Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

There is an interesting structure to the visualization of self in ‘Las Meninas’ and in autoscopy which is paradoxical and uncanny. Autoscopy is a condition where one experiences one’s own image or ‘double’ clearly but in a pathological condition i.e. as a distorted experience of selfhood. Whereas, Las Meninas (the painting by Diego Velazquez) depicts the necessary distortion and the ‘constituted absence’ of self-image which is the everyday experience of a healthy self. I will analyze the idea of self-image and its complicated structure in autoscopy and “Las Meninas” by taking theoretical and empirical resources from the works of Michel Foucault and Aaron L Mishara. When Foucault uses the painting “Las Meninas” to explain ‘the limit and structure’ of self-image (and explores its philosophical significance), Mishara uses the works of Franz Kafka to explain the “calibrated dance” involved in the production of self-image. For us, these two thinkers’ studies help to reveal the problem at stake in the process of constituting self-image. In the paper, I ask: how had the modern subject been demanded to constitute his or her self-image and when he produces, how it becomes an error, maybe a haunting mismatch?