"I love you more than my eyes": Glimpsing the Oblique in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio
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Date
2024-01-10
Authors
Basaldua, Josiah
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Reading Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s understanding of the visual challenge to logocentric epistemologies presented by Caravaggio’s paintings in Caravaggio’s Secrets against their reading of Caravaggio in film, the biopic Caravaggio by director Derek Jarman found in their monograph of the same name, produces fascinatingly contrary conclusions of aesthetic postulations of alternative relationalities and systems of knowing. Bridging this gap are the very bodies whose irreducibility drives the critique of narrativization read into Caravaggio by Bersani and Dutoit, but surprisingly not extended to Jarman, whose work and life as “Britain’s most up-front and articulate advocate for homosexuality” is profoundly offered in Caravaggio through a similar methodology of irreducible bodily presence. This paper seeks to explore these two different readings of Caravaggio as the consequence of a search for the noncoercive image, the mark of its critique of epistemology being its very ineffability.
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Keywords
art, epistemology, relationality, violence