Editorial: On disfiguration

Canadian Comparative Literature Association, University of Regina, juin 2018, 2018

Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 23-42.

What happens when a face begins to lose its familiar form, falls apart, becomes faceless? And how can language mediate the barely thinkable experience of the gaze facing the formless? To answer these questions, this chapter delves into the formal work and affective agency generated by several encounters between subjects and disfigured faces that took place during the second decade of the twentieth century. Reading the faceless images in modernist texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner in dialogue with the war experiences of the gueules cass é es (broken faces), the survivors of the First World War who suffered extensive facial injuries, as rendered by Bernard Lafont and Henriette Rémi, I argue that rather than simply represented the faceless faces are performed through the formal work of affects that structure their discursive forms. Not only do the witness accounts from the battlefront and the literary fictions share an emotional force of the traumatic images but they also enable affects of shock, disgust, and fascination to unfold and shape the texture of these faceless encounters. Shifting from an ontology of the face toward the formal analysis of the faceless encounters, the aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that far from merely providing a narrative theme or a striking visual motif, the faceless face operates as a fi gure that embraces, on the one hand, the aesthetics of the formless, and, on the other, the experience of the real.

2021

What happens when forms fall apart? And how do affects such as fear, shock, fascination, and desire drive and shape formal disturbances in modern literature, cinema, and contemporary art? Opening an interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural affect theory, media philosophy, and literary studies, Tomáš Jirsa explores how specific affective operations disrupt form only to generate new formations. To demonstrate the importance of the structural work of mutually interacting affects, Disformations provides close readings of four intermedia figures stretched out across modernist fictions, contemporary video art, and posthuman visual experiments-the faceless face, the wallpaper pattern, the garbage dump, and the empty chair. Analyzing a wide range of texts, images, and audiovisual works, from Vincent van Gogh and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner, to Francis Bacon, Michel Tournier, Ingmar Bergman, Eugène Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Kosuth, and Jan Šerých, this book opens up a new avenue for addressing how aesthetic forms desubjectify affects to mobilize their mediality and performative qualities. Jirsa's innovative theoretical framework and incisive readings offer a fresh inquiry into how artistic media produce their own figural thinking and in so doing compel us to think with them anew.

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment.

2016

With the development of cultural studies about the human body, predominantly with regard to body perceptions in certain forms of contemporary culture (including popular culture and mass-media), my study investigates the reflection of abnormality and corporeal monstrosity in some forms of contemporary visual culture, and proposes to illustrate, in a large context of historical anthropology, how a form of voyeurism first incriminated in the 1930s (once the exposure of 'monsters' in fairs and salons was prohibited) reappears in indirect ways in the contemporary culture, particularly in certain elite forms of visual art and theoretical studies. The study first documents how, with the passing of time, old voyeuristic practices have gradually evolved, in principle, to total interdiction and dissimulation, even to the denial of people's curiosity, fears or instinctive disgust towards physical abnormality. And, if trivial observation can account for the fact that nowadays popular culture still tends to maintain old voyeuristic practices under some false pretences (like certain American medical dramas in search of high TV ratings), my study would like to point out at two different ways of monstrosity approach, one from the inside (when the subject-artist accepts to exhibit his/her own handicap), and the other from the " peaks " of high art. Both ways (German film director Niko von Glasow and art photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, respectively) propose artistic and ideologically credible approaches to contemporary monstrosity or physical disabilities. In this second section of my study, I chose to focus the title theme on a medical leitmotiv: the thalidomide.

Bodies that Matter Again: Transformative Potentialities of Shape Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performing Arts, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Despite the many acts of denial and resistance embodied in the phrase "death of the avant-garde," interest in experimental, innovative, and politically radical performance continues to animate theatre and performance studies. For all their attacks upon tradition and critical institutions, the historical and subsequent avant-gardes remain critical touchstones for continued research in the disciplines of theatre, performance studies, film and cinema studies, media study, art history, visual studies, dance, music, and nearly every area of the performing arts. "Avant-Gardes in Performance" features exciting new scholarship on radical and avant-garde performance. By engaging with the charged term "avant-garde," we consider performance practices and events that are formally avant-garde, as defined by experimentation and breaks with traditional structures, practices, and content; historically avant-garde, defined within the global aesthetic movements of the early twentieth century, including modernism and its many global aftermaths; and politically radical, defined by identification with extreme political movements on the right and left alike. The series brings together close attention to a wide range of innovative performances with critical analyses that challenge conventional academic practices.

MATRIZes, 2019

This paper is about experiencing images as an interactive imagistic process, as pointed by Bergson in his book Matter and Memory through a dubious aspect of photographic portrait in terms of its repudiated reception within public space. We present a series of photographs taken in four Latin American cities which depict intentionally defaced headshots. Enlisting the studies of Deleuze, Bergson, Benjamin and Barthes, we advance that these photographs are documentary testimony of different reactions. The photographs urge us to move beyond what the disfigured faces mean as iconic signs, making us see them as indicial of the dynamic interaction between the portraits and the anonymous disfiguring agents as an image. RESUMO Este artigo é sobre experienciar imagens como processo imagético interativo, como apontado por Bergson no livro Matéria e Memória, por meio de um aspecto dúbio do retrato fotográfico, em termos da sua recepção repudiada no espaço público. Apresentamos uma série de fotografias de quatro cidades latino-americanas que retratam rostos desfigurados intencionalmente. Recorrendo aos estudos de Deleuze, Bergson, Benjamin e Barthes, apontamos essas fotografias como testemunho documental de diferentes reações. As fotografias nos incitam a ir além do que os rostos desfigurados significam como signos icônicos, para serem vistas como indícios da interação dinâmica entre os retratos e os agentes desfigurantes anônimos, como uma imagem. Palavras-chave: Retrato, desfiguração, propaganda, Bergson, imagem a PhD candidate in Social and Institutional Psychology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Master of Arts-Fine Arts at the Concordia University (2013). Orcid: 0000-0002-7058-9637.

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2006

Developing John Dewey's thought regarding the unity of body and mind and his criticism of traditional notions of aesthetic experience, Richard Shusterman has proposed a discipline of aesthetics (somaesthetics), the purpose of which is to foster inquiry into the aesthetic dimensions of the human body.1 These agreements aside, Shusterman is critical of Dewey's emphasis on the consummatory phase of aesthetic experience, that is, the phase in which the elements of an experience culminate in a fulfilling and organic moment that punctuates the flow of everyday life. Martin Jay too develops this line of criticism by arguing that aesthetic experi ence need not be consummatory in nature and that, with regard to somaesthetic experience, there are a wide array of "transgressive body techniques" that are just as aesthetically valuable as the kinds of experiences advocated by Dewey. Further, Jay argues that these techniques also perform an important political function since they draw attention to the violence that underlies the democratic process, reveal that there are alternatives to a rather homogenous public sphere, and illustrate the need for political criticism.2 Since Dewey held that aesthetic experience is essential for a democratic culture, it seems, then, that he would indeed espouse the work of transgressive body artists since such work can be seen as contributing to the pursuit of a democratic culture. For these reasons, Jay concludes that even though they are blatantly nonconsummatory in nature, transgressive body techniques have both aesthetic and political value and should not be dismissed outright. In this essay I will address Jay's argument first by assessing the aesthetic value of transgressive body techniques and then will go on to say something about their political efficacy. Taking the work of Orlan as my example, I will argue that such techniques have minimal aesthetic value and that what aesthetic value they do have is mitigated by their primarily critical aims. I will also suggest that traditional performance arts such as dance and theatre also utilize the body, but do so in a manner that is more conducive to the realization of a democratic culture.

The general subject of this paper is the precariousness of contemporary art. This precariousness has many faces and meanings, and in fact all of them are aspects of the general precariousness that characterizes the present-day post-globalized world in all aspects of life: from economy and labour to security, or beliefs and values. The precarious condition of contemporary art is an effect of a historical process that began with Romanticism. Hegel had perhaps the deepest insight into this process when introduced the topic of the end of art. From the times of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics to the present that topic has been an important way of dealing with the progressive process of art becoming ever more precarious. Many discourses try to come to terms with this condition by aiming to identify allegedly decadent traits or tendencies. Thus, since the nineteen-sixties some tendencies have been more and more present in many varieties of contemporary arts. I am referring to phenomena such as those that appear in the title of this paper: deartification, deaestheticization and politicization. We could say that these are common features of most contemporary artworks that deepened the discoveries and inventions of the classical avant-gardes. But any of these phenomena can be attributed several meanings; each has its own history. Let us consider Crystal of Resistance, the work of an important present-day artist: Thomas Hirschhorn. This is a good specific case on which to test some generalizations. The work filled every corner of the available space of the Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale last summer. When you enter the pavilion you receive a printed " artist statement " which is rather long and prolix containing the following vehement, ambitious and radical statements. For example: " I believe that art is universal, I believe that art is autonomous, I believe that art can provoke a * [email protected]. This article is a partial result of the research project FFI2008-04339 " The Historicity of Aesthetic Experience II: continuities and discontinuities between a purely aesthetic experience and moral experience " .

Performance Research, 2018

This essay explores the place of the body in the work of VALIE EXPORT and Unica Zürn through the notion of ‘disfiguration’, a notion which connotes an undoing, a deformation. In considering the political implications of artistic practices which disfigure, or deform the body, this essay reflects on the historical significance and conceptual underpinning of this practice. By tracing the history of the cut, as both injury and technique in EXPORT’s work, I show that the Riß (a word that gives meanings that encompass tear, rent, crack, split, rip, break, gap and laceration, and which emerges from the cut), should be understood as both, a technique in art, and the result of societal disfiguration or distortion. Through analysing EXPORT’s Expanded Cinema works, performances, texts and unfinished films, by tracing the transmutation of writing and drawing to media such as video and photography this essay explores the methodological and historical influence of Unica Zürn on EXPORT’s work. Through their disfiguration, I argue these works figure an ‘underground history’, and as such a (return of the repressed) temporally placed para-present of the body, where instincts and passions are understood as deformed and dis-figured (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947). By reading EXPORT and Zürn back onto this ‘underground history’ I want to ask how this distortion is gendered. How and why do they disfigure the body anagrammatically through image and language to its eventual obliteration? What are the conditions of possibility for these practices? And considering these practices, which tend towards their own break (Riß), what is left of the body in art?