Ebook: The Threshold of the Visible World

Love.

Leading psychoanalytic theorist Kaja Silverman argues that love has a crucial role to play not only in the psychic, but in the political domain as well. In The Threshold of the Visible World she creates an aesthetic model capable of assisting us in the seemingly impossible task of loving bodies which are both different from our own, and culturally despised. At the heart of this model is a provocative rethinking of idealizaiton and the culturally transformative uses to which it might be put. Linking Benjamin's notion of the aura with Brecht's notion of alienation, she articulates an entirely new set of formal parameters for political representation.

The Threshold of the Visible World also provides a psychoanalytic examination of the field of vision. While offering extended discussions of the gaze, the look, and the image, Silverman is concerned above all else with establishing what it means to see. She shows that our look is always impinged upon by our desires and our anxieties, and mediated in complex ways by the representations which surround us. These psychic and social constraints lead us to commit involuntary acts of visual violence against others. Silverman explores the conscious and unconscious circumstances under which such acts of violence might be undone, and the look induced to see and affirm what is abject, and alien to itself.


In The Threshold of the Visible World Kaja Silverman advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic, exploring the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies.