the image, Silverman is concerned above all else with establishing what it means to see. She shows that our look is always impinged upon by our desires and our anxieties, and mediated in complex ways by the representations which surround us. These psychic and social constraints lead us to commit involuntary acts of visual violence against others. Silverman explores the conscious and unconscious circumstances under which such acts of violence might be undone, and the look induced to see and affirm what is abject, and alien to itself. 

(Cover photo by Edward Steichen)

MALE SUBJECTIVITY AT THE MARGINS

Routledge Press, 1992

In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman provides a feminist and psychoanalytic reading of a variety of masculinities which fall outside the phallic pale—masculinities which defy the logic of paternal succession, and which in so doing might be said to say 'no' to power. Since the forms of male subjectivity which most centrally concern Silverman are those which occupy a space which has been traditionally defined as 'feminine', this book is also an extended investigation into the category of femininity. 

THE ACOUSTIC MIRROR: THE FEMALE VOICE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA

Indiana University Press, 1988

"The Acoustic Mirror" combines an extended reflection on sound and voice in cinema with a critical examination of the possibilities and impossibilities of current theoretical approaches as they listen, or not, to questions of sexual difference. The result is a vitally new understanding that takes us from the terms of the representation of sexual difference to an anatomy of female subjectivity which will be widely influential."  —Stephen Heath

"Displaying with equal mastery the discourses of feminist film theory and psychoanalysis....Silverman  develops a provocative theory of the constitution of female subjectivity that reconciles the claims of the body with those of language. An original work likely to have significant impact on all those with an interest in the vibrant intersection of feminism, film theory, and psychoanalysis—which is to say a large and growing audience of men and women." —Naomi Schor

THE SUBJECT OF SEMIOTICS

Oxford University Press, 1983

Through the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and others, the kindred disciplines of semiotics and structuralism have stirred enormous interest within European and  American intellectual circles in recent years. With their focus on the ways in which signs, symbols, and cultural phenomena of all kinds convey meaning, these burgeoning theoretical fields have had a special impact on the analysis of film and literature. In this provocative book Kaja Silverman undertakes a new and challenging reading of recent semiotic and structuralist theory, arguing that films, novels, and poems cannot be studied in isolation from their viewers and readers.