Luminous Blindness: on the Misencounters of Image and Word

• In Event: The Expansion of the Arts III: Mediums and Materials

Abstract

In a well-known theoretical intervention, W J T Mitchel argues that if it is hard to keep language out painting and photography, it is equally difficult to keep visuality out of writing, "though the impulse to do so is adumbrated in the topos of the blind poet." Taking as my point of departure the notion that all mediums are impure and unstable, in this paper I seek to discuss specific articulations of photography and literature that defy what Derrida calls the law of the genre and whose signification is based on an apparent misencounter between image and word. I am particularly interested in complex intermedial artifacts that adopt the format of the "book," including photo-books or photo-texts, and that are the result of collaboration. It is my contention that works such as Prosa del observatorio by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar and the photographer Antonio Gálvez, El baño de Frida by the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide and the writer Mario Bellatin, and El infarto del alma by the Chilean avant-garde writer Diamela Eltit and the photographer Paz Errázuriz, openly question the notion of the blindness of literature. On the contrary, each of them shows that writing makes visible the dual regime of every image— stopgap and gap, veil and rip in the veil, sublimation and de-sublimation– each time questioning the dimension of repression in the image and the dimension of the resurgence of the repressed, or, in other words, that which results from the powers of the imagination and any exploration of the real.

Author

• Gabriela Nouzeilles, Princeton University