Portrait of the Artist as an Old Dog: Of Rilke, Cézanne, and the Animalisation of Painting

Abstract

Self-knowledge and self-fashioning, animality and humanity of subject who criticises and analyses himself with autoscopic insight, with resentment and unfeeling reactions of aesthetic values, all these together represent themes dealt with in a few paragraphs (18, 22, and 23) of dissertation on Guilt, Guilty Consciences and Like of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. The flexibly shaping nature of Selbstbeobachtung, desire for a form of self-observation, is directed towards complete animal self. And this beast within man is tamed and rendered ineffectual in its drives and instincts, so that its wounds are livid moments of a hypertrophy of values of good and beautiful, an overgrowth of figure of his inner-most being, and of fantasies of his mind and forms of art. Bestialit?t der Idee is thus a reactive symbolical and aesthetic activity of evil conscience, projective and deadening exuberant response to that animality of Selbst which continues to endure?also as the residue of a metaphor and as remnant of an analogy.1 I will be concerned with these textual and metaphorical minutiae, with this minimal material leftover and resistance to interpretation found in certain Rilkian writings. I will only examine, however, certain aspects and stances of this figure?one last time with Nietzsche?kn?cherne, bony as a dice that falls awkwardly on its corners, to describe it cutting through grey mesh of order of discourse and through variegated web of symbolization process. Indeed I will dwell on certain indexes of an opacity of self representation, wherein space of figurability of subject is presented?space of a distortion process that sucks down persuasive model dimension of representation of self?and of a formless plastic, which imposes itself in a traumatic and stupefying way. I hope to show that it is all a matter of material and non metaphorical indexes that direct Rilke and ourselves towards a recollection of immemorial, together with survival and prolepsis, subject's origin and destiny. These indexes yield neither to hermeneutics nor to historical quirks, both possibly issuing from transitive and transparent dimension of representation in direction of underlying horizons and institutions of sense. On contrary, coup de main and risky methodology of my interpretation aim at effects of a latency and of a virtuality of image, their composite temporality, dense and intransitive, which require both anamnesis and ultimate recollection of that which finds no place in any recorded history.