Fulvio Carmagnola May 23, 2007

Attempt to understand the notion of obversion

Illustrated Philosophy

Video Corridor is an installation by Bruce Nauman that summarizes

visually the notion of obversion that Marco Senaldi reflects on
2003 p. 241). It consists of a corridor a few meters long. At the first
At the end there is a camera connected in a closed circuit with one.
video screen on the opposite side. The visitor enters the hallway and is
ripreso di spalle mentre si allontana dalla videocamera avvicinandosi alla
figure on the screen. The outcome is unsettling: an unknown person is seen who
steps back and discovers that this unfamiliar person, seen from behind,
unrecognizable at first glance, we are ourselves: "the viewer approaches a
"monitor in which he sees himself moving away" (Senaldi, ibid).
Who are we that see ourselves as someone else who moves away while we ...
Shall we get closer? And what is it that I see? A work of art that poses questions.
philosophical or a treatise on the philosophy of the subject illustrated by an artifact?

image

video camera visitor's path in the hallway monitor

One could observe that here there is the visible, aesthetic demonstration of a
state – of the subject, culture, art – that Senaldi precisely defines
"obverse". Already Benjamin saw in cinema a (positive) expropriation that
could allow access to the discovery of the 'optical unconscious' - but here the
things have gone much further. In a sense, I am - as in the case
of the sardine box that Lacan spoke of in one of his seminars (Lacan,
the thing that concerns me (or) involves me and that is foreign to me, generated by what is in the
my shoulders.
In a recent essay, American scholar Joan Copjec writes that the episode
the tin of sardines told by Lacan is the second version of the
mirror stadium (Copjec, ). Perhaps then we could say that here
we have the third and (for now) last version. But here, as Senaldi observes,
the mirror itself is no more: and once again "we are led to
recognize and not recognize ourselves (...) we perceive to be and not to be
"being ourselves" (Senaldi, ibid, p. 205). Here is the disturbing core
of the obversion.
We have moved from the mirror stage to the video stage (Baudrillard,
1989). But why is the video-stadium a further and more radical phase of

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mirror stadium? Because it leads from awareness (imaginary)
of one's own identity (the 'jubilation' expression that Lacan refers to in the essay
famous) to the 'awareness of one's radical dis-identity, of the fact that
never be completely ourselves (...) we are in front of ourselves
like others” (Senaldi, p. 238).
Nauman's installation also anticipates and summarizes what is happening today,
in the banalization of the reality show, that is to say that 'the media becomes
immediate and the lived immediacy becomes television" (there) – amplifying and
systematically rendering the effect of estrangement that we feel when we happen to
passing in front of a shop window where a camera is casually installed
that takes us back as we pass...

Genealogy and similarities

At first glance, the notion of obversion seems to be a rather abstruse variant.

of "inversion". After all, isn't the obverse perhaps the inverse, the reverse? Before
trying to examine its characteristics, it is worth noting that this
the concept is not so outlandish after all. In fact, it can be traced back.
numerous analogies in the events of the most recent philosophical research and
epistemological.
There is first of all an explicit filiation. Senaldi indeed takes up the reading
radical of the Hegelian thought of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In his
the text contains an in-depth exploration of the concept of reflection through a
original and controversial re-reading of Hegel and Kant. In this reading, the absolute
Hegelian or Reason is not Other (from the Kantian finite intellect) but rather
the recapitulation of all the efforts made by finite thought in its
dynamic to reach it. Hegel would therefore be a Kant taken to the
extreme consequences. It should also be remembered that a notable precedent of
A radical reading of this type consists of the three studies on Hegel by Theodor.
Adorno.
This reading allows Zizek to combine Hegel with Lacan by declining the
paradoxical notion of 'future perfect' found in the reflections of
French psychoanalyst :

The paradox of reflection is that it retroactively transforms the state.

things happened in what already-always 'was truly' (...) the past is
retroactively positioned in its truth” (The Great Other, p. 59).

Naturally, another more immediate and evident point comes to mind, the
Baudrillardian notion of simulacrum that Senaldi explicitly refers to,
revisiting the concept of stage-video. It will be remembered that for Baudrillard
the simulacrum transcends the notion of copy and representation as it.
constitutes, to put it briefly, the 'copy' of a non-existent reality and

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so, so to speak, a second time without the first (see also Perniola,
1980).

There are perhaps other analogies to note. As I mentioned above, a similarity

it can be traced in the Adornian reading of Hegel. It goes further back
remembered the notion of Dialektik im Stillstand (dialectics in a state of arrest, more
what would the traditional translation of 'quiet' sound like) that is found in
writings of Walter Benjamin. It is useful to remember that Adorno in one of the Three Studies
it resumes Benjamin's reflection that had been discussed twenty years earlier.
critically with the friend, tracing its origin back to Hegel:

in its microstructure, Hegelian thought (...) is what Benjamin called

‘dialectic at rest’: comparable to the experience of the eye in relation to the drop
of water that begins to teem under the microscope

Ten years earlier, Adorno had already paid a belated tribute to his friend.
disappeared in a masterful essay where he observed that Benjamin had
practiced

(...) an unrestrained abandonment to the object. When thought comes too close to the
thing, this becomes foreign like any object of everyday life seen at
"microscope" ("Profile of Walter Benjamin" now in Prismi, it. p. 246).

The Hegelian reference explicitly recalled by Adorno (and

probably unknown to Benjamin whose sources were others) is the
famous passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which the thinker of
Stuttgart writes that "appearance is a rise and a passing that neither rises
neither does it pass but what is in itself and constitutes the actuality and the movement of
life of truth" (tr. it. pp. 37-38, my italics). It is therefore about a
dialectic whose object moves in place.

In my opinion, it is possible to trace a less obvious analogy but

equally interesting. It concerns the concepts of 'recursion' and 'eigenvalue'.
who are found in the research of complexity epistemologists such as Heinz von
Foerster and Francisco Varela. I will only remember one writing of Varela dedicated to the
the theme of "circularity." Here the Chilean neurophysiologist observed that

VARELA

Certainly, these precedents help to make the singular less isolated.

notion of obversion and place it in a network of degrees of kinship or of
family resemblances. A net whose stakes seem to be the
attempt to make use of that absence in a non-nostalgic way of
foundations on which the contemporary finds itself meditating today.

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It should also be said that the model of obversion does not position itself as foreign or
incompatible with the aesthetic tradition that Senaldi scrupulously revisits,
rather, the definition of aesthetics that constitutes its starting point is
absolutely classical and even Crocean: if for Croce this is 'science'
of art (...) continues systematic arrangement (...) of the problems to which, according to the various
time, gives rise to reflection on art" (Croce cited in Senaldi p. 78), even in
the text we are discussing the aesthetics of is understood as a reflection
philosophical conduct on the ground of (contemporary) art as a domain
privileged, it is still "philosophical analysis of art" (there p.180).
Dove nasce allora la differenza? Proprio dal terreno immanente della storia e
of the tradition of art. Staying in this field, one can glimpse the
problems and anomalies that lead to the formulation of the notion of
obversion, due to intrinsic dialectics, indeed.

Uses and meanings of the term 'obversion'

We thus arrive at the central point: what does this term mean and what
what is specific about it, while keeping in mind the network of similarities to which I have
mentioned? It should be noted that the concept itself is never explicitly defined.
initially but rather circulates insistently through examples and
Thus, I will try to carry out a brief survey of these uses for
identify one or more nuclei of meaning.
In summary, I believe that some great 'figures' can be traced: incest,
the rolling, the alteration of the Other and the identity. In turn, these
recurring and emerging dialectical figures in the analysis of art events
contemporary since Duchamp, generate structural changes
in the Lacanian-inspired framework, or in the topology that connects the
Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary.
In summary, the situation of obversion produces a disidentification or a
overturning of the real, a transformation of the Symbolic (the Great Other
Lacanian) in an imaginary instance called the Greater Other, and
thus an all-pervasiveness of the regime of the Imaginary detached from its
support function of the symbolic plan (fiction).
These structural changes overall describe a
shift from the original plane of psychic dynamics to the plane of the
artifacts and cultural and social dynamics. This situation implies its own
an additional reallocation of the artistic phenomena themselves: from philosophy
of art to the level of reflection on media. It ultimately results in a
the need for a change in the very statute of aesthetic research, in my opinion
notice.

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A basic elementary definition could be the following: obversion
it is the characteristic that defines the essence of an object that is, at the same time
time and under the same regard, more and less than itself, without
possibility of re-resolution or re-elevation. A subject, an artifact, a
event thus acquire the aspect of undecidability and transform into a third
of a strange quality (pp. 244, 251). In particular, the art system on one hand
defines its identity in traditional terms through the form of
works and the noble figure of the artist - but on the other hand, undecidably, in some
how it self-falsifies by entering the medial logic of appearance-
television appearance. Art thus ends up becoming a third unrecognized
(rescinded) one could say, unready made of itself, according to
the expression of Senaldi. An object elevated to a rank no longer of Sublime Thing
but of undecidable Things. It follows that "even Art must be transformed"
"in the enjoyment of his self-alienation" (p.245) instead of in the system
that allowed the aesthetic pleasure of free contemplation of a Symbolic
represented in Opera.

Incest - We can start from here to try to identify the features of the first
figure that seems to be a kind of historical starting point
chronological, as it can be traced back to the practices
duchampian. As is known, the research tradition of anthropology
structural lays the great effort on nature and culture precisely on the
prohibition of incest. It establishes the Symbolic, the possibility of development
of human culture, on exogamy. Without this foundational prohibition,
summarize very precisely Senaldi, "the symbolic structure would collapse."
This condition of prohibition of self-referentiality as a basic constraint
for the establishment of the order that Lacan will in turn define as Symbolic can
to be extended also to art and its history. As a symbolic phenomenon
excellence, the very artistic production is based in turn on a
equivalent of the taboo that establishes a specific form of exogamy: the object
it cannot and must not coincide with its own representation, it must
to be a difference that founds similarity and establishes distance
mimetic as such.
In short, if "in every efficient symbolic structure we find (...) a taboo (...)
that closes the structure as long as an opening, a void is marked - then
even in the case of art, it is about introducing this specific 'void' or
difference that constitutes the device and allows for survival.
Now, "the taboo of art consists in the prohibition of producing the object itself.
rather than its representation" (p.16). It follows the necessary
distinction between image and thing. The famous story of the contest between Zeusi and
Parrasio magnificently illustrates this circumstance: efficiency
The symbolic of mimesis derives from the discovery – reconciling – that the
representation is not the object, although the artist’s skill consists
as they approached asymptotically: "I have deceived the sparrows, but you have
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I was deceived,” admits the loser. This implies a decisive tone: not
the emphasis is placed on deception, on the other hand. Deception in fact reveals
As such, it is removed, it is aufgehoben, and reality is returned to its primal state.
It is precisely this that can no longer happen after Duchamp. It can be said that
the object-obverse is born with the violation of the taboo – with the transformation
of the discernible difference between thing and representation in a third being
indiscernible – the simulacrum, perhaps, to use the vocabulary of Baudrillard.
Duchamp has committed incest after which it becomes impossible
liberarereciprocamente la cosa e la rappresentazione nella loro differenza.
The artifact that has violated the boundary becomes, in itself and without possibility of
exit, the opposite of oneself, intimately and undecidably shifted for
always. Thus is born 'an art returned to itself as it is completely lost
as such (…) intimately rendered unstable” (p.21).

But this incest that characterizes the movement/non-movement or

the oscillation does not resemble the Dialectic at a standstill of Benjamin,
where the object subjected to the gaze wavers indecisively without being able to
to stabilize, without being able to "pass through" finally offering itself to the quiet
contemplation of the spectator? And in turn, this fornication of the
what with itself does not shed a new light on the strange definition
Hegelian appearance as that which "neither arises nor passes"?
Here we encounter a remarkable feature: in the dialectic of the obverse, as
in the Benjaminian one, there is something, precisely, that does not arise and does not pass,
it remains oscillating in place - like "the object equal to x" that is mentioned
even Deleuze regarding Proust. Incest, the mythically pre-state
symbolic, observes Lévi-Strauss at the end of The Elementary Structures of
kinship is actually the projection of the anthropological dream of a 'living with'
it's a stage that never existed – precisely because culture and humanity begin
at the bottom of this thing that has always been lost. Man is forced to be born
just as such in his loss alienating himself in the Symbolic, if he wants to live
in the Culture:

Levi Strauss

So does the readymade violate this condition? Duchamp would create – perhaps
not first from a temporal point of view, but certainly first from
point of view of theoretical awareness – the unresolved loop between the two
entity - the thing and its representation - that culture allowed to
to distinguish, with the birth of that unresolved third which is precisely the object
incestuous.
Between the physical, empirical thing and the representation, there is a relationship.
of difference and of symbolic detection that allows mimesis. While between the
What empirical physicality and the readymade run the relationship, one could say, that there is

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traSacheeDing, tra the simple thing of experience and this unsettling
the incestuous resemblance that reappears before us in the guise of an opera: how
I can distinguish them, if their visible appearance is the same, as happens.
In the film about the Body Snatchers that is one of the privileged topics by Senaldi?
(cf. Piotti-Senaldi, , pp. ).

The rolling - The ready-made short-circuits the representation

because it presents a relationship between the thing and the Thing, between SacheeDing.
the result is that the phenomenological dream of arriving precisely 'to things
"stesse" turns into a nightmare. The short circuit between SacheeVorstellungnon
it is resolved but condenses into the readymade, the thing itself placed in relation
both in relation to representation (the Symbolic, the Difference) and in relation to one's own
"natural" empirical destination. While the relationship Sache/Vorstellung is
symbolic, the relation Sache/Ding, and the relation Ding/Vorstellung are
both incestuous.

BAG

representation
symbolic incest
incest
PRESENTATION DING

And yet there is another way to describe incest. It is about

of the unrolling. We also find it in the epistemological figure of the loop
recursive, which in the lexicon of Heinz von Foerster assumes the name of
"self-value". The Austrian epistemologist asks the following question: how
correctly complete the sentence

This sentence has ... (x) ... letters?

(Foerster, tr. it. 1987)

Here is an interesting case of wrapping or rolling. The correct

the answer to this question involves two lines of reasoning. It is, so to speak,
bring the two sides of the sheet of the signifier together, so that they are
riverberino correctly on the plane of meaning.
For the sentence to be correct (for it to mean what it says) so that it says the
truth, in short, for language to 'do its job', it is necessary that
something goes wrong at point x. And here we come to the issue of
significant: two conditions must be met (the two layers of
leaf). It must be “the right number,” that is, a word, a signifier,
what to say the truth about the right number of letters of the signifier itself (the phrase
in terms of linguistic content) for the truth conditions to be satisfied.
In short, there is an operation that must take place on the level of the signifier.

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it is necessary to literally 'count the number of letters' and
eventually change the word (x) so that the plans match. A
variation of the signifier - let's say, between the word "phrase" and the word
"proposition" - can change everything by reflecting on both planes.
But there is a further subtlety that makes this example interesting:
incest, so to speak, is original because the reference (the level of
(meaning) is rigged. Or rather: the reality plan in relation to which the sentence
it must be true or false is, in fact, the same level as the signifier. The
the reflective condition is original or, to put it with Varela, even in this case
“we can never get out of ourselves”. The number I write in letters enters
overlaps with the rest of the sentence (that is, with the entire signifier) and will prejudice the
truth value or the relationship with meaning.

Let's now try to look at the thing through the conceptual lenses of Zizek (and of
First of all, it is discovered that in the language itself there is a twist, a
double bottom (a pastry). The thing itself is expressed with signs or better it is
consists of signs (Senaldi, cit. p. 285). In short, there is an obverse state of
the language itself, another from the language within itself. The difference
it is no longer between the impotence of language and the richness of the things that it
surpass - the situation described in the Chandos brief by Hofmannsthal (1906)
but between language as a servile tool and the Thing that it itself is
reveals. The Thing is the language itself – with Hegel, but in a certain sense.
upside down.
Joyce had identified this aspect of language - which Lacan would define
just like her Thing, her "real". Joyce thus represents the stage
further respect to the still representational position of Hofmannsthal. The
language not only does not have the power to represent, to exhaust within itself
the same world, but it is opposite to itself. Its reflective power
(speaking of oneself as an object) and his impotence (the entry loop) are the
the same thing, as Deleuze observed about Bartleby:

DELEUZE

Isn't this excellent example worthy of being included in the catalog?

incestuous next to Nauman's installation? What Foerster defines
"autovalore" is very similar to the beautiful expression "rolling".
used by Senaldi (p.77). Whose consequences imply the end of isolation
sovereign of that thing out there, of that supposed 'in itself' that reasoning,
thought, the representation should reach or at least tend towards
asymptotically to reach.

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The alteration of the Other - or the end of the in-itself - are closely connected
to incest. The Other is no longer the reassuring alterity upon whose difference
structural could be founded the very identity of the representation. It is
this is the consequence of the assertion that Hegel would be a
Kant taken to the extreme, and the in-itself would be nothing other than the summary of
Attempts of the finite to reach it: the in-itself is not the transcendent,

the entire content of the immutable being (...) is the process of self-dissolution of
movement as contradictory (...) what consciousness considers as
the path to truth (...) is already the truth (...) the true in-itself is in no way
hidden in the transcendent afterlife. All the error of consciousness lies in the not
to warn that the process you consider external to the object is already the object (…)
the object, its rigid data, resolves into the network of mediations of processes
formally (…) the unthinkable of thought is not the transcendent surplus, the inconceivable x
of its objective content, but its own form (...) the transition to truth leads
the ontological statute of the object to perish and to dissolve" (Zizek, Looking Awry, tr.
it. 2003, pp. 25-27.

Yet it seems that nothing can be said about the obversion that everything is resolved in
an identification of the transcendent object with the movement itself of the
reflection or understanding, of the content with the form. Something continues
to hinder the resolution, the detection, the happiness of the process,
we would say. Rather, the Spirit itself is adverse, as if there were at the bottom of
this radical Hegelianism has a core that refuses it.
Senaldi uncovers a perverse effect of reflection, which in my opinion while
Hegel resumes but also falsifies the outcome. In short, as a result of incest
the representation no longer maintains distance from the thing, it is certain because
the thing itself disappears or reveals itself as nonexistent. The rolling implies
an alteration of the other or an end of the in-itself. But where does the thing disappear?
Under the representation as Baudrillard thought, generating that third
What did the French thinker define as simulacrum? In reality, if we follow this
we would be led to think that it has never existed for us except as
representation effect.
In the current state of the art, resulting from the revolution of the Avant-gardes,
the reflection (the process) prevails over the outcome (the object). The quality
the object (work) thus becomes indifferent, and "any object can
represent the spirit”. In this sense, all art becomes “conceptual”. In
can be that, as Benjamin observed in his most famous work, 'the aura
"the origin has disappeared from objects." But above all, putting the same
Benjamin in short circuit with Hegel, what is obtained is a paradoxical outcome:
what initially had the appearance of the in-itself, of the original, reveals its
nature of duplicate and not just of product. The only thing that survives in the
its apparent otherness is not the work, the object, but the system, "distinct sphere at
beyond the works." And so not even the single object is possible without the
the system itself. The short circuit between the object (work) and the system (Art) nullifies

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the symbolic distance that was at the basis of the efficiency of Art as Great
Other.
One could say that the existence of the Art system now makes it indistinguishable
single artifact from the system itself. Something similar is created not to the
resolution but to that "libidinal traffic jam" that Freud spoke of in a completely different context
context. We never reach a maid of our own, we never achieve it.
because the same creative protrusion, which would give life to the so-called products
of the imagination, each time it appears already planned, as an event,
event, discontinuity, to enter into a loop with the system that can
legitimize by reproducing it as a media and mediated icon. In short
we reach a more Lacanian outcome than purely Hegelian. In fact

every time we reach thing x (...) it clearly reveals itself to be lacking,

meno che non sia sdoppiata nella sua controfigura immaginaria. (…) una volta
reached (that is, become for us) the thing-in-itself risks losing all value and all
sense" (Senaldi, ibid, p. 246),

This leads to a 'specific training', which is original and different from

modernity. It is based on the indistinguishability – for example, between art and life,
where both things are in turn something other than themselves. The medium, the device
media, in fact transforms the negative (the other as opposed to -, life as
opposite to art and vice versa) in 'appearance of negative'. It does not take away from him then
perhaps with this operation, precisely that 'immense power' that is in Hegel
Did it push the dialectical movement? Here the dialectic stops at every
ends without resolution, and Hegelianism in some way becomes real
contradicting itself. It is precisely the rolling: the medial condition 'rolls
"on itself the consistency of spiritual opposites" (p. 77).

Something unexpected happens here even in relation to the same dialectic.

Hegelian? Something more similar to Benjamin's restless Stillstand?
The opponent does not resist, so it is not detected.
In short, the obverse is/not the opposite, as it is deprived of the power of
negative. In the opposition, it seems that none of the opposites is truly an opposite,
able to move by its own power, by virtue of its
"microstructure" (Adorno) towards its detection. Both (Art and Life)
they are thus expropriated in a thirdness: non-art that is also non-life.
This lost otherness is the medial regime. Each of the terms that you
, curled up as it is on itself, is no longer a true opposite, but
only the semblant (a term of Lacanian origin). Each one becomes in itself the
negativity cannot be removed, life becomes non-life (life on screen,
a few years ago Sherry Turkle wrote) and only in this way can it become an Art
necessarily non-art. Blocked dialectic, new version of the
Stagnation in which non-art can no longer be a true Other, background
vital (the world-of-life) on which the Form can build its own identity,

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its own surroundings. Senaldi interprets this in a truly radical way and
disturbing that phenomenon that has been much discussed, the aestheticization of
Lifeworld.
It does not seem, therefore, that the Thing disappears behind its own simulacrum that has
usurped and that events no longer take place, according to the hypothesis of
Baudrillard. It is that the essence itself reveals itself, in itself, as another from itself,
The event has always been a non-event. Therefore inconsequential (and properly
irrelevant).

What then happens to Art? It meets no one else and is not

any other, since the other irrelevant is already in itself and it "suffers the
the charm of reality without being (...) able to exorcise the urge
"sublimatory in aesthetic representation" (Senaldi, ibid, p. 85). On the other hand,
the real is inverted in itself. If trauma was classically described
as a meeting with the Other, here traumatic is not the appearance of a real
shock that makes the irenistic representation of the form impossible,
symbolic representation - but the encounter with the circumstance that the real
it is/not oneself. Already imbued with semblance, of imaginary, already
Predisposed to mediation, reality no longer opposes.
The obverse is indistinguishable, then. But from what? The obverse is an entity whose
the concept is separated from itself within itself, observes Senaldi (p. 88). It seems
that indistinguishability creates an impossibility of exit. Like a state
gelatinous of things in which opposites lose all possibility of resisting
until it breaks into something that surpasses them, and 'reality no longer resists
to artistic action because it too emerges from this deeply dialectic
changed" (there p. 113).

In the most up-to-date reading of the evolution of Lacanian thought, the

interpreters identify a temporal scan that starts from
from the emphasis on the imaginary (the mirror stage as
formation of the self in the writing of 1946) and passing through the phase of
insistence on the symbolic characteristic of the period of influence of thought
structuralist (the so-called "Rome Discourse", 1953) finally arrives at
a predominant focus on the dimension or the register of reality in the latest
phase of development of his thought (Recalcati, ). This reading is certainly
philologically correct yet seems to overlook the consequences
of the application of the powerful Lacanian topical outside the specific field
of psychoanalysis. It appears to you, following the conceptual thread of
lacanianism, a predominance of the instance or the domain of the imaginary in
specific form of mediality - and this is the dimension in which one
moves Senaldi in the analysis of artistic phenomena.
One can repeat with Baudrillard that the real has eclipsed (except then
reappear in the form of an absolute event with the attack on the Twin Towers
or try to show, following Zizek, that the real itself has changed
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look. This is the trace to follow in order to understand the notion of
obversion.

La dis-identità- A questo punto conviene accostare un’ultima figura, la dis-

radical identity. This situation ultimately distorts the very notion
of reflection/reflexivity that seems to have its origin and its in Hegel.
explicit recall.
What does reverse identity consist of? Opposites do not cancel each other out.
but each is/is not both in relation to the other and in relation to themselves (Senaldi p.
There is a 'radical dis-identity, difference, and contradiction exactly
of itself with itself" - that is, an obverse object is one whose identity
becomes 'reflective'. Art can work without outlining its own form.
pure or the outline of the work by contrast with the other (the external reality), but
only by questioning one's own identity form, insists
Senaldi (p. 113).
An important consequence that follows is the following: all phenomena of
border, of marginality and of critical and creative behavior, noted
recently also Mario Perniola, they appear to be integrable a priori (Perniola,
In the version, it is the reverse of the subversion of estrangement.
with respect to power, how desire is already prescribed by the rules
of the imaginary. The identity of these phenomena is already designed
unconsciously or consciously, in advance, in view of mediacy and not
in opposition to this. Numerous examples could be given.
Taking this reasoning to the extreme, we could observe how
the very maximum traumatic event of our time, the attack of 2001,
it has been carefully considered and designed (also) with a view to its
medial recursiveness and therefore according to its rules. And so let it be, not so much
the resurrection of the Symbolic as a transaction without counterpart, according to
the interpretation of Baudrillard (The Spirit of Terrorism) but in reverse
the extreme and sophisticated tip of the Imaginary that confirms its definitive
domain

A falsehood puts the event in loop and confers upon him

native subversive an obverse identity
medial

INDECIDABILITY
designed that contrasts with
in view of

We thus arrive at a final point. It can be said that in the opposite phase every
element of reality and the same representation changes appearance. You become
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indecidable, or rather dis-identify themselves, as a result of incest with themselves
(first figure) that produces rolling (second figure) and negates alterity
(third figure) that is, finally, something other than itself in itself. But this character invests
the same Hegelian notion of reflection, and its interpretation that has
view in Zizek (cf. above). In the imaginary media space, values and criteria
symbolic, observes Senaldi - the distinction, the otherness, the true/false opposition -
I am a target of mockery.
What does reflection then properly become? Not a quality of
thought or of the subject but a quality of the fact itself. It is "mocking" not it
spirit that embodies the cunning of reason, but the very trivial fact that it
events make sense only within the media framework, as they are 'thought out
and built only on account of it" (p. 252). The spirit is a bone, but the bone -
the banal, the indifferent - are the events in the medium that have lost their
power of Distoss. The Imaginary mockingly reflects on the Real itself.

For this reason, in obversion the reflection itself changes appearance, so to speak:
there is no longer the possibility of placing oneself outside of oneself to observe oneself - the
reflective power of language on its own activities - but also, in the direction
opposite, the falling of reflection on this side of itself, in oscillation
perpetual and unsolvable. Reflecting then becomes realizing (from
parte del soggetto) dell’impossibilità di uscire dalloop. In questo senso
"mocking" reason is the intellect itself that has been understood, to take up the
Zizek's observations, but with a different outcome.
Furthermore, from the object's side, there is a second nuance: the object
the obverse and reflective is not compact - it has no shape. It cannot be assigned to a
specific domain. Art is and must be inextricably spectacle
mediated, it is also that life-non-life that the medium produces and reflects. The
the mirror does not reflect but distance, like Nauman's monitor. If in
Hegel says that opposites 'cancel each other out'; here, however, nothing is canceled and nothing is
solved.

It could be said then that there are, so to speak, two levels of obversion. The first
level concerns the intimate dialectic of each object that withdraws in this
way beyond the usual notion of identity, and which also surpasses the notion of
identity as a relationship of recognition (Hegelian): the father is a father in
how in relation to otherness with respect to- (the son)... Here the recognition
instead dis-identifies, leads to the conclusion that each is/is not oneself in
relationship to oneself and in relation to the other. One recognizes oneself by disowning oneself.
At a second level, which we would call institutional or social, it is constituted
the media imaginary as the quintessential Obverse. It is the system that
happens to the Other (symbolic) in dissolution, and which Senaldi defines as the
Greater Other (imaginary). The Greater Other is the obverse of the Great.
Another, the result of the observation that this (the Great Other) does not exist.

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The two levels, the micro and the macro structure, reflect each other. In the impossibility of
to pass into another the dialectic of the obverse thus seems to verify and together
falsifying the Hegelian strategy. In short, the result of the reversed dialectic
it is an un-ironic victory/defeat of reflection: instead of
position/summarize 'the past in its truth' (Zizek, cit.) it reveals it
as intimately false.

This power that we call imaginary...

I try to summarize. The so-called death of art anticipated by Hegel.

(better: the fact that art has 'become a thing of the past' for us) has taken on
today a new meaning, it is her becoming something else from herself while remaining herself, thus
that "Art is also transforming itself in the enjoyment of its own self-
"estraneazione" (Senaldi, p. 245). Enjoyment and not pleasure, reflexivity.
alienating and not pure liberation in the imaginative condition of a
Another symbolic one in which, so to speak, we liberated ourselves in image.
we anticipated imagining the condition of the end of the alienation itself
(as Schiller thought). The opposite would therefore be.

first of all, the character of a thing that in itself is also something other than itself
without solution
as oscillating infinitely within itself, lacking a stable position in the field
of the Symbolic
as it is revealed to be always already removed from the origin (as happens, to
example, for the image of Passages by Benjamin)
and as she has never been herself and therefore through reflection does not return
in its true self but discovers its definitive original falsehood.

Nothing else remains for art, concludes Senaldi, but to give up its own (mythical)
identità per essere finalmente all’altezza del proprio compito nel “contesto di
this power that we call imaginary” (ibid, p. 253).
It is possible to draw some provisional conclusions from the considerations.
previous. What does the concept of obversion describe, what is it 'for'?
in the current landscape of aesthetics? I believe that the original tone of the
The notion of obversion consists in its specific function and its use.
– which seems to be about effectively reinterpreting the idea
same, abused and therefore corroded, of the imaginary. The imaginary becomes the
media domain and together the "power" or the social and cultural instance that
defines the present - and within it makes it possible to reread in their
the still exemplary centrality of contemporary art phenomena.
Once again: the imaginary cannot be naively described as
the archive of cultural images, nor as the reserve of meaning regarding the
the banality of the actual, of the existing – as a tradition that dates back
roughly speaking, with Romanticism. In short, it cannot be identified with the

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creative faculty of imagination. The imaginary is rather a terrain
impure and pervasive, an impersonal instance or a "power," as it is written
He signals, which prescribes our desire – and at the same time, I would add,
a battleground, uncontested terrain as some express it
exponents of Cultural Studies.
The most important outcome of using the notion of obversion for research
contemporary aesthetics, in my opinion, consists in the fact that, due to
immanence – according to the good laws of radical Hegelian dialectics on
what is the genealogical axis that leads from Senaldi to Zizek and from him
Alcotehegelian of Lacan himself – that is, accepting in this case
the very starting point traditionally identified aesthetics with the
philosophical reflection on art – precisely following and radicalizing this
tracing and observing the concrete phenomenon of contemporary works,
aesthetics itself necessarily arrives at trans-appropriation. In short, it arrives at
understand how his current dominant notion is no longer
purified by the work of art, "earthly paradise that men produce without
"to make it inhabitable" according to a famous definition by Gyoergy Lukàcs, but
that very other-in-itself that art has become.
This domain requires aesthetics, for fidelity to its own laws, to
to step outside of itself. To accept not only an expansion of its sphere -
the aesthetics disseminated in its, let's say, more peaceful form – but a true and
own dis-identification, a non-nostalgic farewell to the central notion of
traditional opera. The aesthetics that faithfully follow their own path of
the philosophy of art becomes itself obverse.
But in which direction does this operation take place? What is the ground?
of the obverse that, as Senaldi shows, originated within the dynamics
of art, if it relocates? The new identity of aesthetic phenomena consists of
disidentify in the medial ground, responds Senaldi. We can no longer
to identify ourselves in the artistic phenomenon in the strict sense not because art is
"too tight" or because it has been defeated by massification and by
vulgarity of the media. The obverse is what art itself has made of itself, and perhaps
the only thing that really matters that it has to say to the world today. It is art.
the same that is no longer itself, in the sense of its traditional identity, not
because he lost the battle but because he won it - right in this case
an additional version of the prophecy that dates back to Baudrillard.
On the contrary, art has triumphed. The new ground of the obverse is where
art, media, performance, communication, brand, cinema converge
video game, television, reality. This ground has been brought to us by art itself – it is
this seems to me the meaning of the historical dynamic that leads from alienation
to the obversion.
Thus the dialectic of obversion that I have briefly tried to describe us
also free - did Lyotard not say that the post- is a state of birth and not of
death, the end of mourning and not the twilight continuation of mourning?
from the obsessive modern conviction that it is necessary to resist violence
15
of barbarism, making high art the point of resistance of values, the ground
of the election of the spirit.
The spirituality of art today reveals something entirely different from that of Kandinsky.
the radical direction indicated by the notion of obversion, it shares the
Hegelian definition of the state: the spirit is a bone. Something that is neither true nor false.
Following the spirit is to identify its figure in this 'third thing' in which one is.
transformed. A place where artists become philosophers and/or servants of
television, while philosophers make cinema (Zizek, Derrida, and others) and directors
they do philosophy or 'illustrate' it through images, while critics are forced to
go back two centuries, as Senaldi observes, to celebrate the
extraordinary novelty of a book from 1807 - the Phenomenology of Spirit
Note - if they really want to measure themselves against the present.

Senaldi dedicated a significant art exhibition a few years ago to the phenomenon
delcover. We could say that the cover is an opposite figure of the spirit:
an apparent sameness that oscillates in the other-than-itself. But even here there are
important genealogies, both in art and literature. Pierre Menard,
Borges wrote, reaching his highest originality by rewriting words.
word for word, Don Quixote. Menard would thus be the reverse of Cervantes.
like Gus van Sant, who faithfully remakes Psycho, is today the opposite of
Hitchcock.
The new aesthetic artifact that derives from this condition, of course, does not
it's neither a book nor a work. We could call it by a television name: it is
unformatted which we are still trying to discover the rules. But if the
thought is transformed into a media image and the image is burdened with
thought, the overall name that shows this circumstance could not
to be precisely: illustrated philosophy?

POSTILLA - In 1961, Theodor Adorno held a lecture at the Suhrkamp publishing house.
in honor of Samuel Beckett. The title of the conference was 'Attempt to Understand Finale of
match." Beckett, who was attending the conference, then told Adorno that he was not
in agreement with his interpretation of his own work (Knowlson, tr. it.)
I believe that both – Adorno with his interpretation and Beckett with his
disagreement - they were right. Sometimes the truth itself is quite the opposite ...

REFERENCES (to be completed)

- Adorno, T.W., Three Studies on Hegel, Bologna, Il Mulino

- Adorno, T.W., 1950, tr. it. "Profile of Walter Benjamin" in Prisms, Turin, Einaudi
- Adorno, T.W., 1961, tr. it. 1979, "Attempt to Understand Endgame", in Notes for the
literature 1943-1961, Turin, Einaudi, pp. 267 et seq.
- Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and imposture
- Baudrillard, J., "The Video Stage" tr. it. 1989 in
- Baudrillard, J., 2002, tr. it. 2002 ,Lo spirito del terrorismo, Milano, Raffaello Cortina
- Benjamin, W., 1982, tr. it. 1986, Paris, capital of the 19th century. The "Passages" of Paris, in
Works of Walter Benjamin, edited by G. Agamben, Vol. XI, Turin, Einaudi
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Benjamin, W. The artwork in the age of its technical reproducibility, Turin,
Einaudi
- , in Zizek, S., On the Gaze and Other Objects, edited by ,
- Deleuze, G.,Marcel Proust e i segni, Torino, Einaudi
Deleuze, "Bartleby or the formula of creation" in Critique and Clinic, Cortina, Milan
- von Foerster, H., 1987, Systems that Observe, edited by M. Ceruti and U. Telfener, Rome,
Astrolabe
- Hofmannsthal, H. von, 1906, it. tr. , Letter from Lord Chandos, edited by , Milan,
Rizzoli
Knowlson, , tr. it., Samuel Beckett. A Life, Turin, Einaudi
- Lacan, J, 1966, tr. it. Writings, edited by M. Contri, Turin, Einaudi, 2 vols
Lacan, seminar X? (the small box)
Lacan, Seminar XXIII (Joyce)
Lévi-Strauss, C., The Elementary Structures of Kinship
- Perniola, M., The Society of Simulacra, Bologna, Cappelli
- Perniola, M., 2002, "Test of strength or test of greatness? Considerations onàgalma"
Agalma, 3, pp. sgg.
Recalcati, M, For Lacan, Rome, Borla
- Senaldi, M., 2003, Enjoy! Il godimento estetico, Roma, Meltemi
- Senaldi, M., edited by, Cover Theory, Milan, Scheiwiller
Senaldi, M., Piotti, A.
- Varela, "The Creative Circle. Draft of a Natural History of Circularity", in
Watzlawick, edited by,
- Zizek, S.,Looking Awry
- Zizek, S., The Great Other, edited by M. Senaldi, Milan, Feltrinelli
Zizek, S., The Scabrous Subject

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