Multiple Expousures Identity and Alterity in the Self Portraits of Francesca Woodman

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Multiple Expousures Identity and Alterity in the Self Portraits of Francesca Woodman

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  • Multiple Expeausures: Identity andAlterity in the Self-Portraitsof Francesca Woodman

    AMY SHERLOCK

    Abstract:This article considers the photographs of Francesca Woodman in terms of thecomplex and ambivalent set of relations they configure between photographer,photographed subject and viewer. Usually described as self-portraits, thesubject of these fleeting, fractured images simultaneously presents itself whilstseeming to withdraw from them. The self, there where it most openly declaresitself, disappears. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancys concept of exposition, orexposure, which posits the self as being in-exteriority, thinking the intimacyof subjectivity in terms of an originary relation to the outside or the other, Iseek to problematize the possibility both of the portrait and the self that is itssubject.

    Keywords: Francesca Woodman, Jean-Luc Nancy, exposure, expeausition,photography, nude, subjectivity

    The Archi-original Impossibility of Narcissus

    Whilst studying in Rome in 1978, the American artist FrancescaWoodman produced a series of photographs entitled Self-Deceit. Theseries contains many of the elements that recur throughout her uvre.In them we see the artists naked body set against the crumbling walls ofan interior bare save for a large fragment of mirror. The high contrastis such that the black-and-white images appear almost over exposed.Some areas of the bare room recede into darkness whilst the mirror,where it faces us and catches the light, is bleached blinding white.

    Paragraph 36.3 (2013): 376391DOI: 10.3366/para.2013.0100 Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/para

  • The Self-Portraits of Francesca Woodman 377

    Figure 1. Francesca Woodman, Self-Deceit #7, Rome, Italy, 1978, gelatin silver print. CourtesyGeorge and Betty Woodman.

    In the first photograph in the series, Woodman, naked and on handsand knees, crawls around a dark corner to inspect her own mirroredreflection. The camera is in front and above her; the mirror tiltedslightly towards it. In other images she positions herself between thecrumbling whitewash of the walls and the mirrored surface, whichalways faces outwards. She crouches to hide behind it, or sits next toit, head tilted, the sinuous line of her back and neck doubling theuneven curve of the glass. In another she is pressed against the corner,back to us, palms open in the pose of a prisoner. The haptic quality ofthe uneven walls, their pockmarks accentuated by the sharp contrast,elicit a tactile response, a fleeting, sense memory of the contact of coldstone on bare skin. In Self-Deceit #4 she holds the mirror, Perseus-like,above her face, obscuring herself with a square of almost pure light.But it is the seventh image in the series, Self-Deceit #7 (Figure 1),that is the most interesting. In it Woodmans figure is blurred throughmovement, barely distinguishable from the walls mottled patches.Figure disappears into ground. In the illuminated mirror, between the

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    faint legs of the tripod, two other legs are more clearly defined. Thisis a rare glimpse of the other who haunts Woodmans frames. Theselegs belong to the person who, by clicking the camera shutter closed,is responsible for the particular alchemy by which Woodman becomesimage. In other shots this presence and its power to make visible isonly implied, anticipating the position that will be occupied by theviewer. These faint, trousered legs remind us that Woodmans pose,her naked form, her performance, are directed towards a place and apresence beyond the frame. Even as she turns away from the camera,retreating into a far corner, cheek against the wall, eyes down, she facesoutwards.

    Most commonly referred to as self-portraits, this description, takensimplistically, does not do justice to the nuances of Woodmans uvre.Whilst the title of this series (in itself unusual as her works arelargely unnamed) alludes to an underlying concern with the self,when coupled with the ambiguous deceit the relation that it describesbecomes far from straightforward. As Self-Deceit #7 makes explicit,these images are traversed by, permeated by, the other, sometimesin the person who takes the shot (according to her own rigorouslythought-through concepts) who also stands in for, in the place of, theanticipated audience, and in the mirrored reflection, the self as other,which in many ways anticipates the strangeness of the photographicimage itself. Drawing on some comments made by Jean-Luc Nancy ina recent essay on the photographic image, this article seeks to tease outthe complex set of self-other relations at play in Woodmans work.1

    Central to this reading is the concept of exposure that he develops hereand elsewhere. Exposition or exposure is a term that recurs throughoutNancys body of thought and serves as a linchpin uniting the registersof the aesthetic and the ontological. Resonating with the technicalregister of photography generally and Woodmans recurring use of thenude specifically, exposure simultaneously invokes the scene of viewingor exhibition space (exposition is also the French for exhibition) andthe community of viewers. In exploring the multiple valences of thisproductive term, the extent to which the self of the self-portraitalways emerges in and as a relation to another is considered. Sucha reading would make the self-portrait itself a misnomer, or at leastalways blind. According to Nancy,

    To be exposed means to be posed in exteriority, according to an exteriority,having to do with an outside in the very intimacy of an inside. Or again: havingaccess to what is proper to existence, and therefore, of course, to the proper of

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    ones own existence, only through an expropriation whose exemplary reality isthat of my face always exposed to others, always turned toward an other andfaced by him or her, never facing myself. This is the archi-original impossibilityof Narcissus that opens straight away onto the possibility of the political.2

    In Nancys ontology, exposure describes our originary condition ofbeing-in-common or being-with. The subject, constituted always andonly in relation to others, is evacuated of any claim to self-presence.Community designates this originary or ontological sociality (IC,28). However, Nancy is careful to distinguish between being-with orbeing-in-common and common being, which would posit communityas a unified, coherent entity (the collective subject). Instead, thebeing-in-common of community is experienced as radically disjunctive,binding only through unbinding, and as such it remains inoperativeor unworkable, irrecuperable by any political project based in sharedor common identity. Exposure constitutes a limit, or an interruptionwhere beings touch each other and separate from one anotheraccording to a logic of partage, with its simultaneous sense of sharingand dividing. Exposure is a form of contact but also a means of spacing.For Nancy, contact is conceived in and as distance.

    Recognizing exposures particular resonance with the idiom ofphotography, Nancy revisits this concept in an essay written toaccompany the PHotoEspaa festival in Madrid (2003), whose subtitlethat year was NosOtros: Identidad y alteridad.3 He describes thephotograph as

    the stigma of the surprise in which the thing that or the one who takes thephoto and the thing that or the one who is taken (. . . ) are suspended together.At that point, in this stigma (photography itself), both are taken by each other andby surprising or coming upon each other. They are there, intimate and intrusive,strange and familiar to each other, at the same moment, as the same image. Thesameness of this image is permeated with the alterity of its two concomitantsubjects. (GI, 104)

    Strange to itself: Nancy suggests that the hallmark (and it is certainlya question of marks, of graphy) of the photograph, or what mightmore properly be called the photographic moment, is this paradoxicalsimultaneity of unity and alterity, or disjunctive coincidence. Thestigma, like Barthess punctum, which it cannot fail to recall, has aprecise and devastating temporality, a piercing instaneity that disjoinsthe fabric of the present, isolating and framing the relation betweenI and you. As Nancy goes on to note, the suspended relation of the

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    stigma is also at work in painting. However, painting has neverenvisaged the snapshot, the coincidence of an I with a click thatreleases a you, an other I (GI, 104). Hence, every photograph hasa double subject (the duplicity of the photograph is well knownthe negative reveals it to us). It captures both taker and taken ina petrified moment of interaction that nonetheless restages itselfendlessly with each new stranger that comes upon it. Such a conceptof the photograph is underpinned by the following thought: to exposeoneself to the camera is always to expose oneself to another. Even in the caseof the self-portrait one exposes oneself to the camera for another, toappear to another or and this ultimately comes down to the samething to see oneself from the side of the other.

    Woodmans photographs, frequently managing to feel just-glimpsed or unexpected in spite of their rigorous composition,strongly communicate the surprise of the photographic stigma. Thenumerous sketches and plans found in her notebooks attest to a latercomment by her classmate and sometime model, Sloane Rankin, thatthe photographs were frequently preconceived and later executedwith excruciating care.4 Yet even in the most arranged compositions,Woodmans figure is blurred or caught mid-gesture. In the Eel series(19778) she lies naked on a patchwork marble floor, arching hersupine body around a porcelain bowl containing a large dead eel.She writhes and contorts whilst the coiled eel remains motionless,the smooth creaminess of her flesh echoing its pale underbelly. Asin many other portraits, her head and lower legs are cropped by thecamera. These images are elegant and restrained in their compositionbut the blurred, contorting limbs that extend beyond the frame givethe series a dynamism which, unlike the artfully arranged eel, refuses tobe contained. Drawing the viewer into their own fragmented rhythm,they effect a hypnotic, inverse petrification. They are transfixing,precisely because they refuse to be fixed.

    This transfixed, petrified gaze has been described by MauriceBlanchot in relation to what he terms the fascinated spectator.5 ForBlanchot, fascination is the gripping contact that occurs when whatis seen imposes itself upon the gaze, as if the gaze were seized, putin touch with the appearance (SL, 32). Yet that which fascinates usnecessarily eludes us: (w)hoever is fascinated doesnt see, properlyspeaking, what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediateproximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though itleaves him absolutely at a distance (SL, 33). For Blanchot, fascinationtherefore performs a double and paradoxical operation. It is both thetotal and inescapable grip of the image that captures and immobilizes

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    the gaze and the fleeing of the image away from itself and fromthe spectator into the indeterminate, sightless, shapeless depth, theabsence one sees because it is blinding (SL, 33). In this formulation,the contact designated by fascination is, at best, a grasping, anextending towards an object that always slips away. Like the stigma ofthe photographic snapshot, the fascinating image configures a relationof ambiguous proximity in which the image or other is at onceimmediate and available, distant and inaccessible. Woodmans imagesfascinate, and do so precisely through the double operation of fixityand motion, gripping and slipping away, which Blanchot evokes.Both Perseus and Medusa, arresting and fugitive, the images draw theviewer into a fragile, ambivalent relation in which the conventionalactive/passive binary of the gaze is disrupted. For Blanchot thisfascinated grasping, as the suspension of a contact already foreclosed,isolates the gaze, revealing something of the solitude of which beingis a condition. However, it can equally be thought to express theambiguous proximity of Nancys exposure and the ontological socialitythat it designates.

    Nancys ontology of being-with is predicated upon an originary,shared relation to finitude. Death is the common ground against whichany social or inter-personal relation can take shape. Through herrepetition and accumulation of tropes of vulnerability, disintegrationand decay, Woodmans photographs visualize death as that whichis paradoxically common to all being(s) and that which cannot beshared, according to the impossible logic of partage. For Nancy, everyphotograph exposes this relation to finitude.6 At the conclusion ofhis essay Masked Imagination, he even goes so far as to refer tothe photograph itself, as a death mask.7 Caught in the death masksfascinating play of presence and absence, revelation and concealment,Woodmans photographs are haunted by the no longer that we areall destined to become, articulating the primacy and ineluctability ofcommunity within (where the in is always already an out) the frameof the self-portrait.

    Ambiguous Proximity

    Woodmans work engages the theme of exposure on a number oflevels. Playing with the materiality of the photographic medium, sheuses long exposures to blur her figure. Taking this technique to itsextreme, she appears in one shot in the Angel series as the headless,limbless trace of a torso framed by a doorway and suspended in

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    mid-air. Other images, such as the Self-Deceit series alreadymentioned, border on over-exposure, creating high contrast betweenareas of impenetrable darkness and patches of luminous, white light.The visible becomes a narrow hinterland between these invisiblerealms. The exposure specific to photography follows Nancys logicof exteriority and of distance or spacing. It is the contact of light, firstwith the surface of the photographed object and then with that ofthe film, which brings the image into being. Yet, this light is capturedby the closing of a shutter, a moment of interruption, and its sourceremains at a distance that the photograph, the trace of this contact,does nothing to close.

    Woodman is also exposed in the nakedness of her own flesh.Uncovered and always exhibitionistic, the nude is almost excessive inits visibility (hence the cultural interdiction against indecent exposure).The naked figure always suggests an act of de-nuding or revelation,drawing the viewer into the intimate proximity of that which is closestto oneself, ones own skin. And yet, the intimacy of the revealed skinis ambivalent, paradoxical. That which is closest to the self is alsothat which is most exterior to it, that which constitutes its externallimit. Hence, in a recent publication written with Federico Ferrari,entitled Nus Sommes: La Peau des images (We are (naked): the skinof images), Nancy speaks of this ambiguous proximity (. . . ) of theundressing and undoing [du dnudement et du dnuement].8 As his useelsewhere of the homophonous expeausition underlines, the naked skingives phenomenological flesh to his ontology of exposure.9 The skinis the site of contact but not of fusion, a limit that separates and spaces.

    Woodman works repeatedly with the baring motif. A dress is openedto reveal a bare breast or back; a naked body lies extended behind asuspended mink stole which conceals the sex; a figure slumps againsta wall with the head and shoulders shrouded by a patterned scarf. Theintimacy of the scene of baring (expeausition) in Woodmans work isreconfigured in the scene of viewing (the exposition) on account ofthe small format of the prints. With the exception of the large scaleSwan Song series produced for her thesis exhibition in 1978 and asmall number of later works, the majority of Woodmans archive (some800 photographs) are very small in size. Frequently 8 10 inches withsome less than 6 6 inches, they demand a physical proximity betweenspectator and image. Each spectator must get up close in order to fullyperceive them, bringing them into the intimacy of a one-on-oneviewing encounter. Viewed from afar, or from an odd angle amongsta group of spectators, the photographs are ambiguous, re-staging their

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    enigmatic play of revelation and concealment within the exhibitionspace itself. And yet where the images draw us in, Woodman turnsaway, flees the screen. Hence the prevalence of the blurred figure,escaping into invisibility, the prominence of doors and windows,often ajar, and the familiar curve of her turned back. Every gestureof de-nuding is simultaneously a veiling and the intimacy that thephotographs promise is unreachably, irreparably distant.

    Is there nudity in isolation? (NS, 41) asks Nancy. It is a rhetoricalquestion. The nude exists only for the other, faces him, is perceived byhim. The nude is the figure of pure exposure (NS, 7). As the Biblicalnarrative makes us aware, nudity is a condition of knowledge, not aquality of being. Nakedness must be seen. It is towards the other thatit is projected and from him that it must be concealed. In a sectionthat includes a brief reference to Woodmans work, Nancy describesthe nude in these terms:

    The nude is above all presence. Presence exposed to the look of others. The nude,any nude, is always being looked at, even when it is only the self who is looking.The look, when it comes across the nudity of the body, attests to its presence(. . . ) But the presence of the body is also always fleeing in the look which makesit an image. When the body becomes an image, it escapes itself, it exceeds itself.(NS, 97)

    The nude would therefore be characterized by a certain to-be-looked-at-ness. To pose nude is to offer oneself to the gaze of the other,to presuppose this gaze, but also, crucially, to imagine (or to image)oneself from the side of the other. As the emphatically titled Self-Deceit series makes clear, the central concern of Woodmans work islooking at oneself as other.

    As Jacques Derrida has noted in Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, this superimposition of gazes or eye graft,by which the gazes of self and other overlap and obscure each other,constitutes the inner mechanics of any self-portrait.10 He describes theself-portrait in terms of a facing. Like Nancys nude, the self-portraitis extroversive, turned towards the other:

    If there were such a thing, the self-portrait would first consist in assigning, thus indescribing, a place to the spectator (. . . ) following the gaze of a draftsman who,on the one hand, no longer sees himself, the mirror being necessarily replaced bythe destinatory who faces him, that is, by us, but us who, on the other hand, at thevery moment when we are instituted as spectators (. . . ) no longer see the author assuch, can no longer in any case identify the object, the subject, and the signatoryof the self-portrait of the artist as self-portraitist. (MB, 62)

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    In order to become visible to oneself, one must look from the side ofthe other. It is only through the position of the spectator that there canbe an image of the self, or, as Derrida says, the spectators performanceconsists in putting to work, the sought after specularity (MB, 62).But in this superimposition of gazes, something escapes or withdraws:the artist can only look at himself blindly. And the spectator, nowoccupying the artists former position thus conceals it, rubbing outthe overlapping gazes of artist as subject and artist as object that definethe self-portrait. The self-portrait is caught in this slippage of gazes,which is at once the condition of its possibility and its impossibility.The subject, blind to itself, is unmade ruined, to follow Derridascryptic title according to its own image.

    In order to become visible to oneself, one must look from the side of theother: The representation of the self therefore entails a projection ofthe self outside of itself. For Derrida and the drawings that his essayconsiders, this projection is realized by the mirror. The photograph,of course, has its own particular blindness. Working long before theadvent of the digital camera, Woodmans photographs would haveemerged neither instantaneously nor through a painterly process ofaddition and amendment. Her images would have emerged from theblindness of the dark room whole, complete, presenting themselvesto her eyes in the same form as they are now presented to thespectator. To see oneself, first and finally, from the side of the spectator. InWoodmans photographsdoubly blind as she is often not behindthe viewfinder the projection in question could be said to be thework of the pose. As Craig Owens asks in his well-known essayon the subject, What do I do when I pose for a photograph?(. . . ) I freeze, as if anticipating the still I am about to become;mimicking its opacity, its still-ness; inscribing, across the surface ofmy body, photographys mortification of the flesh.11 As alreadydiscussed, Woodmans photographs are frequently highly constructed,or staged. Owens considers the pose as a feminist strategy within apsychoanalytical context that associates feminism with masquerade.12

    The pose is an ambivalent strategy of resistance, which, like thedeath mask his text also invokes, simultaneously conceals that whichit reveals. Through the association of mimcry with camouflage, theextreme visibility or to-be-looked-at-ness of the pose performs aparadoxical invisibility. For Owens, the pose entails a certain splittingof the subject: the entire body detaches itself from itself, becomes apicture, a semblance in a way which is both complicit in and escapesits own objectification. The pose like the nude is always facing,

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    always anticipates the gaze of other. The splitting of the subject, asOwens suggests, comes down to picturing oneself, or seeing oneself fromthe side of the other. As with the mirror and this is perhaps why theyalso feature so prominently in Woodmans work the pose estranges,introducing distance at the heart of presence. The post-structuralistcritique of subjectivity is predicated upon this originary or ontologicaldistance. As Nancy comments to Derrida in an interview published in1991: To deconstruct, here, comes down to showing this distanceat the very heart of presence, and, in so doing, prevents us from simplyseparating an outdated metaphysics of the subject from anotherthinking that would be, altogether, elsewhere.13 Escaping herself inthe stylized and anonymous repeatability of the poses she strikes,Woodmans portraits touch upon this altogether elsewhere of theruined subject.

    By using her own, youthful, naked female body, Woodman playswith one of the oldest tropes in the Western artistic canon. A long-standing art historical tradition, perhaps best summarized in KennethClarks 1956 essay, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art,14 associates theidealized (and in this sense abstracted) nude, particularly the female,with the representation of what Nancy describes as being fixed,immobile and outside of time: beauty (NS, 17). Woodman playswith the timeless female nude. In certain shots the figure takes onan immobile, sculptural quality such as a late untitled image takenin MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, in which she lies, armsoutstretched, her naked skin taking on the appearance of alabasteragainst the dark ground. However, this elision of the particularor individual in the service of the universal, idealized form existsin constant tension with a countervailing tendency which insistsupon precisely the bodys excess over the image; its fleetingness andunfixability. We see this in the series of images Space 2 (Providence,Rhode Island, 19756) where she poses inside an empty museumcollection case, appearing as a blur, the camera (another tool forpetrification and immortalization) unable to capture the rhythms andtemporalities of lived experience. It is also evident in the images ofCharlie the Model (Providence, Rhode Island, 19767), one of thefew series where another model is named, posing behind a sketchof his own torso or pressing his corpulent torso up against a paneof glass. As Woodmans own caption to one of the images reads:Charlie has been a model at RISD for 19 years. I guess he knowsa lot about being flattened to fit paper.15 The fact that the majorityof her work is presented in series, in catalogues and as well as within

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    the exhibition context, also works against the stasis of the a-temporalideal. The viewer is drawn into the narrative flow of the series,which are structured according to their own internal rhythm. Thephotographs are moments of punctuation, hesitation or interruptionmore suggestive of what Nancy calls these fragmentary sensations andtemporalities that the body represents for the subject (NS, 44) than oftimelessness and unity.

    The Charlie, the Model series articulates a preoccupation with themateriality of the flesh that recurs throughout Woodmans portraits.She repeatedly grasps her own bare fleshher breasts, her bellyas if to experience the material weight of her own presence. For allits intimacy, her uvre could in fact be said to be very superficial:concerned with the surfaces of things, their textures, their feel. AsPeggy Phelan has noted: hands haunt her frames; her work hungersfor tactility.16 This is perhaps why fabricsdresses, scarves, furs,sheets, as well as bodily coverings of a less conventional kind such aswallpaper, bark, dirt and paint feature so prominently in her images.The settings, too, are incredibly sensuous, filled with crumbling walls,dusty floorboards, grass, earth. In an untitled image taken in NewYork (197980), an outstretched hand rests against a round, white-topped stool. A button-up ladies glove sits in the palm, with itsfingers running perpendicular to the hands own. The glove is pristine,white, unmarked. The wall in the background is very dark, almostblack, and ribbed by faint paintbrush marks. The heightened contrastbetween background and foreground brings the smudges and scratchesalong the edge of the stool seat into sharp relief. It also highlightsthe dark smears or bruises on the models forearm, a paint smudgejust discernible in the minute lines of the thumb. The glove is tiny,like a childs, and the style is old-fashioned. It looks like a prop, ananachronism dug out of the dressing-up box. Immaculate. Impossible.Woodmans images call for the gloves to be taken off. She experiencesher surroundings sensuously and immediately. Smeared in, covered byor pressed against them, her naked flesh solicits a tactile response fromthe spectator.

    In privileging the contact of touch, these images engage a tactilevisuality of the kind that Laura U. Marks has theorized in relationto the cinematic image. For Marks, the haptic image is one thatcollapses the distance between the senses of sight and touch, bringingthe spectator into a different relation of proximity to the representedobject. In her study of feminist and peripheral cinema, she exploressynaesthetic perception, a mode of viewing in which the eyes

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    themselves function like organs of touch, as a strategy of resistanceto a male, Western (Cartesian) gaze that objectifies and masters.17 Itis interesting that Nancy, in his Nous Autres essay, uses a tactile figureto describe the action of the photograph, one which we have alreadydiscussed in relation to Blanchots fascinated gaze: Every photographis an irrefutable and luminous I am, whose proper subject is neither thephotographed subject nor the photographing subject, but the silveryor digital evidence of a grasping (IG, 105). The subtitle of Nus Sommes,the Skin of Images, also suggests the extent to which the two thinkersare in dialogue. However, unlike Markss fusional model, which drawsheavily on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and thechiasmatic interpenetration of self and world to cast the touch of thehaptic image in terms of presence and immediacy, Nancys graspingformulation maintains distance in proximity, implying a not-quitecontact that is endlessly deferred. Rather than capture its object, thephotograph fumbles, extending blindly towards something that slipsthrough its fingers.

    In Woodmans photographs, the haptic nude (and all nudes arehaptic, to varying degrees) hovers indeterminately between thesensuous proximity of the flesh and the elevated formal ideal.Exhibitionistic to the extent that it always presupposes an external gazeand complicit in this voyeurism, especially in the sculptural poses thatrecur throughout her work, the nude simultaneously and paradoxicallyoffers itself to and resists the gaze. The tactile apprehension of theimage, based in the sensation of a moment of contact, configuresa relation of intimacy between the spectator and the object. Andyet this touch, which the image solicits, is necessarily thwarted: theexperience of the image can never correspond to the experience ofthe thing. Marks acknowledges this in her description of the hapticimage as a fundamental mourning of the absent object or absentbody (SF, 191). The haptic encounter therefore occurs only as thewithdrawal of touch, as a spacing or distanciation: an ambiguousproximity that restages the aporetically distant intimacy that underpinsNancys thinking of originary sociality.

    Touch and/as the withdrawal of touch: Francesca Woodmans workis caught in this play. Bare skin/covered skin: every gesture of de-nuding is also one of concealment. Suspended mid-act, the photographpoints both ways, to the excessive visibility of the nude and theinvisibility of camouflage. The House series, taken in Providence,Rhode Island, in 1977, in which she stands against a crumbling wall,partially covered by strips of floral wallpaper, notably articulates this

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    dual preoccupation with appearance and disappearance. Blurs in thedoorframe, her portraits hover on the narrow, momentary thresholdbetween the visible and the invisible, presence and absence.

    And finally, to end: the Photograph itself as a Death Mask

    the instantaneous and always rebegun image as the casting of presence in contactwith light, the casting of a presence fleeing into absence, which one neithercaptures or represents. (Nancy, Masked Imagination, 99)

    Ultimately, this is what Woodmans self-portraits so powerfullyarticulate: the fleetingness of presence always touching the limit ofabsence. Woodman is never there where she is. Of course this is true ofevery photograph. For Barthes, famously, it is the eidos of the mediumto present as present, as here it is, what once has been but is nolonger (CL, 115). But in appearing to withdraw or absent herself evenin the present of the photographic moment, Woodman emphasizes thefleetingness of her own temporality.

    For Nancy, originary sociality or being-with, has its ground in arelation to shared finitude, to that which is wholly other. As Nancyputs it: death is indissociable from community, for it is throughdeath that the community reveals itself and reciprocally (IC, 14).Woodmans work is permeated by this relation to finitude, fromthe decaying interiors in which she poses, to her recurrent useof dead fish, stuffed animals and the large museum display casesused for the preservation of such specimens. The juxtaposition ofher youthful body, sometimes covered with dust (or ashes?), withcrumbling walls points to its impermanence, crying out this will beno longer. The provocative title of her 1977 portraits On Beingan Angel (Providence, Rhode Island) articulates this preoccupationwith mortality, even as it nods to the immortalizing function ofthe photograph. Insofar as the images grapple with a relation towhat lies beyond all representation, they are exposure to finitude;they foreground the horizon in-common towards which all being isdirected. Woodman herself committed suicide at the age of twenty-two, a fact that rarely goes unremarked in commentaries on herwork. However, if one can avoid the temptation to psychopathologize,retroactively reading her work as a rehearsal for her suicide,18

    knowledge of this event can be considered a supplementary exposureto finitude that works in addition to the images.

    Nancys description of the relation between the spectator and thedeath mask as a face-to-face that is blind cannot fail to recall

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    the language of Levinasian ethics. For Emmanuel Levinas as forNancy, the subject is constituted in and as a relation to the other,a relation grounded in the face-to-face encounter. From Nancysearly formulation, in the preface of The Inoperative Community, of theexemplary reality of exposure as my face always exposed to others,always turned towards an other and faced by him or her, never facingmyself (IC, xxxvii), to his later description of the nude as firstly afacing [un face ], (NS, 41), his thinking around intersubjectivityand community is in constant dialogue with Levinas. However, whereNancys interest in the face-to-face is ontological, Levinas attendsmore explicitly to the ethical dimension of this encounter and to thequestions of our response and responsibility towards the other that facesus. For Levinas the subject is interpellated into an originary relation ofresponsibility by the address of the other whose face makes a plea oran accusation, a demand that cannot be refused. The subject, from itsinception, is hostage to the other:

    Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, to wounding, passivity more passive than allpatience, passivity of the accusative form, trauma or accusation suffered by ahostage to the point of persecution, implicating the identity of the hostage whosubstitutes himself for others: all this is the self, a defecting or defeat of the egosidentity.19

    The emotive register of the Levinasian account of the ethicalencounter reminds us that there is an affective dimension to originarysociality that Nancy, at least in The Inoperative Community, perhapsoverlooks.20 Like the death mask that Nancy invokes, Woodmansfacing (self-)portraits stage a face-to-face which is blind. Butblindness, as Derrida is at pains to point out, does not preclude tears(MB, 127). Woodmans photographs and the impermanence that theygesture towards communicate on an affective as well as an aestheticlevel. These photographs are haunting. Lying naked next to a white,rectangular plinth surrounded by crumpled paper shrouds (Untitled,Rome, 19778) Woodman is a toppled Venusmortal flesh shiveringagainst a cold floor. Her images articulate the vulnerability implicitin exposure, a vulnerability identified by Levinas but which Nancyleaves largely unexplored. To be exposed is to be open to; the exposedsubject is cast out, always outside of or beside itself. The corollary ofthis is the impossibility of retreat. Interestingly, whilst Nancy stresses inThe Inoperative Community that this openness or opening of the subjectdoes not constitute a laceration or a wound, he will later describe thephotographic moment, the moment in which the subjects behind and

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    in front of the camera are mutually exposed, in terms of a stigma.This term refers back to the branding mark, to a piercing or puncture,and conjures assocations with the enslaved, the criminal and, aboveall, through the associated stigmata, to suffering. In short, it containswithin it an implicit suggestion of the potential violences of socialityand communicates an ethical or affective dimension of exposure thatNancys essay does not go on to develop. It is perhaps this blind spotthat Woodmans photographs can best help illuminate.

    NOTES

    1 This reading of the photograph through Nancys concept of exposure isindebted to Louis Kaplans recent article Photography/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancys Recasting of the Photographic Image, Journal of Visual Culture9:1 (2010), 4562.

    2 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, edited by Peter Connor,translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and SimonaSawhney, foreword by Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis and London:Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxxvii; hereafter IC.

    3 Nancys essay was published in English keeping the French title Nous Autres;see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, translated by Jeff Fort (NewYork: Fordham, 2005), 1008 (104); hereafter GI. The title of the festivalplays with the fact that the Spanish we (nosotros) contains within it otros,or others, joining the first and third person in a way which resonates withNancys thinking of being singular plural. This sense is retained in the Frenchconstruction (literally we others and used to mean we in certain contexts),but has no equivalent in English.

    4 See Francesca Woodman, edited by Herv Chands (Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 34.5 See The Essential Solitude in Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature,

    translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of NebraskaPress, 1982), 2034; hereafter SL.

    6 This is Roland Barthess famous argument in Camera Lucida: Reflectionson Photography, translated by Richard Howard (London: Flamingo, 1984);hereafter CL.

    7 See Nancy, Masked Imagination in The Ground of the Image, 8099 (99).8 Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari, Nus Sommes: La Peau des Images

    (Brussels: Klincksieck, 2006), 9 (hereafter NS, all translations my own). TheFrench title plays on the almost homonymous Nus (nudes) and nous (we).

    9 For Nancys discussion of expeausition or skin-show see Jean-Luc Nancy,Corpus, translated by Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham, 2008), 335.

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    10 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins,translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London:University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2; hereafter MB.

    11 See Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture(Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1992), 210.

    12 A foundational text in relation to this idea is Joan Riviere, Womanliness as aMasquerade, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929), 30313. Owenshimself refers to Rivieres work, although his own argument is situated in adecidedly Lacanian frame of reference.

    13 See Who Comes After the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connorand Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), 102.

    14 See Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London: John Murray,1956).

    15 Francesca Woodman, edited by Herv Chands, 19.16 Peggy Phelan, Francesca Woodmans Photography: Death and the Image

    One More Time, Signs 27:4 (2002), 992.17 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the

    Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 2; hereafter SF.18 Even so perceptive a critic as Phelan has fallen prey to this temptation:

    Woodmans artistic practice might be understood as a way to rehearse herown death (Francesca Woodmans Photography, 987).

    19 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, translated byAlphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1998), 15.

    20 This is interesting, given that the idea of the inoperative community emergesthrough a commentary on the work of Georges Bataille and his thinking ofcommunal existence, thinking expressed precisely in the language of ecstasy,passion, obsession and violence. The relation to death is central to Bataillebecause it is a shared terror. That this element of fear is purged from Nancysaccount of our shared relation to finitude (the use of the word finitude itselfis an indication of this) is perhaps a corrective to the hyperbolic language ofBataille, but it nevertheless highlights the absence of affect in Nancys accountof the (inter)subject.

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