ARTH 101 Lecture 5: Lecture 5 Week 6
Document Summary
It seems irreducible to the image viewed, in a platonic sense, as a second-degree manifestation of something else. Merleau-ponty, the boy is never simply an object but lived-through meanings . Our body both makes us subjects and makes us objects for others. A fetish, the image promises to palliate the viewer"s anxieties about loss, specifically, in classic freudian theory, the male viewer"s fear of losing his penis, a fear instigated by his taking sight of the woman"s lacking body. Photographic portrait filling in as body for the otherwise absent subject and, in this case, also replacing the lost aura of the unique work of art. The photograph as body is both living (flesh) and dead (fetish) Fetish is never living or interactive like the subject or individual who projects or fantasizes it but always only a sign frozen and still in the aggressive field of this viewer"s gaze.
