Abstract
AbstractIn Sisyphus Outdone (2012), Nathanaël’s particular tribute to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the reader faces a challenging hybrid text in which the verbal and visual dimensions intermingle to produce an idiosyncratic type of narrative. Fragmentary, elliptical, a web of quotations, dictums, and meditations on the difficult condition of the individual in the current image-saturated scenario of the first decades of the 21st century, the text manages to propose a rigorous reflection upon crucial aspects of representation from History and temporality, to the Subject now, photography, catastrophe theory, architecture, failure and translation, among the most salient. Sisyphus, I suggest, exhibits a strategic photopoetics which operates as a self-reflective mechanism contributing to the persistence of an impermanent liminal subject and to the (re)production of textuality and the proliferation of voices against silence.
Highlights
In Sisyphus Outdone (2012), Nathanaël’s particular tribute to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the reader faces a challenging hybrid text in which the verbal and visual dimensions intermingle to produce an idiosyncratic type of narrative
Fragmentary, elliptical, a web of quotations, dictums, and meditations on the difficult condition of the individual in the current image-saturated scenario of the first decades of the 21st century, the text manages to propose a rigorous reflection upon crucial aspects of representation from History and temporality, to the Subject photography, catastrophe theory, architecture, failure and translation, among the most salient
I suggest, exhibits a strategic photopoetics which operates as a self-reflective mechanism contributing to the persistence of an impermanent liminal subject and to theproduction of textuality and the proliferation of voices against silence
Summary
Photopoetics: Sisyphus Outdone, the Apostrophal Subject and the Elusive Image 85 which reverberate with larger epochal issues that situate us on the cognitive and emotional threshold towards new modes of production and relations, new sensitivities made up of unprecedented ways of “sensing” the subject (Butler, Senses of the Subject). In Sisyphus Outdone the apostrophal subject is on its way to traversing the threshold which gives access to life and death This complex movement is one akin to how Blanchot (“The Essential Solitude”) accounts for how literary language becomes the image of language and by virtue of this operation Being is, inadvertently, shunned away. One can identify three of them: the textual voice makes her way to the genre of the essay, in which she endeavours, for example, to distinguish between photography and language, or between photography and death; she alternates comments on photographs and reproduces a few within the text, which creates a semantic plurality within the work as a whole; and she associates scholarly and creative writing These analogies, which use antithetical relations and values (didactic and empirical, existential and aesthetic), make of Sisyphus a work of the in-between which is constantly missing its target. The experience of “lostness” (52) is multiplied and the pain and lack persist
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