Althusser\u27s Mirror

Jacques Lacan significantly influenced Althusser\u27s accounts of ideology and the subject. Althusser\u27s belief that science is a discourse without a subject parallels Lacan\u27s belief that in the Symbolic Order the Subject and the Other are alienated. Althusser\u27s account of interpellation, which explains how ideology recognizes individuals as subjects, takes for granted Lacan\u27s notion of the mirror stage. Althusser repudiates the plenitude of the subject, whose interpellation conceals its lack; Lacan shows that the subject\u27s failure to express itself in language makes the subject a void. However, Althusser, whose subject is too much like Lacan\u27s ego, fails to distinguish between the I of the split subject and the ego of the subject\u27s imaginary self-identity. What is more, Althusser rejects the self-consciousness implied by the subject\u27s lack of plenitude and its suturing interpellation

The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900

Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film.  Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world

The Look of Things

Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world

The Look of Things

Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world