LACK AND TRANSCENDENCE THEORY EXTRACT 1

Notes from my research around the concepts of lack and transcendence:

In Freudian terms there is no desire without lack, our scopic drive is organized around desire and possession. Images that ‘puncture’ or ‘wound’ seemingly attest to this unrealized ‘lack’, offering a promise of greater proximity with an ‘essential truth’ that might compensate for an internal ‘void’. Hence we identify with the image, searching for the lost loved object in effigy. 
         Lacan described endeavors to fill the subconscious void (both in the production and consumption of artworks) as the true meaning of sublimation. He referred to this void (or ‘the Thing’ as he coined it) as a ‘non-place’ of deprivation, both ‘suffocatingly‘ insistent and yet “unbearably absent” and inaccessible. Searching for compensation in visual imagery, Lacan argued, is futile because ‘the Thing’ eludes signification- it is beyond our capacity as humans to represent. Artworks that transfix or puncture, according to these principles do so because they involve an object choice that attests to the individual’s own construction of self. The individual’s own personal void.