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Jennifer Friedlander, SUNY Press, Albany, New York, 2008, 139 pp., $24.95, ISBN-13: 978-0791472965
In recent years, the major emphasis of psychoanalytically oriented scholarship engaged with Lacan’s concept of the Real (understood as what lies beyond the signifier and the symbolic order) has been on trauma and the way it eludes representation and infects the subject with a sense of haunting anxiety. In her refreshing and thought-provoking book, Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion, Jennifer Friedlander shifts the focus from the relationship between trauma and the Real to that between visuality and the Real. Her purpose is to articulate a new feminist psychoanalytic theory of spectatorship that challenges previous ways of considering the connections between looking and pleasure, and between spectatorship and ideology. By linking Lacan’s concept of sexuation, presented in his Seminar XX Encore: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972-1973), as the way in which the signifier positions the subject between the sexes, with Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum, elaborated in his highly influential essay on photography, Camera Lucida (1980), Friedlander proposes a fascinating alternative to extant theories of feminist spectatorship that hinge on sexual difference and the refusal of moments of “pleasure and surprise” (p. 5). Her concern, by contrast, is to show how certain spectatorial events actually depend on such pleasurable and unexpected moments.
Key to Friedlander’s project is her view that Barthes’s Camera Lucida has been mistakenly interpreted as a rejection of poststructuralist thinking and as a nostalgic return to realism. In her intriguing rereading of the work, she understands Barthes’s description of the punctum – the apparently banal, accidental detail that disrupts the studium or culturally expected interpretation of a photograph – as an uncoded, uncanny “point of non-meaning” (p. 13) that moves the image beyond nature as