Abstrakt
The presentation will depart from Jacques Derrida's premise that literariness is not a natural property of the text but intentional relation to the latter integrating implicit consciousness of conventional and institutional rules of literature.1 What is more, speaking about the law of genre as an auto-contaminating mechanism functioning on the specificity of a trait of belonging that does not itself belong, Derrida posits the text as a participant in a genre or genres but never as one belonging to it. The claim that 'remarks of belonging belong without belonging, participate without belonging' presupposes belonging and relationship as an element in itself with its own residual make-up.2 Although Jean-Francois Lyotard posits 'the third mediative element' as an essentially regulative rather than constituted within a system,3 Derrida foregrounds the phenomenon of relation or belonging neither as an abstraction, nor as an element un-constituted as a system.
Departing from these, my presentation aims at bringing these claims against the notion of the visual. The extent to which the visual constitutes or is constituted by the law of its own genre will be juxtaposed against the art of British artist Francis Bacon and American silhouettist Kara Walker.
While the art of Kara Walker, manipulates the neutrality of the silhouette as a medium against unsettling scenes of violence feeding to the Western's fantasy of Africa, Francis Bacon utilizes the medium to its utmost violent potential to deform the human body. Both artists evoke a certain type of critical response foregrounding transgressive and violent nature of their art, respectively.
The question to be addressed thus will concern whether violence is the natural element of the visual or the residue of the relation and/belonging determined by the affect and sensation produced on the audience.