Description
Book SynopsisIn this fascinating new book, Rosalinda Quintieri addresses some of the key questions of visual theory concerning our unending fascination with simulacra by evaluating the recent return of the life-size doll in European and American visual culture. Through a focus on the contemporary photographic and cinematic forms of this figure and a critical mobilisation of its anthropological complexity, this book offers a new critical understanding of this classical aesthetic motif as a way to explore the relevance that doubling, fantasy and simulation hold in our contemporary culture.
Quintieri explores the figure of the inanimate human double as an inhuman partner, reflecting on contemporary visuality as the field of a hypermodern, post-Oedipal aesthetic. Through a series of case studies that blur traditional boundaries between practices (photography, performance, sculpture, painting, documentary) and between genres (comedy, drama, fairy tale), Quintieri puts in contrast the n
Trade Review
"Rosalinda Quintieri’s exciting and timely book promises to revitalize critical analysis in visual culture through her discussion of contemporary modes of techno-scopophilia. Deploying neglected theoretical resources from the ‘late Lacan’ in which objects of extimacy become essential parts of our being, Quintieri’s book engages with and develops the logic of recent photographic work deploying dolls, mannikins and marionettes that break with the Freudian paradigm of the ‘uncanny’. In Quintieri’s analysis the ‘double’ no longer simply provokes a crisis of identity and meaning but opens the way to perverse pleasures of human posterity in which the post-human follows the (an)aesthetic trajectory of the doll."
– Scott Wilson, author of Scott Walker and the Song of the One-All-Alone. (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Quasi-subjects”: the hypermodern double between flatness and affective excess 1. The modern doppelgänger: enjoyment as subversion 2. Enjoy (you must)!: Olivier Rebufa and Barbie’s dreamlife 3. Silicone Love: photography as de-Realisation 4. Laurie Simmons: pictures beyond the gaze 5. Lars and the Real Girl: a tale of the New Father Conclusions: doubles beyond the uncanny
