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A review by scrapespaghetti
The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han
2.0
In J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon,” the protagonist retreats to a house by the sea to recover his sight after falling ill. His temporary blindness heightens his other senses. From within, dream images well up. Soon, they seem more real to him than reality; obsessively, he gives himself over to them. Time and again, he summons forth the mysterious coastal landscape with its blue cliffs. In his mind’s eye, he clambers down rock stairs to a cave. There he meets a mysterious sorceress, the embodiment of his desire. After a beam of light strikes his eye as his bandages are being changed, he comes to believe that it has burned away his fantastic visions. His sight returns, but the dream images do not. Filled with despair, he resolves to destroy his eyes in order to see more. His scream of pain is also a joyous ejaculation:
Quickly Maitland pushed back the branches of the willows and walked down on to the bank. A moment later, Judith heard his shout above the cries of the gulls. The sound came half in pain and half in triumph, and she ran down to the trees uncertain whether he had injured himself or discovered something pleasing. Then she saw him standing on the bank, his head raised to the sunlight, the bright carmine on his cheeks and hands, an eager, unrepentant Oedipus.11
In his reading, Slavoj Žižek assumes that Maitland’s actions unfold in an idealist, Platonic dispositive: “how are we to pass from ever-changing ‘false’ material phenomenal reality to the true reality of Ideas?” What does it mean to go “from the cave in which we can perceive only shadows to the daylight in which we can catch a glimpse of the sun?”12 Žižek mistakenly claims that Maitland stares into the sun hoping “to view the scene in its entirety.”13 In truth, however, Maitland is following an anti-Platonic dispositive. By destroying his eyes, he has made bold to withdraw from the world of truth and hypervisibility, to retreat into the cave — a twilight space of dreams and desire.
closing your eyes visibly signifies as much.
The corollary of hypervisibility is the dismantling of thresholds and borders. Thresholds and transitions are zones of mystery and riddle — here, the atopic Other begins.
Quickly Maitland pushed back the branches of the willows and walked down on to the bank. A moment later, Judith heard his shout above the cries of the gulls. The sound came half in pain and half in triumph, and she ran down to the trees uncertain whether he had injured himself or discovered something pleasing. Then she saw him standing on the bank, his head raised to the sunlight, the bright carmine on his cheeks and hands, an eager, unrepentant Oedipus.11
In his reading, Slavoj Žižek assumes that Maitland’s actions unfold in an idealist, Platonic dispositive: “how are we to pass from ever-changing ‘false’ material phenomenal reality to the true reality of Ideas?” What does it mean to go “from the cave in which we can perceive only shadows to the daylight in which we can catch a glimpse of the sun?”12 Žižek mistakenly claims that Maitland stares into the sun hoping “to view the scene in its entirety.”13 In truth, however, Maitland is following an anti-Platonic dispositive. By destroying his eyes, he has made bold to withdraw from the world of truth and hypervisibility, to retreat into the cave — a twilight space of dreams and desire.
closing your eyes visibly signifies as much.
The corollary of hypervisibility is the dismantling of thresholds and borders. Thresholds and transitions are zones of mystery and riddle — here, the atopic Other begins.