Moments Of Perception Research Articles

Stephen Broomer and Michael Zyrd. Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada

Stephen Broomer and Michael Zyrd. <i>Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada</i>

Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada

Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada

Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics and Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Convergences between the theological aesthetics of von Balthasar and the thought of Jacques Lacan allow the author to interpret the aesthetic moments of perception and rapture in terms of truth and desire. A study of Lacan's appraisal of Las Meninas demonstrates how the work of art engages the truth and desire of the subject. In turn, these are presupposed and perfected in the encounter with God's own work of art, Jesus Christ.

Introduction: Mnemonic Regimes and Strategies of Subversion

This collection of papers uses ethnography from Australia and Papua New Guinea to explore the politics of memory and forgetting. It analyses the techniques, practices and context within which memory and forgetting emerge as forces for mediating and constituting present existence. The collection explores both the oppressive nature of memory and forgetting but also the liberating potential and Utopian horizon which memory and forgetting can open up (cf. Jay 1988). It is necessary to bear in mind the contradictory nature of memory: both its necessary and often involuntary nature but also its yielding and malleable nature. In terms of the indispensable imaginary nature of memory, it was Bergson (1991) who argued that the present only emerges through differentiating and relating itself back to the past and that the lived moments of perception are always underpinned by memories. Bergson's point about the necessary imaginary nature of memory for constituting the present (and indeed also the future) has now become the basis for a whole stream of anthropology which argues that in order for people to control how they define themselves in the present, it is necessary for them to control how they define the past. Memory is a particular relationship to time and as such it is mediated by the narrative structures through which communities apprehend and render time significant. The past never disappears from the field of the present but is always present in it, forming as it does the intersubjective basis for the temporal organisation of relationships. In his book On Collective Memory, Halbwachs investigated the social contexts within which memories emerge and circulate, and the way a collectivity defines and creates itself through sharing its memories. He wanted to move away from individualistic explanations of memory so as to explore its intersubjective nature. He explored the difficulty of separating the interiority of memory from all those forms of archiving memory which served to exteriorise it and render it repeatable, fixed and shared.