Abstract/Summary

This thesis is a revisitation of issues in art history in the wake of Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real (1996) and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993). It turns on a central research question: art or textuality? Variously grounded in the proposals of Object-Orientated Ontology (OOO), posthumanism, and Hegelian-Lacanian theory, I identify a move within contemporary criticism to forward a notion of pure and undefiled objecthood in art. The result, I argue, is a transcendental reading of paintings. In order to counter this narrative, and subverting a formulation from Foster, I aim to stage a ‘textual return’, leading me to question a variety of discourses within recent Art Theory: neuro-phenomenology; new materialism; algorithmic theory; immanence philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Although this thesis does not call for any claim of recoverable history or a psychoanalytical Real in art, it does read both a difference and an impossibility of difference between images and language; an inescapable structure, form, and narrative that haunt critics’ own (political) resistance. My offered chapters of this thesis engage with three main areas in Art History: Self-portrait and Faciality (Chapter 1), Lines, Geometry and The Visual Field (Chapter 2), and Paint, Psychoanalysis and Narrative (Chapter 3), which lead to discussions around the historical, scientifical, psychoanalytical, or political notions of transparency, authenticity, equilibrium, transformation, representation, materiality, visuality, affect, and identities in Samantha L. Smith’s ‘Blinding the Viewer: Rembrandt’s 1628 Self-portrait’ (2015), Claudio Celis Bueno’s ‘The Face Revisited: Using Deleuze and Guattari to Explore the Politics of Algorithmic Face Recognition’ (2020), Gilles Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Joan Copjec’s ‘The Strut of Vision: Seeing’s Corporeal Support’ (2004), Charles Blanc’s The Grammar of Painting and Engraving (Grammaire des arts du dessin) (1874), Babak Saleh and others’ ‘Toward automated discovery of artistic influence’ (2016), Dany Nobus’s ‘From Sense to Sensation: Bacon, Pasting Paint and the Futility of Lacanian Psychoanalysis’ (2019), and Parveen Adams’s ‘The Violence of Paint’ (1995). These notions, in turn, are caught up in the collapse, discrepancy, and inconsistency of theorists’ own terms, whose indivisible object, either art or literary criticism, is questioned in this thesis.