Magritte's drawings and Lacan's Subject theory: Gaze, Encounter with the world

마그리트 회화와 라캉의 주체론 - 응시, 세계와의 조우

  • Received : 2007.01.16
  • Accepted : 2007.02.26
  • Published : 2007.12.31

Abstract

The subject is connected with a structure named "The Symbolic" to Lacan, but he denied that the subject is explained simply as a fruit of language and "Other". From his point of view, passing through Subject, De-formation and Crack over it is designated as foundation of generation and creation rather than our destined defect. It should not be understood that subject of "The Real" is a concept of the subject free itself from restraint of "The Symbolic". However, this does not mean he asserts "Subject" is something incapable of being controlled by the unknown power. The problem is that this autonomous existence meets inside of it with something "more than one's own self" by "circulating around itself" like a permanent star. This is the indication of a "stranger in the middle of my privacy", or "extimit$\'{e}$", a coined-word by Lacan. Perhaps "Subject" is nothing more than the name of distance of object which is "too hot" to come close, and of this circulating movement. It's because of this object that the real subject stands against generalization and the subject can't be restored to any place in symbolic order-even though it is empty. The part which is told from Lacan's structural theory, that is to say, an importance to Lacan is that his Subject theory is not suggested or denied as a manual structure. On the contrary, it is a study of the relationship between the settled symbol that included in "real subject which is a unconscious one" and the symbolic subject hold- that is a metaphysical subject in general meaning. In Lacan's enlarged concept of subject beyond symbolic reality, it is noticeable that it gives justifiability to the union of a medium of different nature in artistic expression. We can recognize that the unconscious world is a living space which enables it to be a "condition of human being", not something dark under the surface of water through Magritte's(Rene Magritte, 1898~1967) surrealistic works. In other words, Magritte's art secures a core dimension of human nature through a mysterious gap of conscious and settled space. Magritte's drawings often evokes strange and unsettling feelings in people who view his paintings. This is because routine objects are found in "unsuitable" places from which we usually find them in our everyday lives. "Reality" in Magritte's paintings makes it aware that it is a strained field of concealment and disclosure basically between truths, and we can learn that his behavior to overturn to paint in-visible things is finally an effort to restore the "real subject" to the viewer's reality. In other words, such reversion arouses a nostalgic desire for the objects existing in their original appearance as they are - natural condition that our gaze had not been distorted yet by anamorphic stains. - and the state when we are conscious of them normally. Such desire offers an opportunity for us to get out of mental depression rather than operates to us as an abnormal crack. It's a successive process of effort to search for lost subject and Paradise Lost facing up to reality of subject human that is to be a subject of world and life are ousted from their place by structure and authority of culture.

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