The phantasm of the cracks: an an-historic speculation

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2015v20n2p136

From Siegfried Kracauer's and George Kubler's concept of “shape of time”, we essay a reading of the reception of the mutilated body image in art, analysing how discourses of historians, artists and critics articulate around that image in certain moments of history. We suggest, with Agamben, Derrida, and Deleuze, that a phantasm might be haunting the body image in art, whose spectrality manifests itself underneath the very discourses trying to repress it. We visit the Renaissance, the XVIIIth century, and the turning from the XIXth to the XXth. We conclude that a change of attitude in the XXth century is the reflex of the overturning of platonism which was being announced since the XIXth century, but whose symptoms were felt since before, manifested in a contradictory manner in discourses which praise the beauty of the fragment in the same time they use it to reach an image of beauty beyond the material realm.