Geometry and abjection

Victor Burgin

pp. 11-26

in: James Donald (ed), Psychoanalysis and cultural theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Abstract

Although it makes no direct reference to Althusser's essay of 1970, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses",¹ Roland Barthes's essay of 1973, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein", had the effect of spatialising the Althusserian concept of ideology as representation: "there will still be representation for so long as a subject (author, reader, spectator or voyeur) casts his gaze towards a horizon on which he cuts out the base of a triangle, his eye (or his mind) forming the apex".² Laura Mulvey's essay of 1975, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema",³ subsequently theorised the voyeuristic subject of Barthes's theatrical space in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis. The change across this five-year period is profound. Instead of a contingent set of ideas which might be dissipated by reason, "ideology" was now conceived of in terms of a space of representations which the subject inhabits, a limitless space which the desiring subject negotiates by predominantly unconscious transactions.

Cited authors

Freud Sigmund

Barthes Roland

Diderot Denis