Atomic light

O.2005-5

Dreams, x-rays, atomic radiation, and “invisible men” are phenomena that are visual in nature but unseen. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) reveals these hidden interiors of cultural life, the “avisual” as it has emerged in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Derrida, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô and Sigmund Freud, and H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, and in the early cinema and the postwar Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, all under the shadow cast by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dreams, x-rays, atomic radiation, and “invisible men” are phenomena that are visual in nature but unseen. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) reveals these hidden interiors of cultural life, the “avisual” as it has emerged in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Derrida, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô and Sigmund Freud, and H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, and in the early cinema and the postwar Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, all under the shadow cast by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Akira Mizuta Lippit focuses on historical moments in which such modes of avisuality came into being–the arrival of cinema, which brought imagination to life; psychoanalysis, which exposed the psyche; the discovery of x-rays, which disclosed the inside of the body; and the “catastrophic light” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which instituted an era of atomic discourses.

With a taut, poetic style, Lippit produces speculative readings of and shadow and visual structures or phenomenologies of the inside, charting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen in the radioactive light of the twentieth century.

Akira Mizuta Lippit a soutenu que la psychanalyse, la technologie des et le cinéma, tous développés ou découverts à peu près à la même époque, étaient les techniques essentielles de l'”avisualité” du début du vingtième siècle, promettant de rendre les choses et l’esprit transparents. On attribue au et à la le pouvoir de faire en sorte que le monde se manifeste de manière inédite, au-delà du réalisme du XIXe siècle et des capacités de l’œil humain. On pourrait dire que “[la] vision et la visualité ont fini par être culturellement surévaluées”, mais il faut aussi reconnaître la coexistence de différentes visualités et leur critique mutuelle.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/96/243057/shattered-matter-transformed-forms-notes-on-nuclear-aesthetics-part-2/

http://archivesgamma.fr/2022/05/03/atomic-light