When the real matters: interpreting the visual with Catherine Belsey

Abstract

Focusing on Catherine Belsey's interest in understanding the intimate link of visual perception with the Lacanian real, this article traces the evolution of her interpretation of visual art from her initial allegorical approach to visual language to her engagement with contemporary art. So doing, it also focuses on the way contemporary art dislocates and defamiliarises the gaze. Turning to artists who also feature in Culture and the Real – especially Rachel Whiteread – and taking the question of representation as its central focus, it also returns to Lacan's seminal dialogue with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology in order to cast light on what may be defined as the dead angles of Belsey's analysis of the visual. Desire and loss are seen to be caught in an endless dialectics which is that of the spectator's experience when faced with works whose purpose is both to discomfort and to tantalise. Working with our physical experience of loss, with the mechanics of memory and desire, these works both inscribe and deny satisfaction. When confronted with such visual and experiential riddle, one may find it enlightening to return to Catherine Belsey's poetics of the real and her defence of an open textual practice that acknowledges both the foreclusion of desire and its compelling energy.