Harmony, Anamorphosis and the “Conceptual Scheme”

Une tache floue a l'horizon de la pensee Terence Cave I In the opening chapter of his early study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Steven Greenblatt included a now famous excursus on the subject of Hans Holbein's double portrait, The Ambassadors (1533), and the optical technique of anamorphosis. Hans Holbein's well known painting depicts two French envoys to Henry VIII of England, Georges de Selve and Jean de Dinteville, both young, wealthy aristocrats. Like most commentaries on Holbein's canvas, Greenblatt's discussion--a parenthesis in his chapter on Thomas More--places much emphasis on the distorted skull, which occupies much of the lower quarter of the image. Greenblatt offers an extended, acute reading of the Holbein portrait and of the interpretive unease triggered by the skull. Indeed the uncanny death's head serves to undermine, for Greenblatt, "the very concept of locatable reality upon which we conventionally rely in our mappings of the world, to subordinate the sign systems we so confidently use to a larger doubt." (1) Greenblatt's reading makes extensive use of the notions of "incommensurability" and "incompatibility." Speaking of one of the figures portrayed in the painting, Jean de Dinteville, Greenblatt writes: The incommensurability [between ornament and memento mori] is confirmed by the fact that we must distort, and, in essence, efface the figures in order to see the skull. That this effacement is moving--that it is felt as a kind of death--is a function of Holbein's mastery of those representational techniques that pay tribute to the world, that glorify the surfaces and textures of things, that celebrate man's relatedness to the objects of his making. The skull, "slashing across the pavement, intruding upon [its] complex harmonies and disrupting them," (18) is for Greenblatt an analogue for the "disquieting internal rupture" (23) he detects as well in More's Utopia. Greenblatt continues: [The] sense within the general frame of work of incompatible perspectives between which the reader restlessly moves--is mirrored at virtually every level of the text from its largest units of design to its smallest verbal details. [...] This restless shifting of perspective is, I would suggest, the close equivalent at the verbal level to the technique of anamorphosis, whose etymology itself suggests a back-and-forth movement, a constant forming and reforming. (23) Ultimately, for Greenblatt, "anamorphosis" will stand as an analogue of textual ambiguity and uncanny shifts of perspective evinced in texts and other objects of cultural study. In the broader critical discourse, anamorphosis has recently been very much the province of readings informed by psychoanalytic theory. Greenblatt's reading of Holbein's canvas, characteristically, does not draw directly on Jacques Lacan's treatment of the same work in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI). (2) Nonetheless, in recent years, anamorphosis has often been exploited as an analogy for studying such conceptual networks as "symbolic orders" or "conceptual schemes." Lacan's account of the skull as "a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other" ["un regard par moi imagine au champ de l'Autre"] (Lacan 1973: 79) has been enormously influential, all the more so, perhaps, through Slavoj Zizek's rereading of Holbein and Lacan, and his reformulation of anamorphosis as a theoretical paradigm for the study of ideology and desire. Zizek emphasizes, after Lacan, the unreadable "blot" of the skull as a necessarily absent object of interpretive desire intruding on the inter-subjective symbolic order, both warping it and framing its possibility. (3) In all three readings of the Holbein painting I have mentioned thus far, such entities as "symbolic orders" or "sign systems" are essential to the critical project. …