School of Culture and Communication

This thesis is an analysis of colour as an event with painting and its subject form. It addresses three questions. The first two are: can colour be an event in painting as colour and does its subject form encompass its viewers? The analysis begins with a historical summary of how colour in painting, often aligned with woman and the feminine, has been disparaged and marginalized in Western art. Plato’s theory is examined because he is blamed for the marginalisation of the image and colour, and Lacan’s discourse theory is used to analyse colour’s disparagement and explore how Plato’s philosophy correlates with Lacan’s master and university discourses. The thesis then explores Badiou’s theory on the event and Lacan’s on suppléance to demonstrate how colour becomes an artistic event with a painting and how a viewer becomes a part of the artistic subject form. I argue both pigmented colour and a viewer embody the artistic subject because a truth of the being of colour, in a new relational tie between them, is universalized with others. In different words, the viewer doesn’t just participate in the idea of the being of colour and thus remain caught in the prevailing discourse: she is the localizing point because of a specificity which tempers the singularity of her sight. Theories of Badiou and Lacan are employed to justify these assertions and to address a third question: what kind of philosophy prohibits compossibility with Lacan? I argue Badiou’s philosophy isn’t compossible with Lacan because unlike Lacan’s theory Badiou’s is emancipatory and indifferent to an individual’s symptom. My argument requires I present an application of Lacanian discourse theory and theory on nominations and suppletions to critique of Badiou’s philosophy. I specifically refute Badiou’s claims that there is no subject in Lacan’s theories and that the artistic subject is only with the art work.

This thesis offers a psychoanalytical reading of versions of the Red Riding Hood folk tale, from Charles Perrault to Anne Sexton. It explores how these versions denaturalise culturally constructed gender norms and demonstrates that all versions of the Red Riding Hood tale present a journey towards the dissolution of the self.

This is a study of social change and memory, of ideology and history, of psyche and society. It concerns the lives of eastern and western Germans in the years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. “The East German,” in particular, has been a subject of fascination since at least 1989, but this thesis is concerned less with “how they were back then” or “what made them the way they are” than with what they have been told to be and become since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I am interested in their accounts of what they have become and what they make of their western German counterparts. Hence, while the really-existing Berlin Wall is, for this thesis, of some (historical) significance, the “Wall in the Head” is of greater significance. This Mauer im Kopf is the barrier said to block the true arrival of the East German in the West and vice versa—something psychic is in the path of East and West unity. Many interpretations have been offered of why this geographic or longitudinal identification with East or West endures, despite the dismantling of physical borders. This study surveys this material with a view to providing a novel interpretation which draws on psychoanalytic understandings of ideology, history, subjectivity and memory. The concepts of Nachträglichkeit, as related to historical narration, and fantasy, as it concerns individual and social life, are central to this study. In this analysis, I argue that the discontents of re-unification cluster around East-West relations due to the predominant fantasy of re-unified Germany. The processes at play in the German transition and German history produced a set of distinct longitudinal identities and subject positions, while these also drew on longer geographic distinctions. The re-unification process was far more complex and difficult than anyone had initially imagined, subject to both political whim and historical contingencies. The Wende period emerges as a crucial era in the memorial and historical consciousness of eastern Germans. I describe the mutual distrust of eastern and western Germans. Secured by Cold War ideologies and new post-89 fantasies, these distinctions have been perpetuated by the largely west-derived logics of social, cultural and economic re-unification. Understanding this entails discussion of both the Holocaust’s legacy in German memory and the legacy of the revolution that saw the Berlin Wall fall in 1989. Post-war and post-wall are not isolated moments but deeply entwined events which continue to be articulated in similar terms. This similarity finds voice not only in reference to Germany’s “two dictatorships,” but also in unconscious repetitions and displacements. This study asks how German re-unification is at once a success and a failure. I argue re-unification has been formally fair and materially unfair. I question how those who carried out the 1989 revolution have ended up materially and politically alienated in re-unified Germany. In answering this question, I begin by exploring re-unification policies of historical reckoning and ways of coming to terms with the past. Elaborating this, I move to consider Ostalgie, a set of cultural practices purportedly expressing nostalgia for East Germany. I also consider three films (The Lives of Others, Good Bye Lenin! and Material) which represent touchstones in debates around 1989, the GDR and re-unified Germany. In the final chapter, I look to 2009 as a commemorative year of the Wall’s fall—how do commemorations function and what is their function, how was the narrative constrained and articulated during these events? Throughout, I draw upon a diverse set of primary and secondary sources, including films, museums, literary texts, advertisements, everyday objects and so on. This study is “about Germany” in the most basic sense, but it is also a test in applying psychoanalytic theory to an empirical “archive” or case study. I argue that we can make sense of the stalled and thwarted aspects of German re-unification through psychoanalytic theory. Both implicitly and explicitly, I propose that using a psychoanalytic framework can be an extremely productive way to make sense of complex national situations, where the approaches of political science and traditional anthropology leave something to be desired. The emphases on unconscious processes, the decentred subject and ideology are a fruitful and broadly applicable way of approaching political and social life, as this case study exemplifies. The theory used in this thesis is not merely instrumental (i.e., the best way to comprehend and interpret certain events), but an end in itself—analysis of the specific German case flows back into, and elucidates, understandings of these theoretical positions in general. If the German example is, in some senses, a case study in extremis of the ways in which society is divided, this is useful in the sense that it may show us all the more clearly the ordinary functioning of contemporary ideologies.

School of Culture and Communication - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Filters

Date

Author

Subject

Type

Settings

Sort By

Results per page

Statistics

Citations

Search Results