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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Blind Man: A Phantasmography

The Blind Man: A Phantasmography

Desjarlais, Robert

Hardcover

Series: Thinking from Elsewhere

Art Criticism & TheoryAnthropologyPhotography History & Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0823281124
ISBN13: 9780823281121
Publisher: Fordham Univ Pr
Published: Nov 20 2018
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show the features of a man, apparently blind, who begs for money at a religious site in Paris, frequented by tourists. In perceiving this stranger and the images his appearance projects, he begins to imagine what this man's life is like and how he perceives the world around him.

Written in journal form, the book narrates Desjarlais's pursuit of the man portrayed in the photographs. He travels to Paris and tries to meet with him. Eventually, Desjarlais becomes unsure as to what he sees, hears, or remembers. Through these interpretive dilemmas he senses the complexities of perception, where all is multiple, shifting, spectral, a surge of phantasms in which the actual and the imagined are endlessly blurred and intertwined. His mind shifts from thinking about photographs and images to being fixed on the visceral force of apparitions. His own vision is affected in a troubling way.

Composed of an intricate weave of text and image, The Blind Man attends to pressing issues in contemporary life: the fraught dimensions of photographic capture; encounters with others and alterity; the politics of looking; media images of violence and abjection; and the nature of fantasy and imaginative construal. Through a wide-ranging inquiry into histories of imagination, Desjarlais inscribes the need for a phantasmography--a writing of phantasms, a graphic inscription of the flows and currents of fantasy and fabulation.

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