“Perhaps there is nomination, language, thought, desire, or intention only there where there is this movement still for thinking, desiring, naming that which gives itself neither to be known, experienced, nor lived-in the sense in which presence, existence, determination regulate the economy of knowing, experiencing, and living. In this sense one can think, desire, and say only the impossible, according to the measureless measure [mesure sans mesure] of the impossible. […] One can desire, name, think in the proper sense of these words, if there is one, only to the immeasuring extent [dans la mesure démesurante] that one desires, names, thinks still or already, that one still lets announce itself what nevertheless cannot present itself as such to experience, to knowing: in short, here a gift that cannot make itself (a) present [un don qui ne peut pas se faire présent].”1

“Lacking illusions, lacking shelter, today’s universe is divided between boredom (increasingly anguished at the prospect of losing its resources, through depletion) or (when the spark of the symbolic is maintained and desire to speak explodes) abjection and piercing laughter”.2 There still predominates a kind of “metaphysics of absence”:3 a reality that would consist in the hidden that escapes. Inf initude affects everything: desire, discourse, dialogue and even the sublime. Yet, nevertheless, what casts a spell over us is nothing else but the dull, which is to say, we are narcotized by the abysm of banality.4 Fortunately there are still some artists, like Daniela De Lorenzo, who are capable of creating mysterious works or, perhaps better said, of giving free rein to apparitions;5 her photographs, videos and sculptures are, to a certain degree, dreams in which identity is interwoven in the metamorphosis of differences, forcing us to take into account the hysterical dimension of the subject. As we well know, dreams are not neatly wrapped up in a necessarily pleasant form, if anything the opposite is true. With their inexplicable undercurrents, they are the ground for the sedimentation of a singular restlessness, something that might be prolonged in wakefulness in the true skin of the subject: clothing, that which ensures the passage from the sentience of the body to meaning.6 With a performative conception of photography, this artist manages to dilate the instantaneous7 and makes images evanescent. Daniela De Lorenzo puts her imagination into motion taking as a pretext the catalepsy of hysterics, that “expressive statue” that demands the photographic gaze8 but without being detained in a conclusive pose, more so the contrary, deriving to a kind of choreographic temporality.

Similarly to what happens in catharsis, rejection and repulsion go hand in hand with a fascination for the extreme, and here protection could be the moment before an unconditional surrender, to that acquiescence which is so difficult to attain. Yet this rigorous art of looking after oneself based on the singular estrangement of the body, something similar to what Lacan called extimité (extimacy), is a complex process in which we establish a profound relationship with the Thing.9 That barred subject Lacan10 talked about brings us closer to the desire that can open up from indeterminacy, unsayability or even destinerant. Derrida claimed that “Consequently, I believe that similarly to death, unsayability, what I would also call destinerant, the possibility of a gesture never reaching its destination, is the condition of the movement of desire which would otherwise be stillborn”.11 Desire is a mixture of enjoyment and dissatisfaction that cannot be resolved in the form of an “essential absence”; perhaps the abandonment of different suffering has to do with our renunciation of ourselves and, of course, with the difficulty in establishing an encounter with the Other. Lyotard spoke of the postmodern formulation, in an conflictive imaginary, like leaving the answer hanging in the air, without excluding the possibility that there might be something of the Other, “something of lack and something of desire”.12 The felt sculptures, for instance Cura la tua destra (2005) or Dimentico subito o non dimentico mai (2006), by Daniela De Lorenzo function like transitional objects: “the shred of blanket or beloved shard the child’s lips or hands never stop touching”.13 There can be no doubting that letting-go and castration intervene in the emergence of the subject. “Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire”.14

What is missing is that other that is crucial in the desire that sometimes cuts through this cut not merely to find nakedness but to feel the insuperable fear of f initude. The indifference, associated with the problematic death instinct, is something primordial for this subject who is a gap into which the “passionate attachments” can fall.15 We should understand the death instinct as an ontological derailment, a gesture of disinvestiture remitting to the dissolution of the libido: what dislocates the subject (in the process of its constitution) is the traumatic encounter with pleasure. The I, specularly constituted, believes that around it there is a only a territory full of rubble and, precisely because of this, it is fortif ied;16 seeing oneself as a unitary subject implies a form of visual repression. If desire always leads to the impossibility of satisfying it, the instinct finds its satisfaction in the movement aimed at repressing this satisfaction: “while the subject of desire is grounded in the constitutive lack (it ex-sists in so far as it is in search of the missing Object-Cause), the subject of drive is grounded in a constitutive surplus –that is to say, in the excessive presence of some Thing that is inherently ‘impossible’ and should not be here, in our present reality –the Thing which, of course, is ultimately the subject itself ”.17 In the felt sculptures what is missing is the body. Derrida sustained that the experience of the work of art, among other things, is only possible because there is no full presence.18 We might well think that nakedness, that decisive action19 is a mix of sensitive plenitude and resistance to socially agreed codification. Daniela de Lorenzo’s work alludes constantly to a radical nakedness, that is to say, to a gesture in which we literally leave out skin. Felt, a tremendously connotated material since its use by an artist like Beuys in his totemic-shamanic process or Robert Morris in function of his aesthetic of the anti-formal, is a morbid surface20 of colour and neutral characteristics, though likewise allegoric, of the epidermis. In Daniela de Lorenzo’s “gravitatory” sculptures we can detect the print of the human body. These uninhabited habits function like transmitters of feelings, especially of that which we (Freudianly) call the uncanny. To a certain extent these forms have something of the “homely”, and we could view them as unfinished clothing. We know only too well that human beings are dressed bodies;21 Bataille himself claimed that clothing is associated with eroticism as an aspect of the internal experience unlike animal sexuality, and when hiding the body, clothes excite sexual curiosity and create in the beholder the desire to take them off.22 Nonetheless, when we contemplate the pieces by Daniela De Lorenzo we do not want to undress anybody but rather to recover the body, fill the emptiness, project, forgive the literalism, the images of the videos on these phantasmal felts. The dynamic of corporal absence and presence that seems to engage the spectator and the interpretation in a task of transference, always looking at least twice at this symptomatic situation.23

Mario Perniola put forward the concept of the body as extraneous clothing, something which could be extended to a clothing libido where an equally material and speculative excitation could arise in which the subject can be located in the anonymous, 24 in the unsettling felt as used by Daniela De Lorenzo. The body which neutral sexuality has experience of is not a machine but a thing, taking into account that “the experience of the skin and the body as a totality of tissues is for its exteriority as opposite as one can get with respect to ethico-aesthetic sensualist spiritualism”.25 If clothing can be a transmitter of the attitude and character of the subject wearing it, one could also think of the skin as a tissue, an exciting garment, something that “surrounds us and envelops us”.26 And, of course, Daniela De Lorenzo’s sculptures, remindful of clothing or bodily mould, are more unsettling than erotic, ready to force us to think in the dimension which Hegel would call “sensible certainty”.

The body is a late product, a decanting of the West in which the crucial feature of the fall appears: it is the final weight, one might say, of gravity. That said we could also speak of the body as something disastrous or, even better, as our anxiety laid bare. And that’s where we lose our footing. We have no doubt that dance obsessively covers this folded and refolded skin, smooth and excited, tied or untied, the places of existence, that thrownness that is the body. Bodies, which can cause shock, are essentially slow, just like the instantaneity of gestures, that exhibition of a mediality, can be the cause of stupor. Daniela De Lorenzo’s work, with its intense meditation on corporality over and beyond the metaphysics of presence, shows us that one must be prepared to listen to the unheard-of. But, how can we touch the body with the non-corporality of meaning? Perhaps we have to make meaning a touch, a texture, a demeanour. This touch is the limit, the spacing of existence. After these digressions in which I wanted to give account of an extraordinary event, I believe that the decisive thing is to touch things with the tongue. “Touch the interruption of meaning” as Jean-Luc Nancy says, “and that, for me, is what interests me in the matter of the body”.27 Touching the bottom or, in other words, becoming aware of the ground. With my foot, I touch myself; it is all about touching the outside. The self is a touch of that exteriority,28 but above all else the body is a tone, a tension (drifting toward cadaverous rigidity or the inconsistency of putrefaction). “A body is what pushes the limits toward extremes, blindly, tentatively, feeling one’s way, touching. Experiencing what? An experience of “feeling”, of touching oneself. [...] The body is the experience of indefinitely touching the untouchable, but in the sense that the untouchable is not something behind, nor on the inside or an interior, neither a mass nor a God. The untouchable is that which touches. We could also put it another way: what touches, that which is touched, is of the order of emotion”.29

In the work of Daniela de Lorenzo there is a logic of, at once, sense and sensation, in this profoundness which is surface,30 in the epidermal boundary that precariously protects us from the world, while continuing to sediment all the circumstances and, ultimately, being the human carnality of the world. Her thought-in-body is rhythmic, spacing, throbbing, giving the time of dance, the passing of the world.31 We ought to assume the non-rational, to understand that our corporality is, on many occasions, hysterical.32 “There is no schema that prescribes freedom as the “meaning” of the world of the bodies, and nor is there a figure that (re)presents the “meaning” of this world. In this way, there is no body, there is no organon of the world – just as there cannot be two “worlds” (plural, contradictory). In this, it is true that the world of the bodies is “unworldly”, anxiety and open wound of the bodies that are both in the clarity of the spacing as well as in the implosion of the black hole. The infinite expenditure of some grams, the shuddering of the created world, is inscribed and written as a temblor of the earth: the dislocation is also the creaking of tectonic gravity, and the ruin of places”.33 The fall (or the splitting we see in the video Agile, made in 2004, by Daniela De Lorenzo) is the active, it is the passing to other levels of sensation. “Most artists” wrote Deleuze in his study of Francis Bacon “when confronted with this problem of intensity in the sensation, seem to have encountered the same response: the difference of intensity is experienced in a fall”.34 All tension is experienced in the fall, in the stumble, in the more inward movement of the clinamen, without bearing implicit misery, failure or suffering. The fall is what is most alive in of the sensation, that in which that sensation is experienced as something living: it is the active rhythm.

Daniela De Lorenzo’s actions merging different times allegorise bodily “absences”, the experience of solitude and estrangement that can produce one’s own skin; as Raffaele Gavarro maintained it is a body “abandoned in the impermeable eternity of inanimate material”.35 The “choreographic” exercises we see in the videos by this artist do not bring to mind the highly rhetorised stylistic of the “perverse”. Freud was convinced that perversion is not subversive, and further, that it is not the key to the Unconscious. The almost obscene exteriorisations of the pervert produce a simultaneous increase in fantasies yet preclude the Unconscious. Perhaps there is in these ideas an implicit mythology of the Unconscious as veil. “the pervert, with his certainty about what brings enjoyment, obfuscates the gap, the ‘burning question’, the stumbling block, that ‘is’ the core of the Unconscious”.36 Zizek sustained that, in the era of the “decline of Oedipus”, when the paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is no longer that of the subject integrated into the paternal law by means of symbolic castration, but rather that of the “polymorphous perverse” subject obeying the Superego mandate to enjoy, we have to hystericize the subject, in other words, recover the battleground between secret desires and symbolical prohibitions. In this strange will to instil an absence (together with an ambiguous fascination for the wound), we witness not only a reappearance of sexualization but also a modulation of what Kant would have called sublime feeling (that mixture of pleasure and repugnance or terror). But then again that Other of hysteria could be invested with the archaic flashes of the noumenal.

In the video Agile, Daniela De Lorenzo has a dancer strike hysterical postures, in a lucid return to Charcot and his singular hysterical theatre in which a singular “deformation of art” is produced.37 Hysteria has been interpreted as a spectacle taken to its limits 38 in which the desire to be touched or, better put, trapped demands the intervention of photography. Daniela De Lorenzo revises the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière while gaining awareness of the strange presence of the overacting of these images. The same estranged gesturality in Dammi il tempo! (2006) induced some critics to consider a kind of demonstration of Tourette’s Syndrome39 in which gestural fluidness is lost. Agamben associated this lack of corporal control in which it seems that the musculature dances with Muybridge’s photos of the man walking, underscoring that this situation is the threshold of a complete disappearance of the bourgeois gesture. Contemporary man will definitively live unfolding a frenetic gesturality,40 accepting without anxiety the complete loss of memory.

The bar of the subject (psychoanalytically speaking, once again) is the opposite to a barrier.41 Daniela De Lorenzo’s phantasmal heads are missing portraits in which there is as much narcissism and passionality as hallucination, possession or sublimation.42 We should recall the photos of hysterics, true catalogues of tensed faces, which would respond, according to Charcot, to the desiderata of art and which would have the character of an “orthography of the expression of passions”.43 The images of Daniela de Lorenzo, which Saretto Cincinelli defined with enormously lucidity as the “practice of capturing “invisible” aspects of the real”44, have something to do with hypnotism, the technique that Charcot developed to set in motion his “artistic” unfolding.45 Because Dammi il tempo! is a tenacious exercise in a replica of the occurred, similar to the reinvention of the time of the trauma. In the Charcotian hysteria there is an attempt to restage a hypothetical “first scene”, to provoke unpleasantness and induce a “splitting”. Daniela De Lorenzo’s practice of “choreographic” repetition leads, as happened in that “living pathological museum” of Salpetriere, to hysteria, always in the most visible form, to the plastic quintessence of the symptom. That spectacle exhibiting of things past is transformed by the Italian artist into a geminian postperformative artifice that implies a mise en abyme of the mimetic process. Once again the hysterical theatricality is superimposed on aesthetic theatricality, in an exercise, in all senses of the meaning, impressive and even hypnotic.46

The portraits of faces in movement in the series Distrazione (2000) brings to mind an apostrophe47 or a, pardon the exaggeration, (Medusean) masturbation of the eye.48 Sometimes trying to delay or remove the gaze of death, we surrender ourselves to titanic tasks in which we literally leave our skin or, to put it less dramatically, which we ought to profile in order to avoid a terrible mirror; instead of a reflection, a shadow, in the petrified reality only light is projected, like an allegory of the loss of memory amidst all the images. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud warns us that consciousness arises in the trace of a memory, that is, from the death instinct and the degradation of life, something that photography sustains as the duplication of the real but also as the theatre of death. In the age of the ruin of memory (when cathode vertigo has imposed its rule) time has become dismembered, “from this dismembering” wrote Trias in The Lost Memory of Things, “arises the presence of a reminiscence”.49 Art is fully aware of the importance of standing out from time, looking for correspondence like an encounter (involuntary memory) that halts the accelerated passing of reality. The Medusean pose50 of the works of Daniela De Lorenzo is, to a large extent, the result of her unbridled efforts to recover what we have lost, which is to say, to incorporate memories without giving them a narrative structure, at least for the moment.

The Real is not any “true reality” behind the virtual simulation, but the very emptiness that makes reality incomplete/inconsistent, and the function of all symbolic matrix consists in hiding this inconsistency; one of the ways of achieving this hiding is precisely to pretend that behind the incomplete/inconsistent reality we know that there is another reality not structured around an impossibility. It is not the moment of the disappearance of the veils or the theatrical raising of the curtain but instead the acceptance of the screen.51 Daniela De Lorenzo wants a givenness of time in which the body is impressed by and on its light trace. To a certain degree this “adaptative” position is mythical; bear in mind that myths usually deal with the unavoidable, the painful discovery of harsh limits, and though one takes to flight something will return. We cannot escape so easily from our exteriority, the clothing-tissue (made from that felt which is the trace of an absence) returns, it folds ceaselessly. Bodies are encrypted (mise en crypte) in the clothing that the subject cannot put on, art is inevitably subject to ornaments (parerga), this strange border against which the philosophical discourse reacts.52

We cannot be interested in the Neutral,53 because what traps us is, though it might seem demential, the uncomfortable, the inhospitable, that uncanny code that Pier Luigi Tazzi finds in the work of Daniela De Lorenzo.54 Because all her work is an intense exercises in dualities, where the anatomic and the unsettling are conflated, the specular and the hysterical matrix of absence.55 Despite approaching the traumatic, the imaginary of this artist takes on the weightlessness of the choreographic. “Deployed” as Lacan wrote “in imaginary capture, the feint is integrated into the play of approach and retreat that constituted the first dance, in which these two vital situations find their scansion, and the partners who fall into step with it find which we I will dare to write as their “dancity””.56 In certain suggestions of hysterical theatre it seems that a kind of dance is taking place, a swaying, a hidden pavane.57 Daniela De Lorenzo reneges on the representation of an absolute subject to give account of a processual subjectivation, in a dance that is also a folding. The Ritrarsi series (2003) portrays the delay and the tension of the subject, the bodily withdrawal of hysteria,58 a difference that veils and unveils.59

Daniela De Lorenzo is well aware that there is no univocal identity60 and that the fundamental fantasy must remain inaccessible because if the subject gets too close this obsessive nucleus loses consistency. This need of repression removes it from any spontaneous ingenuousness. The unconscious is an inaccessible phenomenon in the most radical sense, not an objective mechanism that regulates my phenomenic experience. What Daniela De Lorenzo does is to open up the possibility of mining the control that exercises fantasy over us through an overidentifiction with it, in other words, through simultaneously embracing, in the same space, all its multiplicity of phantasmatic elements. One must try to cut through (traverseer) the fantasy, knowing that the meaning is, as Lévi-Strauss or Lacan demonstrated, probably no more than a surface effect, a mirage, a foam. A symptomal reading denounces the illusion of the essence, the depth or the completeness in benefit of the reality of the cutting, the rupture or maturing. Art is always trying to have its way with the “other scene”, that is to say, with that place in which the signifier exercises its function in the production of the significations that are not conquered by the subject and which it shows to be separated by a barrier of resistance. It is the fall of the subject that implies that it knows what is opposed to the notion of liquidation of the transference. Art can disrupt what the symptom imposes, which is to say, the truth. In the articulation of the symptom with the symbol there is no more than a false hole.61 Language is associated with something that pierces the real. And to avoid dissolving we (barred/subjects) need to knot the experience, even though it is a halfsaying. The real is to be found, Lacan told us, in the tangle of the true.62 The real is always a fragment, a bud around which thought weaves stories; the stigma of the real is not to entwine with anything. Between the fierce passion and the speechless sentiment, we could get the impression that everything dissolves in meaninglessness.

Daniela De Lorenzo has developed a singular “art” of not saying.63 Even when we hear, in some of her works, sound fragments, for instance from the essay on laughter by Bergson,64 what we sense is the breathing of the mysterious. This artist persists, between the no more and still not, in one of her strange desires, in an apparition of the phantasmatic that has all the features of a deja vu. We wanted to control this anomalous sensation of repetition and, simultaneously, to escape the excess of jouissance because we can lose ourselves in our ghosts.65 Gilles de la Tourette pointed out that “nothing that is the symptom of hysteria itself can imitate hysteria”. Mimesis is the hysterical symptom par excellence: a hysteric will repeat anything that is said in her presence, she wants to be everybody, or rather she wants to have the being of anyone and everyone. Theatricality, histrionics, identifications, plays of surface that Daniela De Lorenzo uses to give account of the breach of the subject. Her passional attitude calls out for the absolute gift of time.66

The works by Daniela De Lorenzo allude, over and above any literal slogan, to the desire to recover the being 67 because what we actually have are the ashes of time 68 or the shadow of the body. Jung considered that the archetypes that most frequently and most intensely influence the ego are shadow, the anima and the animus: “the figure that is most accessible to experience is the shadow, whose nature can largely be inferred from the content of the personal unconscious”.69 While on one hand it is an expression of the negative, there is also in these obsessions with the shadow a power, and it takes on the form of emotion which is not an activity but an event that has happened. Seen in this light, the shadow is an emotional projection which seems to be unquestionably located in the other. The result of the projection is the isolation of the subject with respect to its surroundings, insofar as it establishes an illusory and non-real relationship with it. Yet it is precisely by means of the shadow that reality, an unknown face whose essence remains forever beyond reach, becomes real. The subject manifests itself through these shadows it has managed to leave on a wall (the mythical story of love, distance and melancholy that Pliny the Elder narrated in his Natural History as the mythical origin of painting), art begins as the touch of an absent desire. Circumscribing the outline of a shadow of a man with a line (omnes umbra hominis lineis circumducta) helps articulate a metaphysics of the image as the presentation of the absent, a re-elaboration of eroticism lost in the memory. Daniela De Lorenzo never stops allegorizing the shadow by means of its phantasmal double. Her repetition of the past leads to a kind of hysterical temporality, to cataleptic plasticity: an imitation taken to the limit, a staging in which all times are present.70 The bodily detachment of this artist imposes an enigmatic theatre of the return of memory, the reiteration of a “first time”, a gestural language of fantasy71 that leads me to believe that we (still) know nothing and that perhaps one word would suffice for us to do that.72

Fernando Castro Flores
Testo dal catalogo Encara de Nou 2008, La Gallera, Valencia.
a cura di Alba Braza.

note

1 -Jacques Derrida: Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992, p. 29.
2 -Julia Kristeva: Powers of Horror, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p. 133
3 -“In our age, or so it seems, we are living at the end of history, of thought and of the unconsciousness: after Heidegger and under his infl uence, the unconsciousness cannot be looked for in the “real”, but in what is absent, in the other, “in-what-is-always-removed-from-itsconceptual- capturing”. And there, the appeal to the other, to the hidden beyond of culture is still, with all certainty, an appeal to metaphysics” (Boris Groys: Sobre lo nuevo. Ensayo de una economía cultura, Pre-textos, Valencia 2005, p. 199).
4 -“The Neutral would consist in entrusting ourselves to the banality that is within us or even more simply in recognizing this banality. This banality […] is experienced and assumed in the contact with death: one never thinks anything about death but banal thoughts.” (Roland Barthes: The Neutral. Lecture course at the Collège de France (1977-1978), Columbia University Press, New York, 2005, p. 83).
5 -““Prima ancora di dichiararsi opere, sculture o fotografi e, quelle di De Lorenzo sono apparizioni, con 205 quanto ne consegue in termini di pedigree” (Maria Perosino: “Di soppiatto, l´infi nito” in Daniela De Lorenzo. Harmonica, Galleria Antonella Nicola, Turin, 2002).
6 -“As for the human body, Hegel has already suggested that it was in a relation of signifi cation with clothing: as pure sentience, the body cannot signify; clothing guarantees the passage from sentience to meaning; it is, we might say, the signifi ed par excellence” (Roland Barthes: The Fashion System, Hill & Wang, New York, 1973,p. 258).
7 -“[...] il tentativo messo in atto dall´artista: dilatare l´instantanea sino ad un punto di non ritorno, è quello di dare consistenza al frattempo, all´invisible del fra, ad un divenire che non diviene (che non cessa di fi nire che non fi nisce di iniziare), che sembra modulare l´immagine più che modellarla” (Saretto Cincinelli: “Carambole” in Daniela De Lorenzo, Harmonica, Galleria Antonella Nicola, Turin, 2002).
8 -For Charcot the expression of the emotions is a purely somatic question. The hypnotised body functions like an “expressive statue” which, Charcot tells us “artists can, most certainly, turn to the best account”: “As can photographers: “the immobility of attitudes obtained in this way is highly favourable to photographic reproduction”, says Charcot, “who had the published edition of his lectures accompanied by the suggestive plates obtained by Londe” (Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 200).
9 -“The problem is that, by “circulating around itself,” as its own sun, this autonomous subject encounters in itself something “more than itself,” a strange body in its very centre. This is what Lacan’s neologism extimité aims at, the designation of a stranger in the midst of my intimacy. Precisely by “circulating only around itself,” the subject circulates around something that is “in itself more than itself,” the traumatic kernel of enjoyment that Lacan refers to by the German word das Ding [The Thing]” (Slavoj Zizek: Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992, p. 169).
10 -“The Lacanian “barred subject” (s) is ‘empty’ not in the sense of some psychologico-existential ‘experience of a void’ but, rather, in the sense of a dimension of self-relating negativity which a priori eludes the domain of vécu of lived experience.” (Slavoj Zizek: The Ticklish Subject. The absent centre of political ontology, Verso, London-New York, 2000, p. 259).
11 -Jacques Derrida: ¡Palabra! Instantáneas fi losófi cas, Trotta, Madrid, 2001, p. 42.
12 -Jean-Francois Lyotard: “El imaginario postmoderno y la cuestión el otro en el pensamiento y la arquitectura” in Pensar-Componer/Construir-Habitar, Arteleku, San Sebastian, 1994, p. 38.
13 -Jacques Lacan: “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Écrits, W.W. Norton & Co, New York London, 2006, p. 689.
14 -Jacques Lacan: “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Écrits, W.W. Norton & Co, New York London, 2006, p. 700.
15 -“The need for ‘passionate attachment’ to provide for a minimum of being implies that the subject qua ‘abstract negativity’ -the primordial gesture of dis-attachment from its environment- is already there. Fantasy is thus a defence-formation against the primordial abyss of disattachment, of the loss of (the support in) being, which ‘is’ the subject itself. At this precise point, then, Butler should be supplemented: the emergence of the subject is not strictly equivalent to subjection (in the sense of ‘passionate attachment’, of submission to some fi gure of the Other), since for ‘passionate attachment’ to take place the gap that ‘is’ the subject must already be there. Only if this gap is already there can we explain how it is possible for the subject to escape the whole of the fundamental fantasy.” (Slavoj Zizek: The Ticklish Subject. The absent centre of political ontology, Verso, London- New York, 2000, p. 289).
16 -“Correlatively, the I formation is symbolized in dreams by a fortifi ed camp, or even a stadium distributing, between the arena within its walls and its outer border of gravel-tips and marshes, two opposed fi elds of battlr where the subject bogs down in his quest for the proud, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario), strikingly symbolizes the id”. (Jacques Lacan: “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in Écrits, W.W. Norton & Co, New York London, 2006, p. 78).
17 -Slavoj Zizek: The Ticklish Subject. The absent centre of political ontology, Verso, London-New York, 2000, p. 304.
18 -“Presence would mean death. If presence were possible, in the full meaning of a being which is there where it is, that is full where it is, if this were possible Van Gogh would not exist nor would the work of Van Gogh, nor the experience that we have of his work” (Jacques Derrida interviewed by Peter Brunette and David Wallis: “Las artes espaciales” in Acción Paralela, no. 1, Madrid, May, 1995, p. 19).
19 -“Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of the being beyond the confi nes of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality” (Georges Bataille: Eroticism, Penguin, London, 2001, pp. 17-18).
20 -“Le sculture in mostra al contrario delle precedenti sono rigide, construite con diversi strati di feltro, come un calco irrigidito in una postura attraverso strane contratture, mentre in precedenza la cucitura determinava la postura del materiale morbido in caduta libera” (Laura Cherubini: “Daniela De Lorenzo. Il ritratto come compagno segreto” in Antonio Catelani, Daniela De Lorenzo. Double, Incontri a Montellori, Fucecchio, Gli Ori, 2004).
21 -““There is an obvious and prominent fact about human beings”, notes Turner at the start of The Body and Society, “they have bodies and they are bodies’” In other words, the body constitutes the environment of the self, to be inseparable from the self. However, what Turner omits in his analysis is another obvious and prominent fact: that human bodies are dressed bodies. The social world is a world of dressed bodies. Nakedness is wholly inappropriate in almost all social situations and, even in situations where much naked fl esh is exposed (on the beach, at thee swimming-pool, even in the bedroom), the bodies that meet there are likely to be adorned, if only by jewellery, or indeed, even perfume: when asked what she wore to bed, Marilyn Monroe claimed that she only wore Chanel number 5, illustrating how without garments, can still be adorned or embellished in some way” (Joanne Entwistle: The Fashioned Body, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 6).
22 -V. Steele: Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from Victorian Age to the Jazz Age, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 42.
23 -Georges Didi-Huberman maintained that the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière is a collection of lingering, of delay: “Always look twice, this was Charcot’s methodology of the visibility of symptoms. See and measure. See and remake through hypnosis. See and photograph” (Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 246).
24 -“Paradoxically, one gets closer to neutral sexuality by abstinence, than by means of vitalistic and spiritualistic experiences that pass animal exuberance or the superelevation of the soul for sexuality. The dissoluteness of the former and the elevation of the latter lead now to ridiculous, now to tragic situations, but in any case they are far away from the impression of a limit-experience that accompanies the offering of one’s own body as extraneous clothing not to pleasure or to someone else’s desire, but to an impersonal and insatiable speculative excitement that never tires of traversing it, penetrating it, wearing it, and that enters, insinuates, sticks into us, opening us toward a complete exteriority in which everything is surface, skin, fabric” (Mario Perniola: in The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Continuum, New York, 2004, pp. 12).
25 -Mario Perniola: The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Continuum, New York, 2004, p. 48.
26 -Mario Perniola: The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Continuum, New York, 2004, p. 49. Yet in the case of David Delfín this clothing is a symbolic skin, different from that “second skin” of a certain brand of fashion that is a kind of “cellophane covering” or vitrifi ed armour-plating that tries to offer an abstract immortality, see Nicola Squicciarino: El vestido habla: consideraciones psico-sociológicas sobre la indumentaria, Cátedra, Madrid, 1990, p. 94.
27 -Jean-Luc Nancy: Corpus, Arena, Madrid, 2003, p. 97.
28 -“Then, there is no need to say, or one ought to try not to say, that the being of the body, the body in itself, the being-with-itself of a body, the relation with itself inasmuch as feeling outside, inasmuch as an innerness that feels itself outside, and there is therefore no longer a need to say that that is a property of a subject of an ego, rather that that is the “Subject”. And even “subject” is extremely fragile, given that there is no need to say that “I”-body- am touched and at the same time I touchthat I am sentient-rather one ought to say (and herein lies the diffi culty) that the “I” is a touch” (Jean-Luc Nancy: Corpus, Arena, Madrid, 2003, p. 105).
29 -Jean-Luc Nancy: Corpus, Arena, Madrid, 2003, p. 110.
30 -“It is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal. Paul Valery had a profound idea: what is most deep is the skin” (Gilles Deleuze: The Logic of Sense, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990, p. 10).
31 -“Rock: under this cadence of body, it turns out that our world has deployed a rhythmic worldliness of jazz and rap and beyond, an urgency, an abundance, a hording, a popularity of postures, an electronic skin of zones, grouped together, which one might well call, if one likes, noise, because it is primarily in the form of background noise which surfaces when forms lose their validity, their meaning (social, common, sentimental, metaphysical) and when, on the contrary, the aesthetics have to be remade directly from the naked bodies of meaning, divested of references, disoriented, disoccidented, and when the arts have to be remade from one part to another like in the creation of bodies. Yes, noise: it is like the reverse of a thought, but it is also like echoes in the folds of bodies” (Jean-Luc Nancy: Corpus, Arena, Madrid, 2003, p. 88).
32 -“Because fi nally one needs to know whether the hysteric is dedicated, fi rst to translation, to interpretation, or perhaps the opposite, and more profoundly, to a tenacious foreclosure of the transmission of meaning. An incarnated discourse or foreclosing body: Who doesn’t see that without a foreclosing body there is not even hysteria?” (Jean-Luc Nancy: Corpus, Arena, 2003, p. 21).
33 -Jean-Luc Nancy: Corpus, Arena, Madrid, 2003, p. 79.
34 -Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2003, p. 81.
35 -Raffaele Gavarro: “Il corpo sfi nito” in Daniela De Lorenzo, Galleria Enrico Fornello, Gli Ori, Prato, 2007, p. 11.
36 -Slavoj Zizek: The Ticklish Subject. The absent centre of political ontology, Verso, London-New York, 2000, p. 248.
37 -“Freud, che aveva studiato con Charcot parlava dell´isteria come “deformazione dell´arte” nel senso che l´individuo affetto da questa malattia sublimava attraverso il gesto isterico il proprio mancato rapporto con il mondo, nello stesso modo in cui l´artista attraverso la propria opera tenta di sublimare il suo. Daniela De Lorenzo opera una sorta di viaggio a ritroso: parte dal corpo e dalle sue posture per raggiungere l´arte” (Pier Luigi Tazzi: “Reading” in Daniela De Lorenzo. Agile, Galleria Nicola Fornello, Prato, 2005).
38 -“A spectacle at its height. This also means that the hysterical body demands (rather than uses) a kind of theatre, which the art of theatre itself would have trembled to encounter, so rawly does it stigmatize a painful kind of theatrical essence. This essence is taken to its height. Thus an art hurries along, madly impatient, passing through the experience of the absence of an end, idling in the very extremity of its act” (Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 163).
39 -“Una ballerina si muove partendo da un´immagine fi ssa, proiettata, di sé. Parte da quel punto, che è la sua imagine, e compie una serie di gesti, piccoli movimenti, che a volte l´allontanano dalla sua orma iconografi ca, e a volte sembrano portarla ad una nuova perfetta coincidenza. Che sucede in questi video? Siamo di fronte ad una dimostrazione della sindrome di Tourette, ad una resa coreografi ca, poetica e intensa, di quella gestualità incontrollata e patologica?” (Raffaele Gavarro: “Il corpo sfi nito” in Daniela De Lorenzo, Galleria Enrico Fornello, Prato, Gli Ori, 2007, p. 9).
40 -“What is most extraordinary is that these disorders [Tourette’s Syndrome], after having been observed in thousands of cases since 1885, practically cease to be recorded in the fi rst years of the twentieth century, until the day when Oliver Sacks, in the winter of 1971, thought that he noticed three cases of Tourettism in the span of a few minutes while walking along the streets of New York City. One of the hypotheses that could be put forth in order to explain this disappearance is that in the meantime ataxia, tics, and dystonia had become the norm and that at some point everybody had lost control of their gestures and was walking and gesticulating frantically.” (Giorgio Agamben: Notes on Gesture” in Means without End. Notes on politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 52).
41 -“It is the completely mad idea that one can free oneself from the Other, throw off the moorings, and do whatever one wishes. Also to say everything that one wants: for instance, the whole truth. But it is only an illusion. The barred-Other does not work; it is a limit that is never reached. In any case, it is a considerable pleasure to be able to say everything, to do everything at the same time...” (Catherine Clément: Vidas y leyendas de Jacques Lacan, Anagrama, Barcelona, 1981, p. 33).
42 -On this question of decapitation as hallucinationsublimation Julia Kristeva has made a seminal contribution in “Visions capitales”, artpress, no. 235, Paris, May 1998, pp. 20-27.
43 -It was Duchenne who pinpointed Charcot as the master of this singular “orthography”, see. Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 199.
44 -Saretto Cincinelli: “Carambole” in Daniela De Lorenzo. Harmonica, Galleria Antonella Nicola, Turín, 2002.
45 -“[...] the technique of hypnosis gave Charcot the freedom of intervention of an artist or a painter, on “material” fully surrendered to him. Hypnotic suggestion, writes Freud, is comparable to the art of painting, in the sense in which Leonardo opposed it to sculpture; it works per via di porre: it deposits (like the painter poses his pigment), supplements, projects, glazes, frames” (Georges Didi-Huberman: Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 186).
46 -“At this point I propose to consider the psychiatric theatricality of the Salpêtrière as a specifi c attempt at reconversion, an ungainly word. They reconverted spectacular hysterical “conversion,” and, in place of a dazzling temporality of repetition [répétition] (in the sense of the Freudian Widerholungszwang, and perhaps the point where this rejoins what Artaud expressed about the theater), in place of the dazzling temporality of hysterical symptoms, substituted another, regulated temporality: the temporality of their hypnotic rehearsal [répétition] (in the sense of theatrical performances)” (Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 244).
47 -Jean Clair ha ricordato che nei vasi greci i personaggi che appaiono frontalmente sono divinità come Gorgone, la musa Calliope o Dionisio, sebbene lo faccia anche l’individuo in stato di parossismo, di terrore, di agonia, di pazzia, contemplando l’orlo della morte, cfr. Elogio de lo visible, Ed. Seix Barral, Barcellona, 1999, p. 234.
48 -“The metaphysical eroticism of the Medusean is a certain witness of the the rejections of the body. Medusa fi xes its distinct feature, paralyses its extension: it is like a masturbation of the eye” (Jean-Luc Nancy: Corpus, Arena, Madrid, p. 38).
49 -Eugenio Trías: La memoria perdida de las cosas, Mondadori, Madrid, 1988, p. 120.
50 -“Più che la riuscita della performace, del resto, a Daniela De Lorenzo interessa, il suo necessario mancare il bersaglio: la messa in scena di un quasi capace di testimoniare l´ineludibile differenza che separa la medusazione della foto dal permutare dell´immagine video; oltre a una capacità mimetica è, qui, in questione, soprattutto, la (im)possibilità di sanare un anacronismo, il paradossale tentativo di annullare il ritardo originario fra la posa e il suo ri-facimento, quello scarto differenziale che, separando movimento e immobilità, rimanda ad infi nitum l´epifania di una coincidenza” (Saretto Cincinelli: “Mancare la posa. Contrattempi” in Daniela De Lorenzo, Galleria Enrico Fornello, Gli Ori, Prato, 2007, p. 25).
51 -“We should not forget at this point the radical ambiguity of the Lacanian Real: it is not the ultimate referent to cover/embellish/domesticate with a screen of fantasy. The Real is also and primarily the screen itself, an obstacle already-always distorting our perception of the referent, of the reality in front of us” (Slavoj Zizek: Lacrimae Rerum. Ensayos sobre cine moderno y ciberespacio, Debate, Barcelona, 2006, p. 186).
52 -“The delimitation [Kant makes in his Critique of Judgement] of the centre and the integrity of the representation, of its inside and its outside, might already seem strange. One wonders, too, where to have clothing commence. Where does a parergon begin and end. Would any garment be a parergon?” (Jacques Derrida: The Truth in Painting, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 57).
53 -“The Neutral would consist in entrusting ourselves to the banality that is within us—or even more simply in recognizing this banality. This banality (I already suggested it when I said that the great sufferings (i.e., mournings) are bound to be processed through the stereotypes of mankind)—this banality is experienced and assumed in the contact with death: one never thinks anything about death but banal thoughts” (Roland Barthes: The Neutral. Lecture course at the Collège de France (1977-1978), Columbia University Press, New York, 2005, p. 83).
54 -See Pier Luigi Tazzi: “Reading” in Daniela De Lorenzo. Agile, Galleria Nicola Fornello, Prato, 2005,
55 -“[...] poiché ciò che Daniela De Lorenzo mette in mostra è che “isteria” signifi ca dopotutto (ri)partire da una matrice malata di assenza, per la quale non ci sarà mai tempo abbastanza” (Alessandra Violi: “Nella spirale del tempo: i teatri dell´isteria di Daniela De Lorenzo” in Daniela De Lorenzo, Galleria Enrico Fornello, Gli Ori, Prato, 2007, p. 44).
56 -Jacques Lacan: “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Écrits, W.W. Norton & Co, New York London, 2006, p. 683.
57 -See Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 223.
58 -“Dei corpi isterici fotografati dalla medicina nel tardo Ottocento si dice che essi non rappresentino nulla: nessuna malattia, se non quelle di un corpo-cliché talmente impresso da memoria di gesti e pose esterne da diventarne il proteiforme fantasma; nessuna anatomia riconoscibile, dato il potrere degli affetti, contraendo gli arti in posture immaginarie o paralizzandoli in incongrue fi gure di pathos. Nell´isteria il soggetto si ritrae dal corpo [...]” (Alessandra Violi: “Nella spirale del tempo: i teatri dell´isteria di Daniela De Lorenzo” in Daniela De Lorenzo, Galleria Enrico Fornello, Gli Ori, Prato, 2007, p. 43).
59 -“[...] a difference that endlessly unfolds and folds over from each of its two sides, and that unfolds the one only while refolding the other, in a coextensive unveiling and the veiling of Being, of presence and of withdrawal of being” (Gilles Deleuze: The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, p. 30).
60 -“L´artista pare voler affermare l´impraticabilità della rivelazione del soggetto come identità univoca (il titolo della serie fotografi ca Ritrarsi allude al doppio signifi cato di “tirarsi indietro” e di “ritrarre se stessi”), per privilegiarne la struttura, la sua ex-posizione, al di fuori, dietro e davanti” (Bettina Della Casa: “Daniela De Lorenzo. L´identico e il differente” in Daniela De Lorenzo. L´ identico e il differente, Associazione Culturale Borgovico 33, Como, 2003, p. 4).
61 -See Jacques Lacan: El sinthome. El Seminario 23, Paidós, Barcelona, 2006, p. 24. The libido participates in the hole, similarly to other forms with which the body and the real are represented, something that, as Lacan himself claimed, the function of art strives to attain.
62 -“This was precisely what led me to the idea of the knot, coming from the fact that the true self-perforates because its use entirely creates meaning, from which it slips, from which it is aspirated by the image of the body hole that emits it, in other words, the mouth in the measure to which it sucks. There is a dynamic centrifuge in the gaze, which is to say, that parts from the eye that sees, but also from the blind spot. It parts from the instant of seeing and has it as a point of support. In effect, the eye see instantaneously. It is what is called intuition, through which what is called the space of the image is redoubled” (Jacques Lacan: El sinthome. El Seminario 23, Paidós, 2006, p. 83).
63 -“[...] and art is always the art of not saying, and to exhibit what is not there to be said (not an unsayable but the not-to-be-said of meaning), in the same totality of that which is exhibited, like the sayable itself, and even more so as saying itself, like all the saying n its fragmentation” (Jean-Luc Nancy: El sentido del mundo, La Marca, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 192).
64 -“L´instalazione sonora presentata negli spazi di Borgovico 33 propone infatti -tra altri lavori- alcuni brani rivelatori tratti dallo scritto Il Riso. Saggio sul signifi cato del comico (1900) del fi losofo francese Henri Bergson. I frammenti di testo -recitati da una voce femminile- si alternano al suono di respiri di varia modulazione e intensità. Ascoltiamo in sottofondo alcune frasi: “[...] L’immaginazione poetica non può essere che una visione più completa della realtà”” (Bettina Della Casa: “Daniela De Lorenzo. L´identico e il differente” in Daniela De Lorenzo. L´ identico e il differente, Associazione Culturale Borgovico 33, Como, 2003, p. 2).
65 -“[...] we can lose ourselves in the phantasm, the phantasm can overwhelm us, and the real sexual act is a defensive measure to control this explosion of the phantasm. So, to a certain degree, the Real is here in the phantasm and we escape to reality to somehow control this excess of phantasm. It is a defensive act: we return to reality to control, to smother, the phantasmatic explosion” (Slavoj Zizek: Arriesgar lo imposible. Conversaciones con Glyn Daly, Trotta, Madrid, 2006, p. 109).
66 -Perhaps Daniela De Lorenzo’s concern with time has something to do with Jacques Derrida’s desire that the idiomatic phrase “given time” is at least pause to think the singularity of double condition both of the giving as well as the time: “What there is to give, uniquely, would be called time. / What there is to give, uniquely, would be called time. / What there is to give, uniquely, would be called time. / For fi nally, if the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even if or because or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we never verify it, we never experience it in its present existence or in its phenomenon. The gift itself—we dare not say the gift in itself—will never be confused with the presence of its phenomenon.” (Jacques Derrida: Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992, p. 29).
67 -“In concreto Dammi il tempo! di Daniela De Lorenzo nel pretendere un affi ancarsi di quei movimenti ai nostri quotidiani, rivela nella nostra stessa gestualità un´incapacità a ritrovarsi, la perdita continua del proprio essere in un luogo, o meglio la perdita stessa del luogo come stato di quiete del nostro essere” (Raffaele Gavarro: “Il corpo sfi nito” in Daniela De Lorenzo, Galleria Enrico Fornello, Gli Ori, Prato, 2007, p. 11).
68 -“The thought of this radical forgetting as thought of the gift should accord with a certain experience of the trace as cinder or ashes” (Jacques Derrida: Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992, 17).
69 -Carl G. Jung: Aion. Contribución a los simbolismos del si-mismo, Paidós, Barcelona, 1989, p. 22.
70 -“The Freudian Darstellbarkeit, or “capacity for staging,” here thoroughly dramatizes each real pain as a fi ction of the primal scene, propelling the body of pain into the cruel, transfi nite pleasure of a bodydaniela actor (Diderot was suspicious of this “contradictory simultaneity” of temporalities in hysterical delirium: “The woman”, he writes “bears within her an organ prone to terrible spasms, which uses her and arouses ghosts of all kinds in her imagination. It is in hysterical delirium that she returns to the past, hurls herself in to the future, and that all times are present to her”)” (Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, pp. 163-4).
71 -“A gestural language of fantasy, or rather of the connivance between the hysterical fantasy (summoned hypnotically) and a fantasy of staging (summoned as an experimental theme) - a gestural language of fantasies has a fatal encounter with the fantasies of death, aggression, and cutting to pieces” (Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 233).
72 -“It usually happens that individuals suffering from coprolalia repeat like echoes the words that have been pronounced in front of them and even sometimes when hearing certain words imitate the action that these words indicate, so that when they hear someone speak of jumping they jump” (Jean Martin Charcot: “Tic compulsivo y coprolalia en un chico” in Histeria, Del Lunar, Jaén, 2003, p. 94).