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Visual Narrative and Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Author(s) : Efrat Biberman

Reviews and Endorsements

Providing a lucid account of Lacan and Freud’s theorizations of aspects of the visual field from the mirror stage to the gaze as object a, Efrat Biberman’s brilliant book shows how painting cannot be thought of separately from the subject of the unconscious and enjoyment. The first book in English to closely engage with Lacan’s seminal analysis of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, it shows the inextricability of painter and observer in the constitution of painting as a site of subjective drama where inside and outside flow into one another.
Shirley Zisser, Lacanian Psychoanalyst and Professor of English at Tel Aviv University

How do we experience painting's story? In this stimulating and highly original book, Efrat Biberman ensues by astutely surveying the ways in which paintings were historically understood in relation to the verbal arts; from Lessing's Laocoon, to the high modernism of Clement Greenberg and beyond, Biberman exposes the flaws they share in subjugating painterly narratives to those of literature, either through comparative (and reductive) opposition, or by way of equally compromised analogies. Instead of this binary model, Biberman brilliantly employs the psycho-analytical toolkit of Freud, Žižek and especially Lacan, to offer a new, fruitful and compelling understanding of visual narrative as standing on its own ground; it is a proposal of visual narrative as multilayered and innately distinct – with incongruity at its very core.
Roee Rosen, artist and writer