Caravaggio's Secrets (October Books) - Hardcover

Bersani, Leo; Dutoit, Ulysse

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262024497 ISBN 13: 9780262024495

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1998

Synopsis

Many critics have explored the homoerotic message in the early portraits of the baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610). In Caravaggio's Secrets, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit emphasize instead the impenetrability of these portraits. The tension between erotic invitation and self-concealing retreat leads Bersani and Dutoit to conclude that the interest of these works is in their representation of an enigmatic address that solicits intimacy in order to block it with a secret.

Bersani and Dutoit offer a psychoanalytic reading of the enigmatic address as initiating relations grounded in paranoid fascination. They study Caravaggio's attempts to move beyond such relations, his experiments with a space no longer circumscribed by the mutual and paranoid, if erotically stimulating, fascination with imaginary secrets. In his most original work, Caravaggio proposes a radically new mode of connectedness, a nonerotic sensuality relevant to the most exciting attempts in our own time to rethink, perhaps even to reinvent, community.

About this title

About the Author

Leo Bersani was until recently the Class of 1950 Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Culture of Redemption and Homos and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Ulysse Dutoit teaches film at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

The fascination of the turbulent life of brilliant Baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610) cannot be denied, and British historian Seward's brief biographical study efficiently encapsulates what is known about the artist's sordid existence. But the derivative, fragmentary, and inadequate discussion of the artist's work vitiates his efforts. Seward slips into the common fallacy of assuming that the painter's subject matter is a reflection of his psychic state, though he never characterizes the nature of Caravaggio's psychological perturbation. Like other biographers of inadequately documented historical figures, Seward on occasion will allow an earlier hypothesis to become the foundation for a later argument. Although not as up to date, Howard Hibbard's Caravaggio (LJ 5/15/83) remains the requisite foundation study. Employing a "methodology" that blends an ahistorical pastiche of critical theory, uncritical psychoanalytic assertion, and a touch of muddled Marxism, Bersani and Dutoit?academics but not art historians?have postulated a reading of Caravaggio's works that alternates between the unevidenced and the unintelligible. The obscurity of their language combined with the ludicrous modernity of their analysis evokes an art that exists merely to serve as a plaything for literary pyrotechnics. The past, language, humanistic scholarship, and common sense are traduced in the service of post-rational subjectivity and obscurantism. Thus, the demented but inspired genius becomes the object of pseudo-thoughts like "Caravaggio is a crucial figure in the history of a suspicion fatal to the procedures and the confidence of philosophy: the suspicion that truth cannot be the object of knowledge, that it cannot be theorized." That a major university has placed its imprimatur on such pretentious rubbish can only serve to besmirch liberal studies. Neither book is recommended.?Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262024497
• ISBN 13: 9780262024495
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 114