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WORLD SPECTATORS. By Kaja Silverman. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, 177 pp.
This slender volume by Kaja Silverman, Professor of Rhetoric and Film at University of California, Berkeley, is large in just about every other way-scope, ambition, range, and ultimately in the challenging questions it raises. Situating herself "between psychoanalysis and philosophy" (p. 27). and claiming that both need each other, she aspires to recenter "visual forms" (p. 62) in our experiential world. Fittingly, she begins with the antithesis to this perspective: Plato's Allegory of the Cave, wherein prisoners are chained in place to gaze at a wall where shadows of images are paraded by unseen laborers. Escaping from bondage to these "shadows, copies, fakes, simulacra, and other forms of traditionally despised seeming" (p. 14), the Platonic idealist emerges blinking into daylight and gradually corrects his vision by ascending the ladder of higher consciousness through "sublimation and departicularization" (p. 8) toward the realm of ideal beauty beyond the sun. Silverman would reclaim the "world of phenomenal forms" which figure in the cave parable "only as a realm of deceptive shadows" (p. 8).
It might be observed that this ground is already heavily trodden, traveled by artists and poets who, in Helen Vendler's words, "provide an urgent sense of the outer or inner world exactly captured in surprising rhythmic language and original form."1 This counter-Platonic-sublimation mode is conspicuous in such Modems as Yeats who wrote "All dreams of the soul/End in a beautiful man's or woman's body,"2 and Norman 0. Brown, whose Love's Body (1965) attempted to undo the alientating damage of sublimation. But Silverman has no brief against sublimation; her interest lies more in how inner and outer realms converge and manage to overcome a split between being and meaning. Moreover, she is writing in a Postmodern mode, which means that, along with Freud, her guiding lights are Heidegger and Lacan.
Most of the time, the pathway of her prose carries her reader either through clearings or at least keeps them in view, though at times we plunge into very dense, almost opaque sections, as when she expounds the intricate interplay of word versus thing-presentations as these are processed through the conscious/preconscious/unconscious systems of Freud's topographic model. I emerged from the total experience...