The Home of Words

In a second approach to her tri­logy, the Cologne-based psy­cho­ana­lyst Fotini Ladaki, who prac­tices after Lacan and Freud, exam­ines the work of Aris Kala­izis from the per­spect­ive of a phylo­gen­et­ic icon­o­graphy based on the paint­ings "The Ritu­al" and "The Band".

"And God com­mands me to paint."
(Rilke: „Das Stundenbuch“)

A huge tree root sys­tem in the middle of a liv­ing room. Behind an observing woman, in front a man in action: scene of a frozen snap­shot. Many asso­ci­ations that evoke this image and the asso­ci­ated sig­ni­fi­ers flow towards you. The sig­ni­fi­ers also smuggle them­selves into the dictum of pop­u­lar wis­dom. These are often rumored and main­tained. Are the pic­tures "The Ritu­al" (2008) and "The Band" (2013) an icon­o­graph­ic depic­tion of one's own, incarn­ate roots?

Is it a mat­ter of tak­ing root, for example to be able to loc­ate one's own fam­ily his­tory, or is it a ques­tion of des­cent or one's own fam­ily tree? Is this cut-off stump in both paint­ings an ima­gin­ary-pictori­al hyper-meta­phor for lost roots?

His­tory and ances­try are enorm­ous pil­lars on which cul­ture rests. There are dif­fer­ent tribes and the stud book. If there were no tribe, there would be no tri­bal his­tory. If there were no root, we would be uprooted. It seems as if the images run along a phon­et­ic mater­i­al­ism or an equi­voc­al (ambigu­ous) char­ac­ter of the words. It is not for noth­ing that Lacan derived the term mater­i­al­ity from the French word mot.

"Con­versely, the point of view I am try­ing to uphold before yours entails a cer­tain mater­i­al­ism of the ele­ments involved, in the sense that the sig­ni­fi­ers are actu­ally embod­ied, mater­i­al­ized, that are words that walk and prac­tice as such they per­form their func­tion of stap­ling.” Lacan J: (1997) The Sem­in­ar Book III. The Psychoses, p. 341)

If there were no root, we would be uprooted

Is Aris Kala­izis sta­ging the phon­et­ic home­land of words in these images? An uncon­scious motive could be the accept­ance of the artist's own bio­graphy, which clearly goes in the dir­ec­tion of search­ing for one's own roots. But bey­ond the bio­graph­ic­al trau­mat­ic mater­i­al, Kala­izis pos­sibly stages the topos of fur­ther uni­ver­sal phant­asms of a world that is attached to the images and pre­cedes the words. But which topos can be meant here? When you have abseiled from cer­tain rela­tion­ships and affil­i­ations, you ini­tially fall out of line. If the rope teams do not sup­port, the con­nec­tion becomes obsol­ete. One must seek and find a new bond in order to enroll in a new attach­ment or affil­i­ation (home, fam­ily, group).

The con­tent of Kala­izis seems to stem from a dis­course that still has anoth­er hint pending from the mater­i­al­ity of the lan­guage and the sig­ni­fi­ers. One could con­nect it with the world of ideas after Pla­to, which Lacan already tried to do in his sem­in­ar book XI:

"The image of the rep­res­ent­at­ive of the Leipzig school does not com­pete with appear­ances, it com­petes with what Pla­to rep­res­ents bey­ond appear­ances and as an idea. Because the pic­ture is that appear­ance which claims to be that which gives the appear­ance, Pla­to opposes paint­ing as an activ­ity rival­ing his own." (Lacan J.: The Sem­in­ar Book XI, p. 119)

Both "The Band" and "The Ritu­al" seem to fol­low a trail that attempts to inaug­ur­ate itself as an acous­mat­ic pre­curs­or of lan­guage. He stages the home of words. Accord­ing to Lacan, this staged world can be attrib­uted to the real. In the real, Kala­izis searches for the ele­ment­ary mater­i­al­ity of lan­guage and stages it in an irrit­at­ingly grot­esque realm of the real.
The real is incom­pre­hens­ible and uncanny.

The real exists along­side the ima­gin­ary and the sym­bol­ic. Lacan speaks of RSI, which cre­ates the equi­voc­al ring of heresy. Per­haps it is a heresy, a con­tra­dic­tion of prin­ciples that have crept into the mind, which is now fol­lowed by a heresy of sub­ver­sion, which in turn pro­duces a trans­la­tion and func­tions accord­ing to the Socrat­ic laws. 

So are these paint­ings also about heresy? A heresy that puts image above word and logos? Was in the begin­ning the image and not the word?

Seek a new scroll in a new affil­i­ation (home, fam­ily, group)

Jacques Der­rida also deals with the dif­fer­ence between phony and graph­ic as well as with the dom­in­ance of logo­centrism in the west­ern world. In his "Gram­mato­logy" he writes: "The nature of the phones (…) would be dir­ectly related to what in 'thinking' as logos is related to the 'sense', gen­er­ates it, receives it, expresses it and 'gathers it together'" (p .24). And a little later, start­ing from the Kab­ba­l­ah, he says the fol­low­ing sen­tence: "(…) the intel­li­gible side of the sign remains turned towards the Word and the face of God … The sign and divin­ity are born in the same place and at the same hour. The epoch of the sign is essen­tially theo­lo­gic­al.” (p.28)

In Plato's Kratylos dia­logue, Socrates also propag­ated a sim­il­ar the­ory about the ori­gin of con­cepts and language:
“So if the word is to be sim­il­ar to the object, then the let­ters from which the root words must be com­posed must also be sim­il­ar to the objects by nature.” A little later Socrates puts for­ward the fol­low­ing thes­is: “Fath­er 'Zeus' is obvi­ously suit­able whose name is won­der­ful, only it is not easy to remem­ber. Namely, neat as an explan­a­tion is the name of Zeus; only we have divided it, and some use one half, and some use the oth­er half.

For some call him Zeus, oth­ers Dis; but both put togeth­er reveal to us the essence of God, which, as we say, a name should be able to achieve. Because nobody is so much the cause of life for us and everything as a whole as the ruler and king over everything. Quite cor­rectly, there­fore, this God is named as the one through whom all liv­ing things boast to live. Just as I said, the name, which is actu­ally one, is divided into dis, from through, and zen or zeus, from life”. (Pla­to: Com­plete Works, Volume 3, Rowohlt's Encyc­lo­pe­dia, 1994, p. 32)

So Zeus comes from the word Zoe and Zoe means life. Socrates also invest­ig­ates the oth­er names of the gods:
"There is no need to con­tra­dict Hesi­od about 'Aphrodite', but one can con­cede that she was so named because of her ori­gin from the foam of the sea, aphros".
Socrates not only sticks to the names of the gods, he tackles oth­er things as well when try­ing to explain the ori­gin­al­ity of the words.
"Like­wise, words would nev­er resemble any thing unless that of which the words are to be com­posed had a cer­tain resemb­lance to that of which the words are cop­ies. But must they be com­posed of let­ters?” (Pla­to, Kratylus, p. 81)

Kala­izis now dresses the human trauma in the guise of a now fig­ur­at­ive guise of the words: Uprooted, roped down, look­ing for the tribe, hav­ing a tri­bal his­tory, belong­ing to a tribe? Does he thereby put the words in the place of the phant­asm by neut­ral­iz­ing and recom­pos­ing the phant­asm via the words? In the pic­ture "The Rib­bon" it is not the rope that pulls through the pic­ture, it is the female angel who car­ries it through the pictori­al space. Is find­ing a social bond an angel's work? Why the angels have to be female, let's put it there first. After all, and it should already be men­tioned, we also find male angels in oth­er Kala­izis paintings.

But does Aris Kala­izis lay bare the ori­gin­al acous­mat­ics of the words and their ori­gin in these two pic­tures, as if they point to an indi­vidu­al trauma? Or is the trauma pushed into a sac­red place or into a strange garden of a real (Garden of Eden)?

Both paint­ings depict a fever­ish dream that arises when fun­da­ment­al events such as attach­ment and home are threatened

In Greek Ortho­dox icon­o­graphy there is Saint Chris­toph­er. This Chris­toph­er, how­ever, does not carry Jesus on his shoulders as in the Cath­ol­ic tra­di­tion. He car­ries Jesus with­in him. And he's a dog-headed mar­tyr. Ori­gin­ally he is said to come from a dog-headed people on the out­skirts of India. But because he learned the human lan­guage and passed his mar­tyr­dom, he was can­on­ized. He is depic­ted in the garb of a gen­er­al or a high­er mil­it­ary per­son. But he always stuck out his tongue and looked up at the sky. But isn't the tongue also the organ of speech?

The images "The Ritu­al" and "The Bond" seem to repro­duce a fever­ish dream that arises when fun­da­ment­al events such as attach­ment and home are threatened. Accord­ing to Freud, two more sig­ni­fi­ers can be brought into play for the word home­land: the homely and the uncanny.

But in a time char­ac­ter­ized by mass emig­ra­tion and refugee move­ments, these two Kala­izis pic­tures in par­tic­u­lar tell of the sphere where the night­mare and the fear of a lost home also con­sti­tute the shim­mer­ing of a float­ing hope. Both symp­toms, fear and hope, coex­ist in a charged rela­tion­ship that is ulti­mately unre­solved by the paint­er. It is there­fore up to us to trans­form this arc of ten­sion into a reflex that is fruit­ful for us.

Lit­er­at­ure
Der­rida J. „Gram­mato­lo­gie“, 1983, Suhrkamp, Frank­furt am Main
Lacan J. „Das Sem­in­ar Buch III. Die Psychosen“, 1997, Quad­riga Ver­lag, Wein­heim, Berlin.
Lacan, J: „ Das Sem­in­ar Buch XI. Die vier Grundbe­griffe der Psy­cho­ana­lyse“, 1987, Quad­riga Ver­lag, Wein­heim, Berlin
Pla­ton: Sämt­liche Werke, Band 3. 1994, Rowohlts Enzyk­lopädie, in Rowohlt Taschen­buch Ver­lag, Rein­bek bei Hamburg

Fotini Ladaki, born in North­ern Greece in 1952, is a psy­cho­ana­lyst (accord­ing to Lacan and Freud) and works in her prac­tice in Cologne. 

In addi­tion, she works act­ively as a freel­ance author. In addi­tion to many essays on art and psy­cho­ana­lys­is, plays, short stor­ies and poetry, she also wrote an essay on Ger­hard Richter “Mor­itz”. About the hor­ror of the exper­i­ence of exist­ence or some­thing like "Freud came to Parla-Dora". Her oth­er pub­lic­a­tions can be found on the fol­low­ing web­site: www.praxisfls.de

©2017 Fotini Ladaki | Anna Popouli­as | Aris Kalaizis