Armand Gatti, Subject to History: The Problem of Representation

Abstract

The starting point, then, is the tension which establishes and makes clear the distance that separates an "outward" vision of the world in which one grows up from another vision, just as strong but "inward," born in the imaginative faculties. That tension, grounded in living experience within which Gatti would always find and recognize himself, is the experience of something missing. One must invent above and beyond poverty, recognize that everything must come out of a hole. But the thing that is missing is at the same time itself an origin, a potential space opening out on all that is "crying out to bedone." The obsessional dream of the adolescent expresses itself in collective terms; the imaginary space that it opens up is already dramatic in nature. We see that at that level a fundamental condition of deficit is really called for, inasmuch as a deficit of this kind amounts to a permanent transformational potentiality: "When you get right down to it, I never really climbed out of that hole, and if! were to climb out of it one day it would really be a pretty sad thing ... I'm not saying that out of love for things gone by, but because that was where I was doing my fighting and that was where my fighting was having its effect. ... '" But for Gatti the hole in which everything was possible has as its background and corollary a much more concrete reference involving the extremely traumatic experience of his arrest and deportation: "There is a corridor in a French prison somewhere that in spite of all my efforts I have never quite got out of. '" This famous text, which echoes so uncannily the first part of the text we have just quoted, emphasizes the constant shifting from the individual world of the imagination to external reality, tracing the perpetual progression which remains the motivating force underlying an aesthetic theory which is constantly in the process of metamorphosis.