Corporeal Topographies of the Image Zone: From Fin-de-Siècle Vienna to Surrealist Paris

I focus on Kokoschka’s turn-of-the-century play Murderer. Hope of Women  and his illustrations of it as a paradigm for a view that transcends the scope of  a Freudian psychoanalytical  model, undercuts it as a mere conceptual grid toward a audio-visual, tactile experience of the human being in its bodily mass and materiality. The playlet is a presentation of  male-female relations as a battle of  the sexes. Kokoschka’s accompanying illustrations, his sketches of a spiral of attraction and repulsion as a murderous dance of death, visually laid bare his intentions. The images are a series of illuminations of  the wounded, lacerated, bloody body, its nerves, veins, ganglia  and blood vessels exposed, thus shattering the self-contained icon of man as composure, composition and completion. Instead, man is flesh (well in advance of André Masson’s and Francis Bacon’s images and Deleuze’s interpretation of the latter).  Most importantly to my argument here, this de-composition of the human image to flesh is taking place within a zone that (as in the case of the then recently discovered X-ray technology) has broken with the norms of an external view of the subject.

Moreover, under attack is the idealist vertical image of man which culminates in the privileging of the head and the face (Georges Bataille) as the site of the human spirit. The opposition of the vertical vs. the horizontal is a centered dimension of our Western cultural symbolism, extending from the sexual to political icons. I thus view Kokoschka’s iconoclasm at the inception of a series of experiments with decomposing the grid of this vertical zone. Beginning with decapitation (at which point Gustav Klimt’s paintings of Judith and Holofernes stop in terms of a psychoanalytical model of Eros and Thanatos) there is a tendency, shared by the European avant-garde from German-Austrian Expressionism to French Surrealism, toward the liquidation of  the humanist form and image of man in terms of an anti-metaphorical “physis- and image zone” (Walter Benjamin).