Introduction

Geometry of Time: Francesca Woodman

and the Kantian Sublime

“These appearances can never contain anything but

what geometry prescribes to them.”
—Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“These things arrived from my grandmothers[.] [T]hey make me

think about where I fit in this odd geometry of time.”
—Francesca Woodman, Some Disordered Interior Geometries

I first saw the American photographer Francesca Woodman’s (1958–81)

work in an exhibit titled “The Disembodied Spirit,” curated by Alison Ferris
in Brunswick, Maine. The scene of this initial encounter intimated some of
the central problems of the sublime: the disorienting risk of the sublime,
the way that the sublime overwhelms the observer. For, having arrived at
Bowdoin College Museum on a bitterly cold winter day, helping my toddler
from the car, I had bumped my head hard on the car roof and consequently
met Woodman’s work not only in a context of nineteenth-century spirit
photographs but also, possibly, in a mildly concussed state. A central
aspect of the sublime—that it overwhelms the viewer, reversing the power
dynamic between the active gaze and the passive object gazed upon—was
structured, then, into my introduction to Woodman’s work. That afternoon,

  The phrase appears in Woodman’s text written below two photographs in

Some Disordered Interior Geometries, reproduced in Chris Townsend, Francesca Woodman
(Oxford: Phaidon Press, 2006), 238.
  Alison Ferris, “The Disembodied Spirit,” The Disembodied Spirit Exhibition
Catalog (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003), 32–43.
 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

seeing images from the House series, the Angel series, and “Self-Portrait
Talking to Vince,” I was struck by the risk entailed in the work. Unlike the
photographic records of the “disembodied spirit” in the context of which
Woodman’s pictures at Bowdoin appeared, Woodman’s photographs of
herself radically disallow the comfort of an easily separated soul and body.
Indeed, it struck me that the photographs expressed unusual claims in their
visual address of ontology. In their paradoxical blurring and emphasizing of
the body, Woodman’s pictures pose questions about the limits of subjectivity
in materiality.
Ferris’s decision to place Woodman’s photographs with nineteenth-
century spirit photographs is itself a fascinating move. Woodman’s work,
which often has been received as biographical revelation, as bare sincerity,
was here juxtaposed with spirit photography, which can be understood
as a trick to make mourners believe the photograph has indeed captured
the image of the departing soul. Ferris’s exhibit suggested to me a way to
read Woodman’s work not as the visual confession of a troubled psyche,
a youthful suicide, but rather as an interrogation of the very terms of
photography, an interrogation both of the “tricks” that photography can
play and, significantly, of the idea that aesthetics override tricks. Indeed,
this placing of photography at the heart of the problem of the aesthetic—
the question of whether aesthetic effects are tricks, illusions, or eruptive
markers of the real—seems to me Woodman’s stroke of genius. Her
pictures remind us that photography in its liminality, historically placed
between science and art, between personal record and public exhibition,
forces key questions of the aesthetic, and does so by visually invoking the
sublime. The role of the frame, which Jacques Derrida’s Truth in Painting
argues is foundational to the sublime, is essential to photography in a
highly determinative fashion. Nothing else determines the photograph’s
existence like the frame and Woodman’s mark, I will argue, is her multiply
approached tilting of the frame. Likewise, questions of power in the
gaze coalesce around photography’s necessity of capturing what in an
irreducible sense was there, stipulating the gesture of capturing the image
as opposed to painting’s gesture of recollecting the image. Woodman’s
awareness of her medium as a kind of devil’s crossroads in aesthetic theory
evinced in her orchestrated troubling of the frame seems to me a source of
her images’ power. Indeed, when I first saw her work at Bowdoin, I was
unaware of her biography.

  Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
  See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
 introduction: geometry of time 

Maria DiBattista provocatively argues for a connection between the woman

artist and scandal, and it is true that the scandal of Woodman’s suicide, dead
by her own hand at twenty-two, makes its way into many interpretations
of her photographs. While acknowledging with DiBattista the power of
biography in shaping an artist’s reputation, I also argue for the validity of
distinguishing reception history from aesthetic content. In this book, I will
be structuring a distance from reception history readings, focusing instead
on the connection between Woodman’s photography and the enduring and
troubling concept of the sublime. Developing from earlier feminist revisions of
the sublime, I suggest that Kant’s sublime, theorized in the Critique of Judgement
as a disturbing and powerful species of aesthetic experience, indeed a limit of
the aesthetic, helps us to interpret Woodman’s work, and I also contend that
Woodman’s work calls us to reinterpret the Kantian sublime. Regardless of
whether Woodman thought of her self-portraits as “theoretical objects,” or
theory-producing objects (Mieke Bal’s concept, to which I will return), she was
interrogating the Kantian sublime by making work that is about the gendered
problem of seeing, seeing herself through and as photographic image. Writing
of Louise Bourgeois’s Spider, Mieke Bal suggests that the work itself generates
and concretizes theory, that it does not passively receive the inscription of
theory but instead produces theory. Although the photograph’s status as object
can be contested, I extrapolate from Bal to argue that Woodman’s photographs
are not passive receptacles of aesthetic theory but rather interrogate, alter, and
generate that theory. Kant’s complex understanding of the sublime, reason’s
boundary, offers a useful template for understanding Woodman’s powerful
photographs, and in turn Woodman’s photographs revise how we interpret the
Kantian sublime.
In particular, this revision speaks to feminist concerns with Kant’s
aesthetics. Barbara Claire Freeman’s The Feminine Sublime and Lynda Nead’s
The Female Nude both significantly ally Kant’s sublime with violence against

  Maria DiBattista, “Scandalous Matter: Women Artists and the Crisis of

Embodiment,” in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine
de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 427–37.
  I realize that one could raise the question of whether the Enlightenment sublime
retains validity at all in our contemporary discourse. My argument is that in terms
of Woodman’s work it does—as Townsend makes the point, her work extends from
the European tradition. For a larger discussion of the contemporary usefulness of the
Kantian sublime, see Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference,
and Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1–13.
  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed
Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5.
 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

femininity, against the female body, while Patricia Yaeger in “Towards

a Female Sublime” also contends with the fraught place of gender in
the sublime. While Nead’s and Freeman’s understanding of a violent
relationship between the frame and the body coheres with my sense of
Kant’s aesthetics as steeped in the problem of power differentials, I believe
that already implicit in Kant’s sublime is an ungendered space, or a space
of such excessive power and force that it exposes and ravels the pretense of
gender. I will be departing, then, from more traditional feminist readings of
Kant. While honoring the importance of their recognition of the tradition in
the aesthetic of violence directed against the female or feminized body, I will
suggest that Kant’s influential sublime does not so much thematize violence
against femininity as it maps a violence that disrupts and evaporates gender,
not destroying femininity specifically but rather broadly effacing gender
designations, in the sublime as limit or boundary of the aesthetic.
If texts theorizing affect, such as Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, have
appropriated Kant’s sublime as affect, in this book I hope to make clear the
work that aesthetics can perform when not subsumed under the rubric of
mood.10 Of course, Woodman’s images can evoke moods in her audience; or,
as Derrida puts it, in response to the sublime, one appropriately mourns.11
But by inserting, for example, disgust in the place of the sublime, Ngai
misunderstands the structured freight of perception that Kant loads into the
sublime.12 It is in that terrain of an architectonic theorization of perception that
I will show Woodman intervenes. Rather than interpreting Kant’s sublime as
affect, then, I engage the Critique of Judgement through its efforts to theorize
the aesthetic as structure. The Kantian sublime turns on a declension, or
recognition, of the separation between the aesthetic and mood, tone, affect.
Woodman’s rigorous work may evoke a mood in audiences, but that affect
is not intrinsic to the photographs. Separating the cultic, affective “Francesca
Woodman” created by reception history from the architectonic, theoretical
objects of her photographs is a goal of this study. It aims to recuperate the

  Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s
Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Lynda Nead, The Female Nude:
Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992); Patricia Yaeger, “Towards a
Female Sublime,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Kaufman
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 191–212.
10  Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005),
334–35.
11  Derrida, Truth in Painting, 44.
12  Here, I direct the reader to Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, especially the chapter that coins
the term “stuplimity” (248–98). Her concept of “stuplimity” is obviated by a consideration
of the way that repetition is already fully and indeed even comprehensively considered
by the Critique of Judgement itself, in the concept of magnitude, for example (272).
 introduction: geometry of time 

sublime as distinct from affect. Insofar as we want to meet Kant where he

lives and hope to meet Woodman where she lives, in her photographs, we
cannot interpret the sublime as a feeling or even as usefully comparable to
states of feeling. Rather, as I believe Woodman’s photographs make clear, the
work of the sublime as aesthetic category inheres in the way it troubles the
conceptual and bodily threshold around the always elusive gesture of seeing.
Seeing emerges as a boundary disturbance, a problematic of structural space:
the more the subject sees, the more disturbing.
Moreover, Kant’s aesthetics and Woodman’s self-portraits throw into relief,
place into the gaze, what Teresa de Lauretis calls the trauma of gender: a violent
moment of vision that ineluctably structurally must precede the subject’s
response to it.13 Gender as cultural construct, however notionally correct,
is overwhelmed at the crux of the aesthetic, the terrain that Woodman’s
disturbing photographs mine. Indeed, this problem of the aesthetic arguably
is the crux of gender. This is not to say that I am arguing for the aesthetic
as proof of essentialized gender roles. On the contrary, I am arguing that
the troubling remainder of gender (that which resists postfeminist theories
of gender undone) surfaces in the problem of the sublime, this problematic
interlocking of power and the gaze, of formalization and the impossible to
inscribe rules of form.
In reading for the problem of gender in the sublime, we yet can interrogate
its violence, its capacity to violate the subject. Woodman’s interpretation of the
aesthetic through photography attends to Kant’s notion of the sublime as that
which paradoxically can be theorized and violates theorization. Woodman’s
photographs’ distinctive combination of self-portrait, blur, and de-centering
similarly intervene in notions of the centrality of the subject, that watchword
of humanism, and significantly interrogate the problem of the gaze displaced
from the body through the mechanism of photography. The camera’s eye is
the logical extension of Enlightenment privileging of rationality as the clearest
vision—the ultimate eye being that glass lens uncannily displaced from the
body.14 Woodman’s photographs, signifying key terms of the sublime, play
through the problem of the displaced camera-eye and the regressive Romantic
trope of the interior eye, the gaze as repository of memory.
Woodman’s self-portraits, in their emphasis on the gendered self—reprising,
redressing, and troubling the tradition of the female nude—articulate
photography as the embodiment of the Enlightenment gaze, a mechanistic

13  Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 21, 23.
14  Even as Geoffrey Batchen persuasively argues for photography’s foundational
links with Romanticism, I point out that an understanding of Romanticism itself must
include Kant’s historical role with regard to the Jenna Romantics. See Batchen, Burning
with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

rational gaze, and confront this problematic of vision with the gazed upon
apparently female body.15 For Woodman, the female body functions as a kind
of lure and collapse, drawing the mechanized gaze of the camera but also
implicated in the production of that gaze, the body itself mechanized.
Woodman’s virtuosic revelation of the relationship between architecture
and the body ties her photography to Kant’s sublime through a shared gesture
of founding the aesthetic on the body’s relationship to space as inhabitation,
as house.16 As Bachelard makes clear, “No dreamer ever remains indifferent
for long to a picture of a house.”17 The dream of the aesthetic inaugurated
in Kant’s sublime is a dream configured architecturally, and Woodman
both inhabits this configuration and troubles it—showing the threatened
status of the female form in the architecture of aesthetic formalization and
also, in entering the house of aesthetic formalization, deploying its violent
propensities for her interrogations of the gaze.
Drawing from Sarah Kofman’s theorization, in The Camera Obscura of
Ideology, of the camera as metaphor for the gaze, I argue that Woodman’s
images interrogate the camera’s gaze as both engendered by and revelatory
of Enlightenment notions of perception.18 Concurring with Geoffrey Batchen’s
reservations about finding the historical “origin” story of photography, I point
to Kofman’s Camera Obscura’s example of refusing to locate a pure or real
origin of photography and instead understanding photography as metaphor.19
When I refer to the camera obscura, then, I am referring more to its work as
metaphor than to the camera obscura object. I understand as Kofman does
the work and implications of that cultural metaphor which is photography.
In such an understanding, the very problem that Batchen highlights of the
story of origins—“this historical move, this gesture to an originary moment
of birth”— is itself elided.20 In metaphor, of course, there is no origin, but

15  Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, discuss the “operation of the intellectual
mechanism which structures perception in accordance with the understanding” in The
Dialectic of Enlightenment. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic
of Enlightenment, trans. John Gumming (London: Verso, 1997), 82.
16  Noting Woodman’s tendency to photograph interiors, I refer readers to
Paul de Man’s interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic as fundamentally architectonic. See
“Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” and “Kant’s Materialism” in Aesthetic
Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
70–91, 119–28.
17  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, 1964 (Boston: Beacon,
1994), 49.
18  Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura of Ideology, trans. Will Straw (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999).
19  Batchen, Burning with Desire, 17.
20  Ibid., 17–18.
 introduction: geometry of time 

rather two terms clarifying and contending with one another. My interest in
understanding Woodman’s interaction with the sublime is not to claim that
she revises some always unprovable “pure” Enlightenment origin as rather to
suggest that she participates in and interrogates the same problems emergent
and still unresolved, or tense and intent, in Kant’s approach to the problem
of the seeing subject, of seeing the subject, and of surviving seeing and being
seen.
Woodman’s fame, placed as it is in a troublingly passive position by
her suicide, is made scandalously feminine (speaking descriptively not
normatively). But the cause of her posthumous approach, like any suicide,
bears an impenetrable illegibility and cannot be read as preordained.21 Since
her death just shy of her twenty-third birthday, Woodman has been steadily
accumulating critical attention and acclaim. Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s 1986
essay “Just Like A Woman,” noted by Peggy Phelan to have introduced
Woodman to a national audience, placed Woodman in feminist discourse
even as the photographer’s self-portraits reflexively established some of
that discourse.22 Solomon-Godeau, Ann Gabhart, and Rosalind Krauss,
who collaborated in creating the important Wellesley College catalogue of
Woodman’s work, established her as a photographer who informs parameters
of self-representation for a subsequent generation.23

21  Recent research in the field of psychology emphasizes the newly emerging
understanding of many suicides as impulsive acts—not fated and inevitable but in
some real sense random, or at least evitable. See, for a quick but good overview, Scott
Anderson, “The Urge to End it All,” New York Times, July 6, 2008.
22  See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Just Like a Woman,” in Francesca Woodman:
Photographic Work, April 9–June 8, 1986, ed. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Ann Gabhart,
and Rosalind Woodman Krauss (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Museum), 11–35,
and Peggy Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One
More Time,” Signs 27, no. 4 (2002): 984.
23  If Solomon-Godeau’s essay, “Just Like a Woman,” published seven years
after Woodman’s death, effectively implied Woodman’s viability as a canonical artist,
a privileging reflective of Solomon-Godeau’s own high standing as a critic, Peggy
Phelan’s 2002 “Francesca Woodman’s Photography” in its turn continued the trend of
using Woodman’s posthumous oeuvre as exemplary of the problematic of the female
artist in the late twentieth century while reflexively strengthening the photographer’s
reputation as an artist about whom critics write. Eva Rus has joined Solomon-Godeau
in interpreting Woodman as a feminist surrealist (“Surrealism and Self-Representation
in the Photography of Francesca Woodman,” 49th Parallel, Spring 2005), while Jui-
Ch’i Liu argues that Woodman’s oeuvre symbolizes a longing to return to the womb
(“Francesca Woodman’s Self-Images: Transforming Bodies in the Space of Femininity,”
Woman’s Art Journal 25, no. 1 [2004]: 26–31), and Jesse Hoffman is developing an essay
tracking the emblems of Ophelia in Woodman’s work (personal communication, May,
2009). Essays on Woodman’s photography have appeared in journals ranging from
the Atlantic Monthly to the Nation to Artforum to the Observer Magazine, suggesting
 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

Woodman’s cult status as a prodigy, literally an otherworldly phenomenon,

and the dramatic, self-imposed truncation of her career by suicide haunt
most critical readings of her work. As Rosalind Krauss discusses in her essay
“Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,” the bulk of Woodman’s photographs
were made while the photographer was still a student at the Rhode Island
School of Design.24 Chris Townsend has extended the notion of Woodman as
eternal student, insisting that we must “never let go of the fact” of Woodman’s
identity as a “schoolgirl” while she was making her photographs, an encoding
of gender as diminishment, covertly signaling the trope of the femme-enfant,
to which I will return.25 Yet the ramifications of her age, like the interpretive
valences of her suicide, are complex.26 While theorizations of Woodman’s age
and gender—criticisms that implicitly focus on the history of her reception—
may be quite valid, it is important to notice that Woodman herself commented
on her role as femme-enfant in a highly self-conscious, allusive, lifelong self-
portrait project, work commenting on and shaping the aesthetic.
And yet her great topic is the problem of self-consciousness as the
vanishing point of the gaze. The virtuosic effect that Woodman achieves in
her photographs stems from her images’ interplay between the performance
of that cultural icon the “schoolgirl” and the self-possessed gaze of the
artist, herself, taking the photograph—a gaze that frames the rhetoric of her
performance of femme-enfant. The self-portrait of the artist as a young woman

Woodman’s broad cultural reach—as does her well-supported Wikipedia entry

(“Francesca Woodman,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, rev. August 10, 2008,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Francesca_Woodman&oldid=289941783>,
accessed August 18, 2008).
24  Rosalind Krauss, “Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,” in Bachelors
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 161–77.
25  Townsend, Francesca Woodman, 6. Townsend also claims that “Woodman
never understood herself as a fully realized artist,” even though there is no evidence
to support the idea that Woodman was ignorant of her accomplishment, and he
problematically makes the sweeping claim that Woodman was not in full control of her
materials (6). Without question, Woodman was a prodigy, creating her oeuvre between
the ages of 13 and 22. However, that does not definitively mean that she was unaware
of her accomplishments or not in control of the creation of her art. One remembers,
for example, the French writer Arthur Rimbaud as a major poet whose oeuvre was
produced in his extreme youth. Indeed, Townsend’s monograph mentions Rimbaud,
calling him not a schoolboy but a poet (57).
26  The question raised by Rosalind Krauss of whether Woodman worked
in problem sets subtly but importantly differs from Townsend’s use of the term
“schoolgirl,” for Krauss implicitly points us toward Woodman’s engagement with
mathematics, a concern in accord with the geometry school workbook that signally
informed and shaped the one book published during Woodman’s lifetime. I privilege
Woodman’s conceptualization of this book precisely because it is a book that she herself
shaped from beginning to end in her lifetime. See Krauss, “Problem Sets,” 161–77.
 introduction: geometry of time 

becomes Woodman’s uncanny gesture toward the gendered mark of the

“schoolgirl,” a figure secured by her repetitive use of Mary Janes as fetish
object, for example, and by her self-portraits’ dramatization of the contrast
between her usually disrobed, sexually maturing body and her still cherubic,
rounded face. Admittedly, the question of whether Woodman’s photographs
of herself are self-portraits is open to debate. Woodman photographs herself,
or young women who double as herself, not to fasten identity but to trouble
and complicate identity, an important twist on the self-portrait, but one that
nonetheless allows her work still to be classified within that genre. For this
reason, I emphasize the importance of Woodman’s use of the self-portrait as
structuring genre.27
But what are the links between self-portraiture and the sublime? Necessarily,
the disembodying, or self-separating, act of making the photograph self-
portrait brings up the sublime as that aesthetic venture of dislocation par
excellence. The body in Woodman’s self-portraits is positioned as a figure
standing for the subject-who-sees, and the subject-who-sees in the Critique of
Judgement experiences the sublime as a dislocating violence. The body-prop
is femininely troped in Woodman’s self-portraits: dressed and undressed
to emphasize gender, positioned in metonymically violent relationship
with its surroundings. This double awareness—the artist’s awareness of the
cultural currency of her body and her awareness of her body as materiality—
exemplifies Woodman’s understanding of violence in the aesthetic, and the
disorienting stroke of the sublime. This violence is a gendered violence for
Kant insofar as he describes the mind in the moment of sublime perception in
positionally gendered terms, a feminized seeing subject violently treated by
the subreption, or violent seduction, of the (for Kant) always interiorized event
of perception.
My turn on reading the problem of gender in the Kantian sublime, however,
is to look not at how questions of gender arise in our response to Kant but at
how already in Kant’s work a disorientation of gendering shapes the aesthetic.
If Freeman argues that for Kant “the imagination is gendered as feminine
and [that] its sacrifice functions rhetorically to ensure the sublime moment …
scapegoating a feminine figure,” I suggest that Kant’s terms of imagination
and reason as they function in aesthetic perception are more complex, shifting
through performative modes of gender, and importantly always within the
one subject-who-sees.28 Not two discrete entities, masculine and feminine,

27  In this, I concur with Harriet Riches’ interpretation of Woodman as so immersed

in the project of photographing herself as to in effect photograph herself even when
photographing other women. “A Disappearing Act: Francesca Woodman’s ‘Portrait of
a Reputation,’” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 1 (2004): 99.
28  Freeman, Feminine Sublime, 69.
10 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

but rather modes of subjectivity govern Kant’s sublime. I ally Woodman’s

nearly decade-long series of self-portraits with this notion of the sublime
as exemplary of ontological instability.

History and Historiography

After graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design, which included an
important year abroad in Rome, Woodman moved to New York City, where
she began the Temple Project and produced Some Disordered Interior Geometries.
Despite her intense engagement with her craft, Woodman has been recognized
widely as an artist only posthumously, a fact that places her by the generically
feminine act of ceding control over commercial interaction with audience—
what Virginia Jackson, writing on Emily Dickinson, has playfully called a
gesture of giving the audience one’s work en souffrance.29 This places her in
a problematically feminine position resonant with the reputations of Emily
Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, who achieved cult status after death, so that even
as Woodman’s powerful work itself militates against this particular passive
position, one notes the dissonance between Woodman’s masterful art and the
powerless position from which she must approach us: through survivors.
Townsend’s comment on Woodman’s “schoolgirl” identity reflects the
highly gendered position of Woodman’s oeuvre as a posthumously known
body of work, a texte en souffrance. But this reality of Woodman’s oeuvre
as posthumous performs an emptying limit: we reflect that, indeed, she
died young and where do we go from there? Instead, I explore Woodman’s
work through the very strategies invoking gender and youth that her work
puts in place. Using a schoolbook as an artist book, for example, Woodman
strategizes femininity as the difficult terrain of forestalled initiation: she
exposes the woman artist as always already forestalled, understood as
a permanent initiate. For this reason, I focus on Woodman’s gestures of
geometry as politics. That is, I focus attention on the photographer’s masterful
deployment of the “schoolgirl” trope of geometry, especially as it resonates
with Kant’s mathematical sublime, and the theorization of geometry and
aesthetic formalization in the Prolegomena. I place emphasis on the way that
Woodman presents the aesthetic as mathematically bound, by using the
student trope of a geometry textbook in Some Disordered Interior Geometries.
The internal shift from her light and playful use of her student status—
connoted by the textbook as artist book—to the intensity with which she
engages questions of the aesthetic in that book should alert us to the necessity

29  Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2005), 244.
 introduction: geometry of time 11

of reading Woodman as an artist whose work arrives at destinations at

variance with our expectations of gender and age, even though (and also
because) she draws on tropes of femininity.
Following her death, Woodman’s parents, Betty and George Woodman—
artists highly respected in their own right—have managed her estate,
devotedly preserving, protecting, and promoting their daughter’s work,
and her posthumous success is striking.30 Critics respond to George and
Betty Woodman’s presentation of Woodman’s corpus with implicitly
salvific gestures of comparison, recuperating Woodman by interpreting
her work as reflective of 1970s feminist concerns, or by aestheticizing the
trauma of her suicide, or by comparing her self-portraits to Orthodox icons,
artifacts that for the Eastern Orthodox faithful are windows to the divinity.
Indeed, Phelan argues that the entire project of Woodman’s self-portraits
is to prepare the audience to accept Woodman’s actual disappearance,
her suicide. Connecting Woodman’s suicide with performance art,
Phelan postulates that “Perhaps on January 19th, 1981, [Woodman]
found a composition that suited her, and she developed it into an act of
suicide.” Driving home the point, Phelan argues that “Woodman’s use
of photography as a way to rehearse her death allows us to consider her
art as an apprenticeship in dying”—a troubling claim, and unmistakably
one that indicates the powerful relationship between the now-always-
posthumous Woodman and the critics and curators who handle her work.31
“Francesca Woodman” the name has become a title under the rubric of
which is organized exclusively posthumous work.
We see in different critical responses the use of Woodman as a figure
for each decade’s dominant trope. Solomon-Godeau takes her as feminist
icon, reflecting the eighties’ more monolithic cultural feminism. Phelan

30  In 2006 Chris Townsend brought out a thorough representation of her

oeuvre, Francesca Woodman, with Phaidon. A selection of Woodman’s photographs
has appeared in an edition published by Scalo in 1998 (Hervé Chandès, ed., Francesca
Woodman [Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain; Zurich: Scalo, 1998]).
Tribute has long been given to Woodman’s work in solo exhibitions, and her
photography has been represented in group exhibitions in museums nationwide and
internationally. A selective list of museums and galleries that have hosted Francesca
Woodman solo exhibitions includes Espacio AV and SMS Contemporanea in Siena,
Italy, 2009; Marian Goodman Gallery, 2004; Cornell University Museum of Art, 2003;
Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2000; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain,
Paris, 1998; The Photographers Gallery, London, 1999; Recontres Internationales de
la Photographies, Arles, 1998; Galleria Civica, Modena, Italy, 1996; DAAD Galerie,
Berlin, Germany, 1993; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1990; and Hunter
College Art Gallery, New York, 1986. Woodman’s photographs currently are handled
by the prestigious Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City.
31  Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography,” 999, 1002.
12 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

places Woodman in terms of nineties discourse of trauma theory, while

Townsend reads her as the “schoolgirl” privileged in turn-of-the-century
fascination with the femme-enfant, the renaissance of interest in surrealism.
Mieke Bal gracefully and movingly writes on Woodman as a Proustian
figure, evoking our early-twenty-first-century awareness of video as a site
of erosion, a space where identity is formally “scattered.”32 In trying to
fit Woodman under the rubric of contemporary discourse, a gesture that
cannot help but reveal most of all the shifting of critical thought through
time, these critics implicitly respond to Francesca Woodman’s originary
trope of photographing almost exclusively herself: for the performance
of the impossibility of engaging a stable identity of the self is a central
tenet of Woodman’s work. Yet Woodman commands the photograph not
to destabilize identity but rather for its sheer usefulness as a tool to reveal
identity’s fractionary quality.
In responding to her work with concerns of aesthetics, perhaps I am
reflecting my own temporal moment and frame, and even biography,
reflecting a mistrust of the bourgeois contours of commemoration. I am also
expressing an interest voiced by Woodman when she wrote that the task of
her photographs was to allow her to locate “where I fit in this odd geometry
of time.”33 Her interest is not in self-exploration, nor self-commemoration, but
rather in the inevitability of the immersion of the self in culture: time crossing
and crossed by the body, zeitgeist most legible in hindsight.
The question of how to understand Woodman’s relationship to inheritance,
to the canon, and to artistic lineage is taken up by Carol Armstrong, who
like Townsend argues that Woodman is best understood as a girl interrupted,
and who strongly emphasizes Woodman’s “marginality” and “minorness.”34
However, Armstrong may not sufficiently take into account Woodman’s
medium as itself participatory in tropes of marginality, a bastard product of
science and art’s liaison. Photography descends not only from the pictorial
tradition but also from philosophies of perception, conceptualizations of the
gaze that valorize the separation of gaze and body, ideas that in part generated
the camera’s creation. Photography is placed at the margins through this
inheritance—maybe the margins of art, but more importantly the margins
of conceptualizations of seeing. The camera haunts theorizations of seeing.

32  Mieke Bal, “Marcel and Me: Woodman through Proust,” in Francesca Woodman
Retrospective, ed. Isabel Tejeda (Murcia, Spain: Espacio AV, 2009), 114–41.
33  Francesca Woodman, Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work, April 9–June 8,
1986, ed. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Ann Gabhart, and Rosalind Woodman (Wellesley,
MA: Wellesley College Museum, 1986), 238.
34  Carol Armstrong, “Francesca Woodman: A Ghost in the House of the ‘Woman
Artist,’” in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de
Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 347–48.
 introduction: geometry of time 13

I point out that Woodman herself is intensely aware of the lineage of her
medium, its minorness, and that playing through the terms of this lineage in
the margins is central to her project.
Claiming not to read Woodman through the lens of her suicide,
Armstrong nonetheless posits Woodman as a feminine ghost: indeed, the
title of Armstrong’s piece, “Francesca Woodman: A Ghost in the House of
the ‘Woman Artist,’” highlights Woodman’s status as a suicide, a ghost.
But Woodman appears in her photographs as a ghost only if we read the
photographs according to their reception history—the historical fact of
their being brought before audience by her survivors. Often read as suicidal
emblems, her characteristic use of blur and self-violating cropping in fact
are methods that Woodman deploys to query geometry’s relationship to
vision and must be read for that formal gesture. Again, I suggest a return
to the terms of placement that Woodman’s work, not her history, offers:
the photographs as object-images that allow her to negotiate a fit between
herself and the “odd geometry of time” even as they also slip through stable,
settled schema. This resistance to critical schema and strategies stems from
Woodman’s almost uncanny fusion with her medium. It is not she who is
marginal but photography that she understands as haunting, and deploys
to haunt the margins of aesthetics.
The powerful, mostly female critics who establish Woodman’s feminist
credentials surprisingly fit with male critics such as Chris Townsend,
and interpret Woodman with gestures of implicit redemption, at once
emphasizing Woodman’s artistic power and also implying that her status
is that of the lost girl—one in need of absolution. But this approach points
to an under-theorization of the prodigy’s art, displacing the work, and risks
leaving aside consideration of Woodman’s extraordinary early steeping in
the aesthetic by dint of growing up in a household of artists.35 Here, I must
take issue with reception history theories and instead suggest that critical
and cultural discomfort with the idea of a female prodigy is the engine
that too often drives responses to Woodman’s art. Consider, for example,
how Townsend’s criticism endeavors to place Woodman in the position
of unwitting, perhaps even lucky, producer of powerful images. Such an

35  Sloan Rankin and Benjamin Buchloh both discuss Woodman’s background as
the very well-educated daughter of two artists, interpreting her early indoctrination
into the field. See Rankin, “Peach Mumble—Ideas Cooking,” Francesca Woodman, ed.
Hervé Chandès (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain; Zurich: Scalo,
1998), 33–37, and Buchloh, “Francesca Woodman: Performing the Photograph,
Staging the Subject,” in Francesca Woodman: Photographs, 1975–1980 (New York:
Marian Goodman Gallery, 2004), 41–50. Likewise, Betty Woodman, in Betty Woodman:
Thinking Out Loud, emphasizes her lifelong work of studying art: visiting museums
and traveling as education, an education in which the young Francesca Woodman
was included (dir. Charles Woodman, Charles Woodman Video, 1991).
14 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

approach ignores the ways that Woodman, despite her youth, uses her self-
portrait photographs to contend with questions of aesthetic inheritance.
Betsy Berne alludes specifically to this aspect of Woodman’s art when she
argues that Woodman’s feminism inheres in the seriousness with which she
took her own work.36
Rather than interpret the self-portraits, then, as ruminating aspects of true
identity, or even self-destruction as one valence of identity, I focus on how
Woodman uses the gaze directed toward the figure of the self as metaphor
for the problem of aesthetic formalization. Woodman’s gaze turned on herself
structures a mise en abyme of gazing, a gesture that disrupts in turn each frame
of reference by which we interpret her self-portrait photographs.

Sublimes

Perhaps eager to dispel masculinist images, such as those put forward by

Phillippe Sollers and Chris Townsend of Woodman as a sorceress or schoolgirl,
Peggy Phelan and Harriet Riches theorize Woodman’s self-portraits as all
about disappearance, as if they wished to bodily remove Woodman from the
sightline of phallocentric misprisons.37 It is from Phelan’s provocative point of
arguing that Woodman’s self-portraits are taken to prepare us, as audience,
for her eventual suicide that I depart—depart from it both in the sense of
deploying Phelan’s insight as an important basis for the study of Woodman’s
photographs and also in the sense of questioning Phelan’s thesis of the
death-bound thematic of Woodman’s art. Phelan’s argument turns on Cathy
Caruth’s theorization of traumatic repetition.38 She suggests that Woodman,
in her self-portraits, repetitively stages the moment of her disappearance, as if
posthumous renown proleptically tugged at Francesca Woodman while alive.
Subverting claims to artistic accomplishment, Phelan states that Woodman’s
“work invites us, with immense fragility and precision, to allow her death
to survive her art, rather than the other way around.”39 I depart from this

36  Betsy Berne, “To Tell the Truth,” foreword to Francesca Woodman: Photographs,
1975–1980 (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 2004), 5.
37  Phillippe Sollers’s essay on Woodman, “The Sorceress” (in Francesca Woodman,
ed. Hervé Chandès [Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain; Zurich: Scalo,
1998], 9–13) will be discussed later in this book; Townsend’s monograph has already
been mentioned.
38  In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth argues for
necessary amnesia surrounding traumatic experiences and also argues that the
experiences return as traumatic repetition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996, 59, 132n).
39  Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography,” 999.
 introduction: geometry of time 15

theorization because if Phelan argues that suicidal ideation is performed in

Woodman’s photographs Phelan has first to assume a transparent legibility
for suicide which in fact can only be read conditionally. Turning from critical
fantasies of bodily recuperation, then, I seek the legibility of Woodman’s
pictures in other registers.
Phelan’s valorization of Woodman’s work as articulating “fragility”
nevertheless is useful in terms of its evocation of the fragility of the
medium, the photograph as transient memento. The disappearance
evoked by Woodman’s manipulation of shutter speed to create images
of herself as a blurred figure, or her use of square format and cropping
to display images of herself without a head, or her placing herself at the
edge of the photograph’s frame, is not the disappearance of Woodman’s
self but a shifting of the mechanism of the frame itself, and a shifting of
the mechanism of audience as the implied limit of the photograph.
Her engagement is with the limits of seeing: a kind of seeing intensely
related to Kant’s notion of vorstellen, or imagination as the placement of
the image violently into the gaze.40 For Kant’s sublime encodes violence
and loss, indeed, a “violence that is wrought on the subject through the
imagination” because the image places itself into the gaze in a manner
that complicates or reverses the relationship of the gaze (as agency) to
the gazed upon (as object). Kant’s use of vorstellen radically describes the
gazed upon as an object that acts, that emplaces itself into the capacity
of the gaze.41 Playing through tropes of the powerful object that in some
sense throws or disturbs the gaze, Woodman’s work in its fierce contentions
with the aesthetic reads as anything but “fragile” precisely insofar as it
acts through its awareness of photography, the medium, as fragile. The
Temple Project, for example, articulates the dissonance between classical
marble caryatids and the photograph-caryatids with which Woodman
was building her temple. The drama of the Temple Project inheres in this
highlighting of the difference between marble and film, stability and
fragility.
Are Woodman’s self-portraits, with their characteristic blur and decentering,
about formlessness, about the loss of self as the loss of form, or is something

40  I am using the term vorstellen—representation—untranslated because I do

not want to lose the doubleness of the term in the German, the sense of that which
places itself. My reading of Kant’s use of vorstellen is influenced by Jonathan Loesberg’s
revision of Kantian aesthetics’ usefulness in postmodernity. As Loesberg writes, “The
aesthetics that comes out of Kant will always depend both on an essentialism and on
its own undoing of that essentialism, regardless of the essentialism or the skepticism
of the philosopher, and it is precisely that deconstructive balance that will enable the
postmodern employment of it.” Return to Aesthetics, 125.
41  Kant, Critique, 89.
16 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

more complex and difficult tracked in these images?42 Woodman’s submitting

herself to the process of photographic self-portraiture reflects less a
narcissistic obsession, or its obverse wish to disappear, as rather a fascination
with the violating—flattening—gaze of the photograph, and with blur as
a way of bringing dimension into the flat image. As a stroke of integrity,
she characteristically submits her own body to the experimentation of that
violence. Her negatives destabilize the privileged Kantian notion of negative
pleasure. Woodman’s self-portraits, uninterested in her own person, use the
body of the young woman photographer as a prop to query the violence
inherent in aesthetic formalization, traditional readings of the relationship
between femininity and formlessness radicalized by Woodman’s self-
portraits. Like Kant’s notion of vorstellen as that which forcibly re-presents
in the imagination what is at once still sensuous and definitionally not
embodied, Woodman evokes an uncanny deferral of materiality in the act
of seeing that is placed in the photograph. She emphatically attends to the
photograph as medium, playing with its singular flatness as disembodying
power while emphasizing her body, deploying the female nude with all
its semiotic freight. Woodman’s self-portraits invoke a fall into perception
as a loss of intact boundaries, and I connect this vertigo of perception, a
hinge between the sensuous and the rational, with the core difficulty of the
Kantian sublime.
Approaching Woodman’s work in terms of the sublime as risk
(encompassing threat as a valence of fragility), I’m aware that there are
many sublimes: Burke’s sublime, Hegel’s sublime, Herder’s sublime, the
postmodern sublime, Lyotard’s seminal interpretation of Kant’s sublime, and
Yaeger’s female sublime, to name a few. While I return often to Freeman’s
feminine sublime and to Vijay Mishra’s gothic sublime, in focusing on Kant’s
Critique of Judgement I am acknowledging, to put it mildly, the influential
pull of the philosopher’s work on the topic. But, as I will show, the striking
proximity of concerns that occur between Kant’s sublime and Woodman’s
self-portraits merits articulation. Woodman’s emphasis on geometry,
exemplified in her use of an Italian geometry textbook as the template for
Some Disordered Interior Geometries, and reflected in recurrent structuring
motifs of her photographs, manifests as commentary on key terms of the
Kantian sublime and also resonates with Kant’s discussion of geometry in
the Prolegomena. A dialogue opens between Woodman’s interrogation of the
aesthetic as an “interior geometry” and Kant’s architectonic imagination
theorizing the sublime. States Kant, “The sublime is that, the mere capacity

42  For a discussion of gender and focus, see Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus:
Women, Children, and Nineteenth-Century Photography (Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 1998).
 introduction: geometry of time 17

of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard

of sense.”43 That is, the sublime at once forefronts and destroys the frame, a
gesture on which Woodman’s self-portraits remark. Woodman’s exploration
of the meaning and work of the frame pivots on this boundary condition of
the aesthetic.
Vijay Mishra, in The Gothic Sublime, suggests, “The sublime is that which
cannot be bordered, defined, delimited.”44 Woodman’s images work by
disarticulating and dislocating the preeminence of the frame implicit
in the photograph, a gesture strongly resonant with Derrida’s reading of
Kant’s sublime as that which troubles the frame: “What has produced and
manipulated the frame puts everything to work in order to efface the frame
effect.”45 For Derrida, the sublime is this contestation of the work of the
frame. Not only, as Townsend notes, do Woodman’s photographs present
an obsession with the problem of space, and space’s function as frame, but
this obsession is keyed into Kant’s theorization of the gaze in the sublime as
an event violently displaced from the spatial and the temporal. Woodman’s
photographs exemplify a risky and troubled relationship to space, an
exploration that pressures boundaries.
Commenting on the uncanny swerve of photographic space in her
pictures, Woodman’s use of the serial plays across the spatial register.
Phelan interprets the serial gesture of Woodman’s work, its quality of
repetition, as posttraumatic, while Krauss argues it derives from origins
as student exercises and Townsend links it to a tradition in American
photography passed down through Aaron Siskind. I suggest, though, that
Woodman’s trope of repetition in stretching space across the boundaries
of individual frames taps the Kantian sublime as mathematical sublime.
Woodman’s entire oeuvre—interpretable as a nearly decade-long series of
self-portraits—inclines toward the status of that which is repeated until
it becomes massive, the massive a central concept of Kant’s mathematical
sublime. Woodman’s nearly ceaseless return to the self-portrait, a repetition
that makes a series great “beyond every standard of sense,” takes on the
terms of the sublime by invoking magnitude, both through sheer repetition
and by invoking the vulnerable, even violated, position of the observing
subject in a lifelong series of self-portraits whose boundaries are effectively
eroded by juxtaposition against each other.46 For, of series, Kant argues,

43  Kant, Critique, 81.

44  Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994), 41.
45  Derrida, Truth in Painting, 73.
46  Kant, Critique, 79. Argues Kant, “The Sublime is that in comparison with which
all else is small” (80).
18 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

“The … series is a condition of inner sense and of an intuition in a subjective

movement of the imagination by which it does violence to inner sense.”47
Woodman’s repetitive recourse to the self-portrait gesture, legible as a
lifelong series of self-portraits, goes so far beyond student exercises that it
asks to be interpreted beyond such frames of reference. As if nothing might
have truncated the continuation of the self-portraits, Woodman’s repetition
creates a series of self-portraits so extensive as to form together a massive
text. Importantly, Woodman’s implicit invocation of the massive work of
art—her massive, lifelong series of self-portraits—militates powerfully
against notions of woman’s art as miniature and delicate. The volume that
she achieves by returning day after day, year after year, to the act of the self-
portrait, even as it opens her to charges of feminine vanitas, shakes gendered
norms. Woodman’s oeuvre insists on the massive, a massive continuous
work whose very over-sized force militates against coding the photographs
as transparent feminine meditations on beauty.

Sublime Materiality

As I have noted, Kant’s sublime’s relationship to substance and space is

troubled. For Kant, the sublime occurs only in the mind of the beholder
and cannot adhere to a physical object. Likewise, the sublime resists and
troubles form, troubles structure and materiality. Photography’s history
suggests a relationship to the sublime, insofar as they share troubled
concepts of materiality. Interpreted by Henry Fox Talbot as “fairy pictures”
because of the ephemerality of his early methods of making pictures from
light, the photograph yet retains the memory of the risk of ephemerality,
the back-story of impermanence.48 Its hybrid status as scientific artifact and
stepchild of the pictorial tradition places the photograph almost between
matter and form, between object and evanescence. While we speak of a
photograph’s composition and formal balance, the photograph also always
contains the threat of raveling, of decomposing back into formless light. The
photograph tests Kant’s sublime configuration of what erupts and disrupts
the boundaries of form. Woodman’s focus on the self-portrait as a site of
blur works so powerfully because she invokes photography’s history as
“fairy picture,” or ephemerality reified, and also enunciates its resistance

47  Ibid., 89.

48  Writes Talbot, “This method was to take a camera obscura and to throw the
image of the objects on a piece of paper in its focus—fairy pictures, creations of a
moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.” Quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The
History of Photography: From 1893 to the Present, 5th ed. (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1994), 19.
 introduction: geometry of time 19

to vanishing, the form that teeters on the verge of the formlessness of

light.
Is the photograph indeed an object, or a record of an object? Of course,
it has physicality of its own, but this physicality seems always to be less or
more than the sum of its parts. That is, the history, trace, of the physical that
the photograph presents, along with the dissolution of the physical that its
status as light-graph also presents, focuses a crux of form and formlessness
that echoes Kant’s concern with how the sublime connects to the object—this
very troubled connection. My suggestion is that Woodman’s self-portraits,
by enacting a decentering of the prop of subjectivity, interact with Kant’s
concern about vision’s threatened and threatening power (which contains
the problem of form and formlessness), the object’s intermediary status in the
sublime. Woodman’s approach to visually decentering the subject interacts
with Kant’s theorization of the struggles surrounding formlessness and stasis
in the aesthetic.
In the photograph that Townsend uses for the jacket of Francesca Woodman,
for example, we see Woodman’s “shadow” made explicit in white powder
(Untitled, Providence, RI, 1976; fig. 1). Beneath the figure of a nude Woodman
sitting in a chair, a floor covered with white powder retains the dark imprint
of her body. Apparently, Woodman had lain down in the powder and made a
kind of nude “snow angel” in it and then gotten up to sit in the chair for the
slant self-portrait to be snapped. Although the self-portrait cuts off her head,
we are utterly aware of her gaze in this image. Her gaze is the subject of the
photograph, its truncation precisely the point. For irresistibly, we “see” her
looking down at her own dislocated shadow, her own negative.
This dislocation of flesh from shadow, of form from form’s echo, is
precisely the twist that photography offers, and Woodman’s uncanny self-
portrait of herself as a negative plays through its terms with masterful wit.
Indeed, Woodman makes the topic of many of her self-portraits the way
that form is lost and gained in the photograph—which is both an object and
not an object. Woodman presents an ingenious grasp of her medium’s risk,
and this risk correlates with the threat of dissolution that Kant’s sublime
presents.
My contention in the chapters that follow is that Woodman’s theory-
producing photographs work figurally as Lyotard intends, through terms of
figuration that trouble and alter the status quo. The figures in her photographs
interpret and interrupt ideology and charge and change the aesthetic.
Woodman interrogates the “subjective movement of the imagination by which
it does violence to inner sense,” shifting her body as a figure that represents
the imagination in photographs staking their claim as interior geometries.49

49  Kant, Critique, 89.

20 francesca woodman and the kantian sublime

Sublime Photography

Developing from Benjamin Buchloh’s argument that Woodman is utterly

concerned with the process of photography, the physical immersion that
produces the framed image, I approach Woodman’s engagement with
geometry.50 Engaging and troubling the architectonic, the flat plane of the
photograph plays through the process of losing and claiming space as
it is framed. A tapping of the sublime as interior, but interior complexly
adumbrated in an always flat image, marks Woodman’s interaction with the
gendering of the aesthetic. For the history of femininity as interiority and
excess, analyzed by Judith Butler in her reinterpretation of the Platonic chora
in Bodies that Matter, points to an ambiguous cultural space, at once originary
and abject, threatening because of the quality of excess that also defines the
sublime.51 While Butler suggests that a radical disassociation of the feminine
and interiority is necessary to undo the denigrating link between femininity
and formless matter, there are other ways to interpret the chora. Indeed,
I will suggest that Plato’s chora resurfaces or echoes in Kant’s sublime.
One of the tasks of this book, then, is to return to the vexed relationship
between form and origination, in which is embedded the problem of the
idea of the feminine as that which produces form but lacks form itself. The
relationship between form and femininity is pressured and thrown into
relief in Woodman’s sublime. Woodman’s work performs an extraordinary
intervention into the terms of the sublime, a gesture which the following
chapters will chart. Reading Woodman as an artist engaged in the discourse
of aesthetics, a discourse bound up with metaphors of photography and
gender, and interpreting Woodman as an artist who interrogates and revises
this discourse, I hope to offer a way to widen the scope of our critical gaze
on her remarkable photographs.

50  Buchloh, “Francesca Woodman,” 46.

51  Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London:
Routledge, 1993).