| Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon Contributor(s): Weiss, Allen S. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0791421562 ISBN-13: 9780791421567 Publisher: State University of New York Press OUR PRICE: $32.25 Product Type: Paperback Published: October 1994 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Philosophy | Aesthetics |
| Dewey: 111.85 |
| LCCN: 93-50160 |
| Physical Information: 0.4" H x 5.91" W x 9.02" (0.54 lbs) 158 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon analyzes the limits of the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to aesthetic discourse, and in doing so expands the range of non-normative paradigms of spectatorial identification and sexual identity. These considerations are based on the epistemological premises that the ideal seldom coincides with the empirical, and that identification is always partial, fragmented, heterogeneous, mixed, such that total identification would be tantamount to delirium. The imagination is but the ephemera of partial objects torn from culture and history, the transgression by fragmentation of a contemporary cosmos all too unified and all too controlled to admit the most singular, and idiosyncratic, phantasms of our desires. Thus we must posit an aesthetics where theory and interpretation are juxtaposed to, or traced above, the effects of the passions, where a muscular contraction or spasm is worth as much as a concept. It is here, at the fragile limit between iconophilia and iconoclasm, that the ironies and exigencies of poetic justice reside. |