Caravaggio′s Secrets (October Books) - Hardcover

Bersani, Leo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262024497 ISBN 13: 9780262024495

Publisher: MIT Press, 1998

Synopsis

Many critics have explored the homoerotic message in the early portraits of the baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610). In this text the authors emphasize instead the impenetrability of these portraits. The tension between erotic invitation and self-concealing retreat leads them to conclude that the interest of these works is in their representation of an enigmatic address that solicit intimacy in order to block it with a secret. The book offers a psychoanalytic reading of the enigmatic address as initiating relations grounded in paranoid fascination. They study Caravaggio's attempts to move beyond such relations, his experiments with a space no longer circumscribed by the mutual and paranoid, if erotically stimulating, fascination with imaginary secrets. In this work, sensuality relevant to the most exciting attempts in our own time to rethink, perhaps even to reinvent, community.

About this title

About the Author:

Leo Bersani was until recently the Class of 1950 Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Culture of Redemption and Homos and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Ulysse Dutoit teaches film at the University of California, Berkeley.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0262024497
• ISBN 13: 9780262024495
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 136