Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Dialectics of Desire and Revolution: Vienét's 'Girls of Kamare'

Unpublished

ABSTRACT

In the Fall 2008 issue of October, Kelly Baum wrote an article entitled The Sex of the Situationist International. In it, she radically reformulates the accepted art historical understanding of a common “leitmotif” in Situationist publications, that of nude or semi-nude women. Previously, critics ignored the usage either by dismissing it as, in the words of Thomas Levin, “problematic depictions of scantily clad women” or by condemning it, as did Susan Suleiman, as the product of a “men’s club.” Baum, however, asserts that the Situationists, while reproducing some of the gender biases of the time, were actually using these images as a way to critique the alienation of desire as present in advanced capitalism. Baum goes even farther, indicating that the images the Situationists used in their publications of women were not actually images of women, but rather images of desire. Relying on work done by Thomas Y. Levin, Giorgio Agamben and Henri Lefebvre, Baum succeeds in developing an analysis that situates the Situationist use of images of desire as gendered politicization of desire to attempt a “revolution in desire.” In this paper, I intend to extend Baum’s analysis of printed images and a curt examination of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle to a film directed by Situationist International member René Viénet called Girls of Kamare, on which there is little to no theorization available, while exploring the revolutionary implications of this detourning of desire through a psychoanalytic and visual studies lens.

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