Conjuring Bodies: Kofman's Lesson on Death
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13534645.2011.530539
ISSN1460-700X
Autores Tópico(s)Bioethics and Human Rights Issues
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death: Remarks on The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolas Tulp (1632)’, in Selected Writings, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, eds. Thomas Albrecht, Georgia Albert, and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p.239. 2 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’. p.237. 3 After painting The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolas Tulp in 1632 (which is housed at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague), Rembrandt portrayed another dissection in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deijman in 1656 (which hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam). Despite the fact that the second Anatomy Lesson is more graphic than the first–‘the cadaver occupies the central place and is shown eviscerated, the operating physician having detached with a cut of scissors the dome of the scalp’–Kofman claims in ‘Conjuring Death’ that this painting is no less Apollinian than the first. Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.240. 4 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.237. 5 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.237. 6 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.237. 7 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.237-38. 8 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, eds. Thomas Albrecht, Georgia Albert, and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p.21. 9 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.238. 10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.2. 11 Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p.128. 12 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty: The Uncanniness of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray’, in Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, trans. Duncan Large, eds. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 13 Sarah Kofman, Childhood of Art, p.107. 14 Sarah Kofman, Childhood of Art, p.108. 15 Although we will not address Kofman's strategic use of two of Goya's Black Paintings (1819-1923) in ‘Conjuring Death’, it is important to note that she contrasts Rembrandt's first Anatomy Lesson and the doctors’ fascination for the book with Goya's Witch's Sabbath or the Pilgrimage of Saint Isidore (both housed at the Museo de Prado in Madrid) and the crowd's terrified fascination with an unknown object. To begin to think through the fascination at work in Goya's paintings, Kofman suggests one must look to the notion of fascination developed by Blanchot in The Space of Literature. In his ‘Introduction’ to Kofman's Selected Writings, Derrida writes: ‘One would have to inquire once again […] into what Blanchot analyzes under the words “fascination”, “remains”, “cadaverous presence”, and “cadaverous resemblance” in the “Two Versions of the Imaginary”’, p.10. 16 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.239. 17 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIII trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966). 18 Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p.111. 19 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, p.87. The patient in question is the ‘Rat Man’. 20 For a rich analysis of Freud's notion of the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, see Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, pp.110-120. 21 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, p.88. 22 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, pp.88-89. 23 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, p.89. 24 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, p.89. 25 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, pp.89-90. 26 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, p.90. 27 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, p.87. 28 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, p.88. 29 Sarah Kofman, Childhood of Art, p.122, citing Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE.XIII, p.188. 30 Sarah Kofman, Childhood of Art, p.128. 31 Sarah Kofman, Childhood of Art, p.128. 32 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1979), p.75. All translations provided are my own. 33 Pleshette DeArmitt, ‘Sarah Kofman's Art of Affirmation, or the “Non-illusory Life of an Illusion”’, in Sarah Kofman's Corpus, eds. Tina Chanter and Pleshette DeArmitt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 34 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, p.62. 35 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, p.61. 36 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 67. 37 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 59. 38 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 59. 39 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 59. 40 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 58-59. 41 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 58. 42 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 58. 43 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 58. 44 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 61. 45 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 59. 46 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 60. 47 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, p.11. 48 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, P.61 49 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Random House, 1968). 50 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.94. 51 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 61. 52 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 61. 53 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 62. 54 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 61. 55 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 60. 56 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 60. 57 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 58. 58 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, 59. 59 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.21. 60 Kofman identifies the cadaver ‘by name and nickname as Adrian Adriaenz, called the kid, Het Kind’, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.294, ft.5. 61 In order to fully think through this ‘there’ of ‘là’ of the corpse, one would benefit from Derrida's superb interpretation of the ‘little word là’ in Kofman's text. He writes: ‘the whole lesson on the Lesson questions and teaches this here [cela], this right there [ce là], this being-right-there of the body [corps] or of the corpse in the corpus of the work of art’, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.1. 62 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.238. 63 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.238. 64 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.9. 65 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.239 66 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.239. 67 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.239. 68 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.239. 69 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE, XIII, pp.110. 70 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.18. 71 Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, p.239. 72 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.21. 73 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.8. 74 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.21. 75 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.10. 76 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.10. 77 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.10. 78 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.10-11. 79 While this is a very artful interpretation of Kofman's final essay and one to which we would like to subscribe and do in many ways, Derrida's powerful reading, which cannot and should not be denied, may also be, in his own words, ‘a ruse to conjure away death in my turn, and, through this ruse, which I do not deny, a sort of protestation against her death’. However, it would be folly to deny that in Kofman's work there is, as Derrida testifies to, an irrepressible ‘denial of negativity’ that expresses itself as ‘an invincible affirmation whose desire can never be denied’, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, p.10 and p13. 80 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.47. 81 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.41. 82 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.40. 83 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.41. 84 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.33. 85 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.41. 86 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.36. 87 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.41. 88 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.40. 89 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.41. 90 Sarah Kofman, ‘The Imposture of Beauty’, p.41.
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