Michal Pawel Markowski: From Bare Life to Still Life

Vortrag (in englischer Sprache)

Taking as a starting point the famous anecdote told by Pliny about the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, this lecture tries to expand the well-grounded discussion on the artistic deception into a more anthropological field. The question, then, is not anymore about the ontology of mimetical representation, or about ist epistemological consequences (two privileged philosophical domains of reflection on trompe-l’œil), neither about superb craftsmanship (this is where art historians feel at home), but about continuity and discontinuity of the human experience. Trompe-l’œil is a kind of representation which shatters our deeply rooted convictions about the world we live in. This kind of representation presents itself as a bare thing belonging to our world, whereas it is just a representation of it. Refusing this sheer presence and establishing the lost distance to the world by the medium of representation constitute a necessary condition for instituting the power of the subject, or the subject of power. In order to analyze this “political effect” of trompe-l’œil, it is useful to look at the modern “primal scene” of mimesis, when one of the first realizations of the genre was “presented” in Vienna, by Sebastian Stoskopff (or, more precisely, his “representative”) to the Habsburg monarch. If we take into account that this year, 1651, was also the year of publication of the famous Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, the link between mimesis and the sovereign power can be realized far more clearly than before.

Michal Pawel Markowski, Prof. Dr., is Professor at and Chairman of the Department of International Polish Studies and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. Visiting Professor at American universities including Harvard and Northwestern University. Co-editor of the series “Horizons of Modernity”, editor of the series “Hermeneia”. He is IFK_Senior Fellow.
Publications (among others): The Unforeseeable. Essays, Kraków 2007; Theories of Literature in the 20th Century, Kraków 2006; Dark Waters: Gombrowicz, World, Literature, Kraków 2004; Identity and Interpretation, Stockholm 2003; Anatomy of Curiosity, Kraków 2000; Desire for Presence. Philosophies of Representation from Plato to Descartes, Gdansk 1999.