The subject under the skin: art and violence in Slavoj Žižek

Abstract

In the present paper, we start from the use that Slavoj Žižek makes of Badiou's Theses on Contemporary Art in order to consider the homology between the truly ethical act and the subtractive operation of modern art. We take them as the practical and sensible poles of the same movement: the one that converges with critique of ideology at the point where it touches action. We describe the gestures of Bartleby and Malevich as (anti) ideological operations capable of opening a space where “rien n'aura eu lieu que le lieu”. And from there, we place the role of the cinema screen, between perception and imagination, as a modulator of desire and as a space for interpellation. Taking violence as a guiding thread, we show the possibility, contrary to Žižek's Lacano-Hegelian formalism, of accounting for different moments in the history of this screen effect. The comparison between two works by Delacroix and Jeff Wall will allow us to show a mutation that envelops and relocates the explicit screen of the cinema.