Inner Force, or, the Revelatory Body

“L show you what you do not see—the body’s inner force,”

~~Francesca Woodman

Woodman’s self-portraits irresistibly call to mind Longinus’s description of

the sublime as that which “transports” and leaves traces. Longinus writes
that in language, the “sublime not only persuades but even throws an
audience into transport ... the sublime, endued with strength, irresistible,
strikes home.”! Invoking spatial metaphors of distance and inhabitation,
he conceives of the sublime as if moving through space, “striking home,”
even as the relationship of the sublime to space is complicated in ways that
Ihave previously indicated (home is a place, but Kant makes clear that the
sublime exists only in the viewer, a place without place). ‘lransport, as the
mode of the sublime, resonates with Woodman’s use of the photograph as
that which transports traces always in the process of being lost.
tn light of conveyance and location, modus and locus, what shall we make
of Woodman’s outrageous claim, quoted above: “I show you what you do not
see”?? Quite apart from her invocation of the body’s having “inner” force as
well as, logically, outer force, and apart from her staking for herself the keep
of this terrain of inner force, Woodman’s claim to be able to show us what
we do not see merits interpretation for its implicit evocation of transport, of
taking her audience elsewhere. Does she mean that her photographs show us
what we do not ordinarily see, or is it a deeper clatm—that her photographs
show us what cannot be seen? This second interpretation aligns Woodman’s

1 Longinus, On the Sublime, wans. William Smith, 1743, in The Sublime: A Reader
in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22.
2 Quoted in Phillippe Sollers, “The Sorceress,” lrancesca Woodman, ed. Hervé
Chandés (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour I’Art Contemporain; Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 10.
90 FRANCESCA WOODMAN AND THE KANTIAN SUBLIME INNER FORCE, OR, THE REVELAVORY BODY 9

project with Kant’s idea of the sublime as the moment of blindness in vision,
the moment of seeing how hidden are the conditions of vision. Showing the
audience what we do not see—paradox— structures Woodman’s approach to
making photographs.
In the self-portraits, Woodman’s blurred and de-centered body
transport. The border of the frame stands, of course, as that across which
the image cannot leap. But Woodman’s use of blur, slowed shutter speed, in
conjunction with her frequent deployment of the self-portrait, articulates the
sublime as that which transports, for the self-portraits in their very repetition
of blur communicate image as trace across the frames of individual images.’
In two photographs from the series Space? (Providence, Rhode Island, 1976),
for example, Woodman moves her body rapidly before a camera she has
set on slow shutter speed, recording transport in a medium
such record? The photographs study the body’s inhabitation of space and
articulate the difficulties of holding still for such a study. Playing through
resistance in a project of “transport,” Woodman evokes that embodiedness
that scandalously persists even in the mind’s finality, reason’s interaction
with imagination.
In the extended project of her self-portraits, Woodman’s figure
portraying the subject-who-sees is transported through mechanics of
light. The result is not narrative but traces, graphs. Diane
described photographs as “traces ... like a stain,” and Woodman’s self-
portraits interrogate the sublime by articulating the photograph’s status
as remnant, laying bare the way that identity itself is a stain.® In another
image from Space’, Woodman crouches naked in an abandoned glass
museum case (Providence, RI, 1975--76).° Here, the body is cast on display
as museum piece. Evocatively, the breasts are pressed up against the glass
of the case, at once emphasizing the substance of and also de-realizing
the breasts, flattening and making strange this symbol par excellence of
femininity (“feminine” deriving elymologically from /elare, to suckle). In
an earlier image from Boulder, Colorado, Woodman photographs
with her breasts held by clothespins (untitled, 1972-75).’ Clothespins that
are traditionally used to hold clothes on a line, to keep them aloft, invoke
3 Woodman notably borrows the blurred figure from Ralph Meatyard and Duane
Michals. It seems fair to say, however, thal her repeated use of the gesture marks it as
signature—a gesture that she repeats to emphasize and shift its meaning across various
scenes.
4 See Chris Townsend, l'rancesca Woodinan (Oxford: Phaidon, 2006), 120-121.
5 Diane Arbus, Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003), 226.
6 See Townsend, Francesca Woodman, 118.
7 Ibid., 83, 80.
the pain of holding aloft the female body in the cultural construction of
femininity as that which is earthbound.
The intimations of pain and entrapment in the images mentioned
above—pain and éntrapment focused on the femaleness of the body~
evokes interrogate the nexus of pain in the aesthetic that Kant draws together
with the idea of the sublime. The image from Space? of Woodman crouched
im a musetm case raises the question of why the young woman’s body is
pushed up against this glass. In part, the image is established as a metaphor
to hold the body stable against the fall of gravity, youth here presented as
trope for what must give way (to old age, to mortality), the museum case
holding the young body still. In effect, the camera lifts the body up from
gravity through its function as apparatus in the same way that the museum
that resists case holds the body as if frozen in time. Woodiman’s self-portraits play
through the idea of vision as vertigo, perception as fall, and the acsthetic
as protection, safeguard, against falling. Transport, then, appears in
Woodman’s work not just along the horizontal but also along the vertical
axis, invoking the risk of gravity —that force against which the body's force
works.
Arbus has Eyes
Woodman troubles boundaries, exposing the uncanny conditions of seeing
through photography. The boundaries of the self are reified and croded by
her self-portraits. A photograph showing Woodman curled on the lower shelf
of a glass museum case below a stuffed fox—as if she were herself a stuffed
fox—for example, indicates the gesture of the fallen body, posed as if it had
just fallen, and also the caught body whose fall has been halted.* But it has
been halted only by a kind of chilling violence that is the rhyming of museum
case, taxidermy, and the camera —a link that I tie to the Enlightenment for its
herself obvious evocation of the scientific as the privileged gaze.
Similarly complicating the se/fin self-portrait, the final image of Woodman’s
Fish Calendar—6 Days series, titled “From a calendar of 6 days, this is the 6th
day” (Rome, 1977), presents the subject set at the far left of the frame, de-
centcred, radically not the focus of the image.’ The center of this self-portrait
8 Here, I refer to an untitled photograph from Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-
1976, that is the cover image of Richard Hughes's The Fox in the AHic (New York: New
York Review of Books, 2000). In Townsend, Francesca Woodina, 104. See also “Untitled,”
Providence, RI, 1975-78, in Francesca Woodntan Retrospective (oxhibit catalog), ed. Isabel
Tejeda (Murcia, Spain: Espacio AV, 2009), 30.
9 See Townsend, Francesca Woodman, 163.
92 YRANCESCA WOODMAN AND THE KAN'TIAN SUBLIME INNER FORCE, OR, THE REVELATORY BODY 93

is long silver fish and a long, low silver-toned marble table. The fish mark interpreted by Kant as necessarily interior representation in the sublime."
time as they rot. Woodman’s concern with the geometry of time is denoted Likewise, a photograph slides before the gaze not simply representing but
as a “calendar” of “fish,” and this juxtaposition of that which quickly rots recasting what once was, a “stain” of what is not there now. In a sense, the
and becomes abased set against the marble substance of the table—marble photograph is uncannily like the Kantian act of vorstellen. The photograph
evoking temporal stability, resistance to decay—shapes the pictures’ theme. demands a collusive gesture on the part of the viewer, a placing of the
The audience implicitly is set parallel to Woodman, her upward gaze meeting image before her/his gaze. Woodman’s gesture of tableau in the Fish Calendar
our downward gaze as we look into the image of the crouched body, low table, image emphasizes the photograph as eidolon, The photograph here acts as
and floor. The audience and the self-portrait subject (Woodman) are caught in an intermediary between what is sensuous and what is in the mind, what
the act of observing the transience of the body, the supple and imminently decomposes through time and what organizes or supervises time.
useless and beautiful bodies of fish curved against the stability and, indeed, Woodman’s self-portrait from Space’ in which the photographer's head is
mausoleum cool of the marble table and the stone floor. cut off by the frame, and she holds torn wallpaper across her nude body (fig.
Woodman’s nakedness sets her on par with the fish: her nakedness 10), evokes in a different way the question of what is an event in the mind
implies the fish’s nakedness, her supple and gray-lit body’s gleam analogous and what is specified as sensuous, In this photograph, the body appears to be
to the fish bodies’ supple, gray shine. A long fish on a plate at the edge emerging from the decrepit wall: it is as if the body were firstly insubstantial,
of the table gestures toward the phallic, the kind of detail that encourages imagined rising from the wall. The hands holding large swaths of ancient
Phillippe Sollers to describe Woodman’s photographs as having a quality of wallpaper across the breasts and genitals of the woman’s body suggest that
“more naked’”-ness. But the fish, or the phallic member, is literally set beside the body has emerged by fantastic force from the solid wall. This body is
the focal point of the calendar’s ultimate image. Instead, the self-portrait positioned as a ghost of the imagination. In this self-portrait from Space’,
contrasts the young woman's gaze with the blatant lack of gaze of the fish Woodman offers the image of her body as a piece of imagination, as vorstellen,
and with the supervising gaze of the audience. We arc to the girl as she is or something set before the gaze."' The young womans face is hidden by the
to the rotting fish, the composition of corruption implies. ‘The fish calendar, wallpaper, and her genitals parallel the face in their status as that which is
then, not only shows the fish marking the days by their rapid decomposition, covert, covered by the wall’s derma. The feet and belly similarly shape parallel
not only implies the vulnerability of the body to time, but also defines the markers for that which allows the body to persist despite its slatus in the
subject-who-sees by her relationship to time and by the way that she sees mind as haunting, fotceful image, vorstellung. In this self-portrait, the fect and
her relationship to time, like and unlike the unseeing eyes of the fish. In the the belly hold down the representational axis of the corporeal, while the torn
image, we sec her seeing her vulnerability, in the marmoreal coolness of this wallpaper rhymes with the damaged window frames and the chipping paint
visual calendar. and dust, lead dust from the last century's leaded paint, evoking a sublation,
In the Fish Calendar, Woodman poses the abased body: she uncannily a loss of substance—like the damaged paint on the window frames. This
parallels her naked and somctimes crouched body to the bodies of fish, and
presentation of the not-body as the site of damage while the corporeal, the
she sets the images together with an evocative caption, calling the images a
“calendar.” ‘This could be a reference to the fasts and restrictions on eating
meat imposed by the Catholic calendar. (The series was taken in Rome.) The
emphatic articulation of medium in the final Fish Calendar photograph forms a 10 Rachel Zuckert goes so far as to argue that the Kantian sublime needs no object
crucial interstice between the body and the marble, the photograph performing at all to set it in motion, a position that is at once revelatory and ultimately not quite
accurate to the emphasis on the passivity of the perceptive faculty before the force of
the transience of the gaze, that transient gaze without which, as the Romantic
the object perceived. “Awe or Envy: Herder contra Kant on the Sublime,” Journal of
poets saw, the sublime act of perception could not exist. The medium of the Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61, no. 3 (2003): 219. But Zuckert’s problematizing of the
photograph, however, also doubles marble, making a show of fixing time, of place of art in Kant’s sublime is well taken; this problem is precisely why Kant’s theory
being unchanged by time. ‘The fish and the girl, bodies vulnerable to time, of the sublime so interestingly intersects with photography as that which at once is
“art” and also strictly, simply records physical objects.
images evanescent, are made of marble, static, in the photograph.
The picture is constructed through exterior representations that indicate 11 The German use of the verb vorstellen can be reflexive, a grammar linking
the Kantian notion of vorstellen to the self-reflexive gesture of the self-portrait, of self-
interior trouble, the trouble of time’s mark that works into and erodes the
introduction, Vorstellen translates as to introduce, to present, show; move forward, to
bodies of the fish and the body of the girl in the picture. A phantasmagoric put in front; to represent, mean, signify; while the reflexive sich vorstellen translates as
aspect of the Kantian sublime is implied by the way that the sensuous is to imagine, or to introduce oneself.
94 FRANCESCA WOODMAN AND THE KANTIAN SUBLIME INNER FORCE, OR, THE REVELATORY BODY 95

feet and the torso, remain clean and intact suggests a reversal of the terms we
usually associate with falling. Here, the body does not fall to earth but rather
into the element of light passing brilliantly through uncurtained windows
and luminous, toxic dust.
Playing through the problem of vertigo in perception, Woodman positions
her body inhabiting ruined architectural spaces, an evocation of loss as
transport. Kant indeed suggests that “the sublime consists in its being a
feeling of displeasure at an object which yet at the same time ... derives its
possibility from ... an unlimited capacity of the very same.” This aesthetic
inheritance of displeasure, the lacunary or mournful terms that Woodman
interrogates, is crucially invoked by terms of incapacity.
Derrida repeatedly writes in response to Kant’s sublime
and initiates mourning, he suggests that not only is the structure of Kant’s
third Critique lacunary but also that its intent is to cause the reader to
recognize loss.'? Woodman’s use of blur, then, invokes transport, her body
blurred because she is moving, but it also invokes loss, insofar as
incompletely represented because of the obfuscating qualities of
Articulating transport, the self-portraits resist stasis analogously
that the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement is defined as the
moment that at once resists perception and also overwhelms perception,
imposing on the viewer the swerve of an overwhelming perceptive event.
Argues Kant: “Itis precisely in ... the straining of the imagination to use nature
motion.'* Woodman manipulates her image in the self-portraits so that that
appearance of self-regard, of awareness, is evacuated. In effect, she performs
the subject without affectation precisely by reiterating the gesture of the self-
portrait, as if to train herself to see that “she” is not there, but rather a trace.
She reiterates the trace as that which is left after the sublime carries away the
subject-who-sees, reiterating this trace figurally, enacting a performance that
tums on the camera’s configurative trope of loss. Sarah Kofman reads this
trope of loss as extending the Cartesian metaphor for the gaze, a metaphor
into which rupture, dislocation, and dissociation are inscribed.” Kofman
concludes that for Descartes,
“one must become blind in order to know,” a
notion of vision built on loss, and lack of resemblance.
When Jacques The Puppet and the Fall
that it instigates
Kleist’s essay, or parable, Uber das Marionettentheater posits that marionettes
perform with exemplary grace because they lack minds: “Grace appears
most purely in that form which either has no consciousness or an infinite
her form is consciousness.” While Woodman’s photographic praxis was marked by
blur. her single-minded drive and mastery one may paradoxically read the self-
to the way portraits as performances in which she poses and stages her body as if it
perceptual lacked any will other than that which is attached to the photographer —but
the photographer herself stands dislocated from the photograph. [n the act
of photographing herself, she loses awareness of her own existence, or rather
that existence is marked apart from her activity. The photographer, then, acts

as schema for ideas that there is something forbidding to sensibility ... letting as a sort of puppeteer to the self-portrait object —her body.
it look out beyond itself into the infinite which for it is an abyss.”"* Derrida Although Kleist’s Marionettentheater does not invoke the sublime explicitly,
also refers to this quality of perception that almost nullifies perception as the Kant’s concept of the sublime can be linked to Kleist’s notion of grace because
figure of the abyss, the motif of the sublime.” Strikingly, movement, transport, it turns on a similar gesture of acknowledging the problem of knowing the
is imposed violently onto the event of observation, perception, specifying the
conditions of judging. In Kleist’s essay, the puppet’s grace derives “first of
way that movement shakes perception.
Heinrich von Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater, to which I will return,
echoes this tragic, unstill, unstable, shaken sublime when it assigns grace 16 Heinrich von Kleist, Uber das Marionettenthenter, trans. Idris Parry, in Essays ow
Dolls (London: Syrens, 1994), 1-15.
only to that body that moves without self-regard, without awareness of its
17 Sarah Kofman, Cantera Obscura of Ideology, trans. Will Straw (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999), 49-53, Kofman points out: “Because images on the retina arc
perspectivist, Descartes concludes that there is no resemblance between object and
12 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed, Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed. image ... It is the mind that sees, and not the eye ... at the same time errors are of the
Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 89. mind ... the idea is thus not the reflection of the object, whether inverted or not ... one
must become blind in order to know. In this way, the model of the camera obscura may
13 Jacques Derrida, The ‘ruth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Jan lead to a non-perspectivist conception of knowledge” (52). To this, Kofman’s virtuosic
MacLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 79-80, 91. description, I add that the Cartesian notion of “no resemblance between object and
14 Kan, Critique, 95. image” in effect builds a notion of vision on loss, on lack of resemblance.

15. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 129. 18 Kleist, Uber das Marionettenthenter, 12.
96 FRANCESCA WOODMAN AND THE KANTIAN SUBLIME INNER FORCE, OR, THE REVETL.ATORY BODY 97

all [from] a negative [advantage]: it would never be guilty of affectation.” grace, Kleist invokes grace at the site of an inanimate puppet and invokes
Kleist explains: “For affectation is seen, as you know, when the soul, or mathematics as the salvific metaphor for grace.
moving force, appears at some point other than the centre of gravity of the Tn both Kant and Kleist, then, the sublime or graceful moment is won by
movement.” Kleist links affectation—self-regard—to performance, arguing loss in the subject-who-sees: either, as Kant defines the sublime, by violence
that gravity and the illusion of self-knowledge similarly mar grace. Likewise, inflicted on the subject-who-sees or, as Kleist defines grace, by violence
Kant envisions the sublime as that perceptual event in which the subject-who- interpretively imposcd on the puppet, who is compared to a radical amputee
sees loses a sense of control, loses self-regard, loses the weight, or the gravity, Through this figure of the Kleistian puppet, one may link Woodman’s self-
of reason. portraits to Kant’s violent sublime. I'or Woodman interrogates the radical
I link Kleist’s ideology of grace to Woodman’s stilled, blurred movements separation (amputation) of subject and object theorized by Kant and Kleist
in the self-portraits because her performance engages a troubling grace as as taking place across the vertex of the gaze. The photographer taking the
the term is developed by Kleist, capturing the image of the body from which self-portrait photograph secs her body again and again until her image is
the photograph has taken away the will. it does so in the obvious sense that transferred to the photographic medium, leached from her control.
the body becomes immobile in the frame of the image, but also in the sense The amputating force of the frame is that within which Woodman
that the camera as apparatus in effect lifts the image of the body, achieving a figuratively performs for an audience, audience necessarily withheld
resistance to gravity in the flat (weightless) space of the image. by the frame. For the frame is that beyond which we definitively cannot
If for Kant the sublime is cxemplary of the subject-who-sees both losing see. Kant’s notion of the sublime, as Derrida makes clear, turns on his
and gaining power, or gaining grace in the act of losing mastery, the sublime theorization of the frame as violence. ‘The photograph is an object always
links back to other acts of gazing conditioned by tropes of a painful agitation already violently expressive of limits, framed but also exceeding the frame
in the moment of the sublime, “a subjective movement of the imagination by pointing back to the “lost” scene it traces or graphs. The photograph, in
by which it does violence to inner sense.””” For Kant, the aesthetic is always other words, definitively framed, becomes the paradigmatic progeny, the
implicated in loss, in the lost illusion that one can ascertain by aesthetic Fnlightenment object (as Kofman makes the historical argument) revelatory
judgment the formal conditions of aesthetic perception. Kleist defines of notions of grace bound up with abyss and loss, exemplary of the troubled
“grace” similarly as a lack of self-regard or affectation, a way of secing that boundary between subject and object. Woodman’s project of self-portraiture
also ravels seeing, a theorization of seeing that deeply intertwines vision significantly eschews self-regard —affectation—inasmuch as she presents
with the condition of loss. herself in blurred or effaced images that structurally trouble the centrality
Kleist locates grace in the body of the object viewed: the puppet in the of the subject, revealing the frightening exposure of the body’s inner force,
Marionetlentheater. But for Kant, an object external to the viewer cannot be its vulnerability to time.
sublime: the sublime definitively occurs as perception and cannot describe
an object perceived. Kleist, however, imposes the idea of grace onto the
body of the puppet through the gesture of observation. In fact, he positions Traumatic Sublime
the mind of the viewer of the Marionettenthenter as the locus of grace. In the
interpretive mind of the viewer inheres the realization of the puppets’ grace. Inher essay on Woodman, Peggy Phelan focuses on the repetitive gesture of the
Both Kant and Kleist place in the sublime, or in grace, a stroke of loss. Paul self-portrait in Woodman’s oeuvre, referencing Cathy Caruth’s theorization,
de Man, linking Kant and Kleist, proposes an impossibility: “The aesthetic in Unelaimed Experience, of trauma and the repetition compulsion” But
can be taught only if the articulation of aesthetic with mathematical (and Woodman’s repelilion of the gesture of the self-portrait also can be read as
epistemological) discourse—the burden of Kant’s Critique of Judgentent—can
be achieved.””! Similarly, recognizing impossibility as the formal gesture of
22 Linking the lack of limbs with lack of self-regard, the artificial limb metonymy
for lack of self-regard, von Kleist writes, “The range of their movements is in fact
limited, but those they can perform they execute with a certainty and ease and grace
19 Ibid, 5-7. which must astound the thoughtful observer.” Uber das Marionettentheater, 5.
20 Kant, Critique, 89, 23 Peggy Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One
21 Paul de Man, “Aesthetic formalization: Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater,” in More Time,” Sigits 27, no. 4 (2003): 993; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
The Rhetoric of Romuaiticisn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 270. Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 57-72.
 WOODMAN AND THE KANTIAN SUBLIME INNBR FORCE, OR, THE REVELATORY BODY 99
98 FRANCESCA

such as death or sexual difference, but which keeps insisting and manifesting
an interrogation of the aesthetic, Trauma, here, is legible as the trauma of the
s itself through repetition.”” Lacan’s notion of trauma and the real, as well as
aesthetic as such. Indeed, criticRemy Roussetzki contends that Kant establishe
the Kantian sublime, are not posited as literal, direct perceptions of the real
the sublime as the traumatic “real.”*4 1 want to tighten Roussetzki’s insight
into the aesthetic and trauma to argue that the event of sublime perception
but rather as moments in which the inadmissibility, or the unbounded quality,
of the real is felt. The real is felt only as recognition of the impossibility of
is traumatic because it manifests precisely where direct perception of the real
apprehending the noumen. It is felt as a boundary.
is approached and withheld. For Kant, the sublime stipulates the absolute
of the conditions of judgment, a privation that is itself real. Performing at the edge of multiple visual boundaries, Woodman’s self-
inaccessibility
portraits interrogate not a life but boundaries—of geometrical forms, frames,
This privative quality, this severe loss, is the kind of trauma that Woodman
and of time, to name a few. The gesture of the self-portrait in her hands
dramatizes in her self-portraits. Interrogating the impossibility of seeing
becomes a testing ground for loss. Roussetzki draws parallels to the feeling
wholly, her self-portraits play through and show herself seeing herself secing,
of the abysmal, the unspeakable, in Kant’s sublime and the traumatic aphasia
not simply resisting being looked at but figurally performing the impossibility
and repetition that follows events of violence.* A practice of repetition,
of a totalizing gaze.
(and one may differentiate sustained from photography rehearses the trauma of the incompleteness of the gaze and
Woodman’s sustained
perhaps also of aphasia, a trauma that Kant categorizes through the concept
repetitive) project of self-portraiture invokes the terms of the Kantian
of the sublime.*! Keeping in mind Roussetzki’s notion of a traumatic sublime,
sublime, interrogating notions of boundlessness.* While it is true that there
T link the traumatic force of Woodman’s photographs--the way that they
is no evidence that Woodman was a student of Kant, I am making a slightly
was not introduced to Kant in the way of often strike her audience as having to do with death and deathliness—not to
different argument. Woodman
Woodman’s biography but rather to her presentation of the parable of abyss as
Roussetzki’s example of Percy Shelley, for example, through privileged male
the eye’s condition, In her self-portraits, it is her revelation of trauma worked
hegemonic discourse.” Despite her upbringing by devoted and supportive
place in the discourse of education, at
into the substance of the aesthetic, instead of a narrative or biographical
parents, Woodman retains a woman's
statement of trauma, that haunts us. The undertow of trauma in Woodman’s
least insofar as her extraordinary carly talent is focused on herself as object
self-portraits is that of continually, repetitively approaching the inaccessible
of interrogation. Her interrogation of the aesthetic is established within the
limits of the conditions of secing, a Lrauma embedded in her medium that
confines of male aesthetic discourse that builds itself on woman’s body, as
Woodman’s work makes explicit, and that becomes so vivid in Woodman’s
Lynda Nead’s The Female Nude persuasively argues.” Nevertheless, Woodman articulation that we feel the loss.
intervenes in Kant's strategy of conceptualizing the sublime. This intervention
must be read through the terms of Kant’s currency, that is, through the
legitimacy rather than mere historicity of Kant’s aesthetics. Interpreting inner Force
Woodman with Kant, we retain the motive of Kant's usefulness.
Both Lacar’s notion of trauma and Kant’s idea of the sublime are negative
Woodman’s self-portrait project points to a sensuous loss embedded in the
moments. Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf glosses Lacan’s “real” as follows: “In act of aesthetic judgment. But this aspect of the gaze, the way it troubles
Lacan the real refers lo that which cannot be directly inscribed or experienced,

24 Remy Roussetzki, “Aggravating Shakespeare: Endiess Violence in Shelley's
494,
and in Musset’s Theater of Anxiety,” Europemt Romantic Review 15, no. 4 (2004):
25 Kant emphasizes the hauntingly imteriorized quality of the sublime: “The
sublime is thal the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind
transcending every standard of sense.” Critique, 81.
26 Roussetzki, “Ageravating Shakespeare,” 495.
27 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London: Routledge,
1992).
29 Christine Van Boheemen-Saal, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History:
Reading, Narrative aud Postcotonialisin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
19. ‘ ‘
30 Roussetzki, “Ageravating Shakespeare,” 494-98,
31 In this, Woodman evokes Kant’s sublime, for, in his Critique of Judgment, the
radical awareness of what cannol be represented is not a sense of the inaccessibility
of what Slavoj Zizek calls a “kernel” of noumenal reality but rather strictly a formal
impossibility. See The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Cove of Christianity (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 2003), 69-74, 77-79. In other words, the core of the real that Zizek calls

28 Jacques Lacan, The Filies of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, book 7 of The Seminar of the “kernel” cannot be accessed in the experience of the sublime, because for Kant the
noumenal itself cannot be accessed.
Jacques Lacan, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 19-34.
100 FRANCESCA WOODMAN AND THE KANTIAN SUBLIME INNER FORCE, OR, ‘HE REVELATORY BODY 101

the frame because loss acts as a cut that disturbs somatic continuity, seems
almost distasteful for Kant, who writes that “the sublime in nature may be
regarded as completely lacking in form or figure.”** Indeed, the problem of
the sensuous haunts Kant’s project of adumbrating the sublime. The Critique
of Judgement seems to want to shed the very visceral power that it theorizes,
positing as safeguard the evacuation of the sensuous: “The safeguard is this
purely negative character of the presentation ... when nothing any longer
presents itself to the senses.”
“eye.” Tor this reason, her self-portraits are marked by the vertigo that
comunentators often link back to her suicide. But this vertigo is not necessarily
biographical. Woodman, rehearsing the moment at which the observing self
is at once blind (to the conditions of perception) and possessed of a visionary
lucidity (aware of those conditions), intersects with and troubles ideology of
an inhuman “eye” (the camera) that is supposed to see in a more revelatory
fashion than the human eye.
As a loss of equilibrium or balance, vertigo is linked to a loss of boundaries,

If, as Roussetzki suggests, Kant’s sublime is the presentation that indicates
“that there is some unrepresentable ... indicating that there is a ‘place’
(which is no place) where objects and their images are no longer possible,”
the question of the body’s inner force~-which Woodman claims that she
critical to the sublime. That is, if location (where does Kant’s
can show —is
sublime occur) haunts Kant’s theory of aesthetics, it is because the subject-
who-sees is suspended between embodiment and abdication of the senstious.
‘This gesture of flight, transport, is surely part of Woodman’s notion of “inner
force.” Kant’s sublime indicates an abysmal moment of approaching the formal
boundaries of perception that themselves cannot be perceived. The objective
corollary of aesthetic judgment in the sublime of the Critique, however, is not
noumenal revelation but a kind of sensuous erosion that Woodman’s blurred
self-portraits typify.
In a sense, the photograph, like Kant’s sublime, is a “place of no place,”
at once sensuous (seen) and non-sensuous (impossible to touch the objects
imaged in the frame). Woodman taps this aspect of the photograph as a
place abandoned by the quality of place-ness. Woodman’s photographs are
profoundly without a story, turning her grandmother's objects or inherited
“things” (history) into geometry, relationships between shapes. Woodman
interrogates where she “fits” in this geometry of time: where the living, forceful
body fits among the reliquary forms of decrepit architecture and abandoned.
“things.” Evoking places of formalized loss, Woodman’s self-portraits attend
to the body in space in images where the self is not intended. Phelan’s thesis
that Woodman’s self-portraits teach us Lo accept the loss of the girl overshoots
the mark. lior the purpose of the aesthetic, there never was a girl, only a
series of frames and within them the body showing its inner force.
Woodman’s staged tableaux for pictures snapped by someone else or by
a shutter-corded camera strategize blindness, even an amputation of the
the force of gravity as a boundary. In interpreting Woodman’s oeuvre through
the framework of the sublime, then, | want to keep alert to Woodman’s striking
and paradoxical claim: “I show you what you do not see: the body’s inner force.”
Her revelation is of gravity and the body’s resistance to and recuperation of
the ramifications of that grave frame, her self-portraits structured according to
this vanishing point where the revelatory body exemplifies that loss implicit
in the gaze. In images from the Eel series, as we have seen, the naked girl
curls next to a bow! of eels, her curving body formally matching the eels.
This formality of the body does not, however, elide the stroke of the body’s
raw exposure. Rather, the figure’s prostration echoes the formal arch of the
eel, Like Emily Dickinson’s Master-letters persona, Woodman’s self-portrait
persona explores a rhetoric. Here, the rhetoric is visual, and the topic is not
romantic love but the tragedy of embodiment as such. The photographer and
the poet share a deployment of prostration as a trope that gains the subject a
privileged link to the aesthetic. However troubling this privilege may be, in
terms of gender, it is not something to turn away from in our consideration,
but rather the central thing to face.
Force
The collapse in the center of the sublime inscribes a terrifyingly visceral
trope of limitlessness — of taxing oneself to the uttermost and yet remaining
in a space of instability, indeed of further taxing. Woodman’s response to
aesthetic formalization is powerfully couched along gendered lines, showing
women’s bodies and also evoking traditional parameters of femininity
as appealing and dangerous—dangerous because of woman’s cultural
denigration. Woodman’s use of the female body tagged as what Nead
calls the boundary, that which demarcates culture, coheres with Kofman’s
theorization of the camera as a development of Enlightenment notions of the

32 Kant, Critique, 109.

33. Ibid., 104.

36 Sloan Rankin, “Peach Mumble—Ideas Cooking,” in Francesca Woodman, ed.
34 Roussetzski, “Aggravating Shakespeare,” 495. Hervé Chandeés (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain; Zurich: Scalo,
35 Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography,” 1001-1002. 1998), 34-35,
102 FRANCESCA WOODMAN AND THE KANTIAN SUBLIMF INNER FORCE, OR, THE REVELATORY BODY 103

eye and the gaze.” The camera stands as a reliquary metaphor reproducing also query how nakedness metaphorizes possessing the gaze.*? Woodman
its gendering of ontology. In Woodman’s nudes, the body as geometry is implicitly builds through the compilation of her self-portraits the image of the
fitted to the aesthetic through tropes of compression, violence, suggesting body’s inner force: its role as locus of the act of possessing the gaze.
that the aesthetic compresses the body into a museum case or lifts the body
with clothespins. Offering an Enlightenment paradigm of gaze as gendered
pressure, Kant writes in the Prolegomena, “The space of the geometer { Could No Longer Play,I Could Not Play by Instinct
is exactly the form of sensuous intuition which we find a priori in us” —
that is, the body, or geometry as bodily formality, is fitted to perception.” As noted by Benjamin Buchloh, the cut breast bleeds film in Woodman’s self-
But Woodman’s self-portraits illuminate the violence of that tally, that portrail titled “I could no longer play i could not play by instinct” (Providence,
fit. RL 1977; fig. 18). To close this chapter, I explore how this unusual self-portrait,
The violence of Woodman’s self-portraits, then, engages the gender while gesturing towards masochism, also shows “what you cannot see: the
concerns beautifully articulated by Abigail Solomon-Godeau in “Just Like a body’s inner force.”
Woman” by evoking the violence of pushing the figure against the frame—the The self-portrait “I could no longer play i could not play instinct” strikingly
frame of the architectural space she inhabits or, as in the Self-Deceit series, is acephalic: Woodman’s head is cut off by the frame. The violence of the image
the frame of the mirror, and always the frame of the camera’s distorting and does not end with that beheading. Her breast appears to be cut by a knife
fixing gaze.” The frame in Woodman’s self-portraits is vertiginous and exact, that not only remains in her hand but also continues moving, blurred with
an eroticized pressure. motion. From the cut, exposed breast bleeds photo-booth film with several
I have been arguing for a rereading of Woodman’s work as resonant ghostly shots of Woodman’s face. Here, I use the word “ghostly” advisedly:
with the Kantian sublime, suggesting that it shows ways to reread Kant’s the photo-booth shots of her face make identity a ghost that haunts the body.
Critique of Judgement as a theorization of aesthelics and a space in which Tt is gothic to place identity, in the form of the face, at the ctymological site of
a collapse of gendering occurs. Kant theorizes this swerve as inherent in femininity, the breast. The image bleeds, it repeats, it absorbs the gaze through
the extremity of the aesthetic, the sublime. Derrida, as I have discussed, violence. But also, the photo-booth self-portrait faces that are bleeding from
limns the veering of the frame, arguing that Kant makes the loss of the
Woodman’s “cut” breast gaze at us, the audience. (Since the knife is clean, |
frame the very hallmark of that most accurate and disturbing moment in assume she did not actually cut herself but poses the idea of the cut.) Gaze
perception, the sublime. Woodmar’s self-portraits perform the subject’s
here is multiple: the gaze of the head cut off by the frame returns and presides
endangerment at this boundary of secing. The body’s inner force Woodman over the entire photograph; the gaze of those repeated faces bleeding from the
reveals is its capacity to have the gaze, and this exposure plays through breast stealthily confront us. But what of the knife? In an image so controlled
the idea of the camera as revelatory apparatus. Here, the ideology of by the theme of the cut—its face cut off and displaced onto another cut—the
perception as dislocated from the sensuous is turned round to interrogate knife would seem to represent the force that dispossesses the subject of the
itself. gaze,
The almost exclusive nudity of the images begs the question of gender as And yet the knife is also the metonymic object that embodies the “inner
performativity. Here, the performative act is the act of the gaze, Woodman’s
force” that is the gaze. For the knife cuts the breast that bleeds the face with
act. Although some of Woodman’s self-portraits do perform femininity as
eyes, and the knite, the image implies, cuts off the head that in this self-
overdetermined, stylized submission or even as masochism—rseflecting portrait does not appear on Woodman’s body. Yet this cutting does not take
Laura Mulvey’s notion of mid-twentieth-century femininity as “be-looked-at- away from Woodman her ability to see, does not dispossess her of possessing
ness” and performance artist Gina Pane’s portrayal of gender as harm— they the gaze, Rather, it binds the face cut off (cut out of the frame) with the photo-
booth film faces bleeding from the breast. Vision, the capacity to see, and the

37 Kofman, Camera Obscura, 52.

38 Lmmanuel Kant, Prolegoniena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Lewis White Beck, 40 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminisnt and Film,
trans. Paul Carus (indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), 35. ed. E, Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34-47. See also Kathy
39 Abigail Solomon-Godcau, “Just Like a Woman,” in Francesca Woodman: O'Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Arl and the 1970s (Minncapolis,
Photographic Work (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Museum, 1986), 11-35. University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
104 PRANCESCA WOODMAN AND THE KANTLAN SUBLIME

possession of the gaze are the body’s inner force. And Woodman shows us Mechanics of Evanescence
this body's inner force, this revelation through violence alone, fused to the arc
of the knife.
In Woodman’s “| could no longer play i could not play by instinct,” then,
the acephalic figure holding the knife presides over the multiplication of a
visual pun. Here, the self is not only displaced —the head cut off, reappearing
in the photo-booth film images of Woodman’s face—but that displacement
by the frame is multiplied. The subject organizes and multiplies the gesture
of her own displacement. This is the paradigmatic gesture of all Woodman’s
self-portraits: the self (the gaze, the cyes) displaced onto film. The photograph
exemplifies the ghostliness of gender, its haunting quality, or rather its
entanglement in repetition that is haunting. The imner force the image shows
is that of the self-portrait subject’s capacity to see, to possess the gaze. This
“That this happens at the expense of stable and determinable meaning
capacity is the inner force that Woodman shows us. She shows the body’s inner
is a fair enough price to pay for the mastery over form.”
force: the capacity to see. The part of herself that Woodman most revealingly
shows her audience is her possession of the gaze. —Paul de Man, “Aesthetic Formalization”

I have discussed Woodman in terms of her inheritance from woman artists. But
she can be interpreted as drawing from the techniques of photographers Duane
Michals, Ralph Meatyard, and Aaron Siskind.’ These comparisons attend
to Woodman’s use of blur, her evocations of spectrality, her use of decrepit
interiors, and her deployment of the series. While it is without question that
Woodman uses blur, works in series, photographs abandoned and damaged
buildings, and plays with evocations of spectrality, and while it is likely that
Woodman is emulating Michals, Meatyard, and Siskind with these gestures,
in this chapter I will look at the question of gender in these influences. I attend
to the problematic ties of gender and influence not to argue that Woodman
was not influenced by male photographers but to examine ways that tropes of
materiality, focus, and motion intersect with and are troubled by gender.
Woodman refers to Siskind, who taught at RISD, in a photograph with
the caption “After Aaron Siskins [sic] opening i painted the wall sometimes
i catch people photographing it but my photographs of it aren’t very
nice” (Providence, RI, 1975-78). This caption beneath a delicate arboreal
photograph suggests Woodman’s sense of inadequacy in comparison with
the teacher—his “opening” inspires her to paint a wall that inspires others
photographs but that she cannot translate into successful photographs. [Jer

1 See, for example, Benjamin Buchloh, “Francesca Woodman: Performing the

Photograph, Staging the Subject,” Francesca Woodman: Photographs, 1975-1980 (New
York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 2004), 41-50, and Chris ‘lownsend, “Scattered in Space
and Time,” introduction to Francesca Woodman (Oxford: Phaidon, 2006), 6-67,

2 See Townsend, Francesca Woodman, 145.

 Francesca Woodman and
This book is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth (1966-1987)
the Kantian Sublime
To the pure all is pure

Claire Raymond

ASHGATE
 © Claire Raymond 2010
Contents
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission
of the publisher.

Claire Raymond has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Published. by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East Suite 420
Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Famham Burlington, VT 05401-4405
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England
List of lustrations vi
www.ashgate.com Acknowledgments

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Introduction: Geometry of Time: Francesca Woodman
Raymond, Claire. and the Kantian Sublime
Francesca Woodman and the Kantian sublime,
1. Woodman, Francesca, 1958-1981--Criticism and
interpretation, 2. Sublime, The. 3. Photography, Artistic. 1 Mistresses 21
I. Title
770.9 2-de22 2 Woodman’s Mirror Is an Enlightenment Mirror 4)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raymond, Claire. 3 Shaken Sublime 65
Francesca Woodman and the Kantian sublime / Claire Raymond.
p.cm. 4 Inner [orce, or, the Revelatory Body 89
Includes bibliographical references and index.
TSBN 978-0-7546-6344-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1, Woodman, Francesca, 1958-1981--Psychology. 2. Women photographers-- 5 Mechanics of Evanescence 105
United States--Biography. 3. Photographers--United States--Biography.
4. Photography--Philosophy. 5. Sublime, The, in art. 6. Photography of the 6 Among the Ruins: Vertigo, Philobats, and Statues 123
nude. 7, Neo-Kantianism. I. Title.

TR140.W675R393 2009 Epilogue: The Question of Narcissism 137

770.92--Ac22
2009053878 Works Cited 145
Index 151

ISBN 9780754663447

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