The Art of

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03
Lacan juxtaposed the
metaphor/metonymy
binary set with the
binary set that Freud
claimed to be the basic
functions of the unconscious:
repression and
displacement. Metaphor,
functioning
through similarities
and substitutions,
coincides with repression,
and metonymy,
functioning through
contiguity and difference,
with the psychic
trope of displacement.
Sadeq Rahimi, The
Unconscious: Metaphor
and Metonymy: http://
somatosphere.
net/2009/04/
unconsciousmetaphor-andmetonomy.html
(accessed 5 January
In a film interview taken in 2007 in New York, at his crammed, messy desk,
Boris Lurie points to a black-and-white photograph on the wall. The picture
shows four naked women who are surrounded by a circle of armed
soldiers watching, like spectators of a circus ring. The women’s arms are
folded to cover their exposed bodies. They are panicked, humiliated. It is
winter. They are about to be shot.
The photo was taken in Libau outside Riga, Lurie says, by one of the
Latvian officers who executed the mass murders of Latvian Jews in 1941.
The officer liked to shoot photographs of naked women. His negatives
were found. “Today,” Lurie says in the interview, “one can see it in the
photos from Abu Ghraib in Iraq, for example. It’s an expression of society.
The way the strong ones suppress the weak and the torturer gets a certain
pleasure from it, a sexual pleasure.”
Lurie doesn’t distinguish here between torturing and photographing
(seeing) torture. Indeed, much has been said about the dual usage of
“shooting” as a verb that describes the act of killing and of photographing.
Susan Sontag famously remarked that “To photograph people is to
violate them [...] it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph
someone is a subliminal murder.” 01 However, amateur photographs from
the Final Solution were an unprecedented phenomenon. Alongside the
official photographic documentation (which was strictly monitored and
included the destruction of negatives after printing) and despite the official
prohibition, private photographing of shootings of civilians as well
as other parts of the extermination were made all through the different
stages of the genocide, against confidentiality order. Those amateur
photographs threatened to undermine the “rational” “political” character
of the murdering. Such photos served both as a detachment means and
an instrument for increasing sadistic and voyeuristic lust. Moreover, the
anonymity of the seen bodies lent itself to the photographer as a materialization
of his own body-loathing, from which he might have wished to
disburden himself.
The excessive, unuseful 02 violence within the complex of industrial
mass murder—an outcome of the combination of racism and modern
production procedures, as utilized for killing the European Jews—informs
the work of Boris Lurie.
In his art, women’s violated, expropriated bodies serve as a Lacanian
object-a. They are its metonym (in so far as they replace or stand for
things they are not) and its metaphor (as they share characteristics with
what they stand for). 03 Images of women in his work present an object
of unfulfilled desire and of contempt. Their bodies are consumable, sites
of pleasure as well as of atrocities. They reveal power relations and the
2016). TAL STERNGAST
01
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography, New
York: Rosetta Books,
2005, p.10.
02
Primo Levi coined this
term in his descriptions
of the irrational
violence, towards the
ones who were meant
to be killed anyway. As
examples he gives the
endless parades as well
as the prisoners’ orchestra
that was forced
to accompany the slave
laborers on their ways.
Primo Levi understood
these acts as an integral,
essential part of
the apparatus of mass
murder. (See Primo
Levi, The Drowned and
the Saved, New York:
Summit Books,
1986).