#object misrecognition

[iceybot]

Mistook the ball of yarn in the first image for a melon god damn it

Started a new vest project this week ! Test swatch + bottom section ⛪🌿

[harbingersecho]

misrecognition is not ignorance

[grandwitchbird]

A bunch of people who never read the novels are already crawling out of the woodwork to share their opinions(tm). But “I know the legend of the Witcher and the Witcher girl,” and I got you.

Consider this a highly specific explainer of some of what makes The Witcher novels interesting for those thinking of jumping into W3 or the novels now that 4 is in the works. My interests lie in what stories are doing and how, so this is analytical and not just a summary or reference guide. Wikis exist for that, and if you want to experience the characters you gotta go read the books. No real spoilers because I’m not focusing on plot here.

The Witcher novels are a very cool exercise in dual protagonists driving a convergent narrative operating on two distinct literary frequencies.

Geralt spends most of the books chasing Ciri in some capacity. He’s the man on the ground, getting stuck in personal problems and more ‘realistic’ situations and intrigues (sometimes your friends are also vampires; don’t be weird about it). His world overlaps with the mythic realm, but the sense is that he’s a regular person who keeps ending up in mythic situations. He approaches problems like the professional he is. He’s our guy. But he’s basically just a guy. When he tries to be a hero things tend to go really badly for him.

Ciri is a child of prophecy who befriends unicorns and gets roped into space elf dynastic disasters and visits camelot. She’s also trying desperately to get back to Geralt and Yennefer, her very normal parents. Her world overlaps with the mundane because she’s Geralt’s daughter by choice. She has to study swordplay with her Witcher family and practice magic discipline with Yennefer, but her problems are operating in the realm of myth and folklore. She’s perceived as the holy grail by men who want her power for themselves, a vessel to own and fill with a child. This is a misrecognition, and she remains beyond their grasp because Ciri is really the noble hero Geralt always wished he could be. When people forget that, things go very badly for them.

These two are also a split reference to Elric of Melnibone’s personas. Geralt is the White Wolf and Ciri is the dimension-hopping champion eternal. Their shared role is very consciously designed. Also just about everything is some kind of literary metaphor here.

The Narrative World

Let’s look at what the world-as-narrative is doing and how Witchers function in it.

The Continent exists on a fantasy world where realities have converged, and it greatly resembles Central Europe in its cultures, conflicts, and references. We’re talking Germany/France to the Russian border. This is an area that’s been repeatedly invaded from all sides for millennia. The convergence of spheres operating metaphorically as waves of invasion and overlapping cultures does quite a lot for the story in terms of conflict and setting up an interplanary reality. It also means that everyone is aliens.* Which is objectively the funniest way to do things in addition to providing a pretty fascinating moral bedrock. There’s no 1:1 fantasy race being mapped to real life groups here, though the series is strong in its references to concrete human evils in the real world. Everyone is people. Except monsters. Except when monsters are people too.

Witchers are people who are like monsters. Witcher is also a profession. They’re something that doesn’t fit into any neat category, and that’s the entire point of them. The ones who survive the trials that make them into witchers go on to live brutal lives killing monsters for coin or children to make new Witchers (the trials render them sterile; this is a real thematic beat. I’ll get to it). Witchers are the ‘other’ you’d expect to be scared of in a more conservative fantasy. But in this series, we see this world through the eyes of two Witchers, and we hear the exaggerated stories about their inhumanity, and we know they’re actually people with distinct experiences and perspectives and desires. We know how they feel, and that they’re not doing anything weirder than what everyone else in this world is doing to survive. So we know everyone else is people too. And that lends a very real layer of horror to the fact that by the time we meet our Witchers, most Witchers have already been massacred in a pogrom.

This isn’t as simple as ‘we’re the real monsters’ navel gazing. Over and over we see the different angles of everyone. One moment you’re looking at a strange and alien fae, the next a broken addict. The kindest man you meet is a vampire, and he’s done monstrous things he describes with philosophical eloquence. You’re asked to see the strange and uncanny and ‘other’ in everyone so you can also see the humanity. People are both, always. And the loss of one is the death of both. The novels enforce distinct narrative perspectives to this effect. Everything we know, we know through subjective and limited perspectives. This is a good series for folks fond of Bakhtin.

And if the fact that there are real monsters who aren’t sentient and are absolutely dangerous seems unfair. There’s also mad dogs and people who are beyond all reason and help too (the church is pretty fundamentally evil here and tends to instigate the pogroms. Wonder where a Polish author got that). The text doesn’t shy from the implications.

*except maybe gnomes. That might be a running joke. Nobody knows.

Btw if you’re here from my Dragon Age posts. Yes this is exactly what BioWare tried to immitate but ethically dropped the ball on by doing the exact thing the Witcher resists doing.

Witcher Family Planning

At the heart of this story is a family by choice and maybe destiny.

Geralt is a Witcher who survived an extra round of trials. A mutant among mutants. He’s an extraordinarily competent professional whose sense of justice and soft heart tend to cause him problems. He’s not nice. He’s kind of a boor. He’s very sulky. He loves deeply.

Yennefer is an outrageously overpowered sorceress who really regrets her inability to have children. She’s ambitious even by sorceress standards. Yennefer does things exactly the way she wants to, and that tends to cause her problems. She’s not nice. She’s imperious. She’s very petty. She’s ride or die for anyone she likes even a bit.

These two are the love of each others lives. This is a relationship, and I’m directly paraphrasing here, where two people who don’t know how to be soft try to be soft to each other. They’re bad at it. They keep trying.

Ciri is the lost Scion of every royal line on the continent. She’s also a Witcher. And a child of prophecy. And a dimension-hopping superhero. She’s also about 15 for most of the time we know her in the novels. She’s survived war, led a life of crime, been a gladiator. She’s clever and strong and rebellious and has an innate nobility that shames kings. She has Geralt’s compassionate heart, and she’s honed it to Yennefer’s cutting edge.

Gender & Power

I touched on this up at the top. Over and over again in these books, and in W3, we watch the patriarchal norms of the continent run smack into an interesting reality of the setting. Women tend to be the ones who are ‘first’ in power. There’s a lot of Mists of Avalon happening here. Sorceresses outdo their male peers. All these powerful men think they can have Ciri’s power for themselves by getting a child on her. They ignore that it’s the women in her line who have and wield the gift. They really ignore that her grandmother didn’t even need the gift to bring men like them to their knees. Patriarchy is a kind of willing blindness here. The desire to own and control makes the men of the series into fools who can’t see the obvious. That this isn’t their story.

Amongst Witchers, girl children are usually traded to the dryads for boys. This is left notably vague (another patriarchal blind spot? More likely than you think; there’s hints of female and nonhuman Witchers in the cat school) because by the time we meet our Witchers, the real secrets of their process have been lost. Ciri herself does actually take some of their potions and trials, which seem to potentially interrupt her puberty. Our Witchers are reluctant to subject her to what they went through, so she’s never put through the final trial. But this literally results in the reinforcement of Ciri’s gender by external forces. She is a woman, so that’s actually helpful under the circumstances. But. Fascinating stuff.

Sterility and Reproduction

Briefly. The novels constantly undermine the ‘replacement fear’ of dominant groups set on finding scapegoats for unsolvable problems. Witchers can’t reproduce, so they functionally adopt. Sorceresses may often be sterile too. Elves are particularly slow to reproduce. Women who aren’t mothers and men who live together and adopt and ‘others’ who are probably jealous and stealing our children… And just when you think this is a clumsy metaphor, the text smacks you with the fact that nobody reproduces as fast as regular old humans. This is explicitly about providing zero foundation for any of the bigoted anxieties around ‘nonhumans’, and the presence of sterile humans is here to complicate that very border. The text refuses to cede any quarter to attempts at justifying paranoia-fueled hatred and violence.

The Hero

Ciri is the unique point around which the novels’ tensions cohere. She loses her magical abilities in the books only to awaken to new and greater power. She’s human and nonhuman. A witcher who never completed the trials. Noble and criminal. She’s a woman who literally can’t be physically contained by this patriarchal setting. She’s entirely her own person in a world designed to break her. She’s a hero that eludes a hero’s limits over and over.

Nobody should be surprised that she’s The Witcher.

Novels in order:

Blood of Elves

The Time of Contempt

Baptism of Fire

The Tower of Swallows

The Lady of the Lake

Next Up:

I’ll do a write up with some grittier explanation for what happened between these novels and W3. The games are messy, so we’ll get into it now that you’ve got some themes and angles to roll around.

I may or may not touch on the short stories. Part of the wide misreading of the series is due to folks who’ve read a few of the stories and think that’s what it’s all about. This was also the problem with the show. Well. One of the problems.

[luxe-pauvre]

What we see in a mirror is always an illusion. Lacan demonstrated that our identification with our reflection relies on méconnaissance, or misrecognition. When we look in the mirror, we see a pleasing image of wholeness and project onto it a mental fantasy—the ego ideal. If you watch someone gaze at themselves in a mirror, you can glimpse this fantasy in action. Some people suck in their lips. Others elongate their neck, or tilt their head into a more flattering light. I am as curious as anyone about the nature of people’s souls, but I can hardly bear to see the naked longing concealed in these gestures. Dickens captures it memorably in Nicholas Nickleby when a servant observes Miss Squeers gazing at herself in a mirror. “Like most of us,” the servant notes, “she saw not herself, but the reflection of some pleasant image in her own brain.” Until recently, one did not find this look in photographs. Unlike the mirror, which flips our image horizontally (an illusion we’ve come to prefer), photos show us how we appear to others. Perhaps for this reason, the expressions we assumed for cameras have traditionally been closer to the affable, unselfconscious face we showed to the world. This has changed, owing to the invention of the smartphone and the new form it has spawned—the selfie—which allows us to watch ourselves as our image is captured. To scroll through the feeds of Instagram and Facebook is to see a gallery of Lacanian méconnaissance; the private longing once reserved for the bathroom mirror has become our most public face. And yet these photos are never as pleasing as we’d like them to be. The forward-facing camera mimics the reverse image we recognize from mirrors, but once the photo is taken, the technology flips the image as it would in a traditional photo. As a result, the still images always strike us as slightly askew: our eyes uneven, our parts reversed, our faces bulging on one side. The popularity of the mirror selfie — the selfie taken in a mirror — speaks of our desperate need to preserve the delusional image, the ideal I that exists in our heads.

Meghan O’Gieblyn, Objects of Despair: Mirrors

[mothprincess]

yay, i'm reading again! the wood at midwinter was a very lovely, short read. i'm getting thru motherthing speedily, still have to pick back up misrecognition, and also started my dark vanessa i feel like i could use a fun psychological thriller tho, along the lines of sharp objects and gone girl. 'dangerous girls' is one of my favorite themes

[gd-rd-me-of-gd]

Comments:

@/aalekiaa: "What do u mean by il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel"

@/gd_rd_me_of_gd: "It's a quote from Jacques Lacan, which translates to "there is no sexual relation." In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this formula basically mean that recognition is always just out of reach."

@/aalekiaa: "I speak french but i don't understand like why is recognition always out of reach? I need to read his stuff lol"

@/gd_rd_me_of_gd: "oh i see, it has to do with his pessimistic reading of unconscious processes. Like it kind of in the context of this post is something im using to say “we are each alone in our experience of the world” and there is no total merging between two people. But he would extend the formula many topics, including the always-impossible attainment of any object of our desire, because he believed desire in itself springs from an unfillable anoriginal lack that we nevertheless try and fail to fill. For example, he talked about how in terms of gender identity, totally being any one gender is actually impossible for humans. He also says that many peope seeking a world without masters and domination fail to recognize the reality that revolution is a constant process, not a linear one-and -done. He even extends this sense of perpetual misrecognition to self-recognition, saying that is all begins in a moment in childhood when we realize that the ‘me’ i see in the mirror is not me but a reflection of something i can never actually see (and similarly with the perpetual inadequacy of self-concept—i can never fully be my own idea of myself because all language at least partially fails to translate reality). Like i said, pessimistic and humbling! In my work as a theologian, im trying to sometimes incorporate his insights in the style of Zizek because i very much feel the inadequacy of theological language. But i also really like thinking about i and thou relationships in the style of martin buber, and i think there’s ways to draw out whats on this slide more eloquently eventually."

@/aalekiaa: "oh my god thank you so much for this detailed explanation!! I just got "the object relation" and i think i wanna incorporate some of those ideas in my dissertation on identity after psychiatric trauma. Do u have any other reading recommendations in that vein?? Thank u again so much and i love ur substack xx"

@/gd_rd_me_of_gd: "aww thank you! I vibe with the book The Monstrosity of Christ as an interesting discussion starter, and a feminist take on specifically artworking-through trauma is Bracha Ettinger's work in the book Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics."

[donelektro]

*The fetishisation of things* - don elektro - 2025

The fetishisation of things as a form of modern escapism—especially in a society increasingly detached from cohesive moral or communal values—can be seen as a symptom of a deeper existential and spiritual vacuum.

Where Marx viewed fetishism as a misrecognition of labor in commodities, and Freud saw it as a psychological displacement, your framing suggests a more contemporary and perhaps more cynical twist: people turning to objects, brands, aesthetics, or even ideologies not just for meaning, but as a distraction from a crumbling moral or ethical framework. In such a context, the object doesn't just stand in for labor or desire—it becomes a surrogate for belief itself.

In this view, fetishism isn't a misrecognition but an active substitution: when shared values collapse, the mind clings to things—tech gadgets, luxury fashion, wellness rituals, online identities—as stand-ins for coherence and purpose. These objects don’t just symbolize desire; they create a false sense of control and rootedness in an otherwise fragmented and unstable world.

It's escapism, but with a twist of hyperreality: the fetishised object is often already saturated with signs that promise transcendence—think of how consumer products now market not just usefulness, but "lifestyle," "mindfulness," or "belonging."

[mangocheesecakeicecream]

Gaze is like the divided object subject that receives the look and returns the look to you so it's actually less to do with you looking well it is to do with you looking but it's not about for example Foucault talking about medical gaze where in a situation where there's a patient and a doctor there's a masterful person who looks down and sort of controls the situation it's actually the sniff sniff precise opposite you know so what happened yes in sort of I would say secondary tertiary critical theory so we're not talking about you know early thinker marxists or the Frankfurt School or even like psychoanalysts we're talking about like interpreters in cultural studies so there was a sort of misunderstanding of what gaze meant in this context and so gaze then became this idea of the male Gaze and gaze became sort of it was like a question of a gaze of power gaze being the thing that… because you can't say in the English language I'm gazing at something but Gaze as a philosophical concept capital G means something other than looking and so it sort of became this elision between like looking and subject object divided subject object that returns the look in the visual field so this received wisdom was that like men then therefore the received wisdom is that obviously especially you know in the 1970s when these ideas were coming up and sort of feminism was a big kind of cultural thing well we all know that men are X and we all know that transcendentally subjectively X we all know that women are subjectively transcendentally Y this was also sort of confused by the idea of sexuation that exists in Lacan which is an important contribution where basically you have your birth into subject birth into matter and then as  a sort of a being animalistic kind of subject and then your birth into subjectivity sort of becoming so this is where sex and gender sort of don't align and really you can emerge into any form of sexuation there are two sort of poles but these can manifest in sort of potentially infinite different ways so there was a sort of a misrecognition that sexuation was an essential I mean it is it's I would say sexuation is a symptom of lack in matter and sexuation emerges as part of our second birth into language which is a symptom of self-consciousness which is the the divided subject seeing itself so it's consciousness of consciousness or as Alenka Zupancic sort of puts it's the ticks and grimaces of the universe... it's we are the the universe divided experiencing itself so sexuation is actually sort of a second step and what comes first is a universal lack that we all have to pass through that we are all marked by as speaking subjects

Helen Rollins, cinema and psychoanalysis with Rahul Sam

[intrepid-fictioneer-7]

"[Mages] are liminal creatures at odds with their ineradicable humanity". What I spent thousands of words to say in a long ass post, someone managed to say more succintly and far shorter. While my verbous, pompous post argued that the idea the fandom has of a "perfect magus" is reductive and most the characters people think embodify it actually fail, the line I'm quoting is someone arguing that the very concept of "perfect magus" isn't real and isn't represented by *any* character in Type-Moon. The life of a magus is the story of how a person cannot avoid falling short of that ideal of a "perfect magus" - either because it becomes muddled by their humanity (Rin is the quintessential example, but you also have Kayneth and Gordes of all people), or because, in abandoning humanit,y they lose sight of their goal and cause their own downfall (Roa, Zepia, and Zouken being perfect examples).

Kinda like what Medea says in Fate/hollow ataraxia:

"Hmmm, the combination of magic and everyday life. Caster, what do you think about that?" Since I don't know a lot of magi, I'm a little curious. "That though in itself is incorrect, boy. 'Magic' and 'everyday life' cannot coexist. You should not even think about combing them. The fundamentals of magic are "distortion and reversal." No matter what kind of magic it is, when used, it will distort the norm. Therefore, if you want to live correctly, you have to separate magic from normal life." "You can't live in both worlds?" "You must wholly life in both worlds, that is. A magus is someone who crosses that boundary all the time. He is free to focus on either side, but he must never try to erase the line that separates both. In order to fully immerse yourself in magic, you must exclude your normal life. Once you choose that path as a human, you create an inner and an outer face in order to master it. Then you can start deciding how to live as a person divided between magic and real life." "Then what about you? You are Kuzuki-sensei's wife now, but what about your side as a magus?" "It's no different from what it used to be, naturally. I have no doubts about the magus side of myself. I just use my powers as I see fit. But it's true that nowadays, I don't turn into my magus self as often as I have in the past."

Or what Waver says in Case Files:

It wasn’t limited to magecraft. It wasn’t limited to those beyond humans (monsters). In a world of common sense (the obvious), it was something everyone understood. If you said that misunderstandings, miscommunications, disagreements, and false understandings are what connected them, then… “We are misrecognition. Our world itself is misunderstanding. We can experience a multitude of truths, not just one single reality. No matter how wise you are, or how much time you are given, you will never reach something like a single truth. Magi may just be those who continually reject that fact.” Speaking as if in self-deprecation, my master had pursed his lips at that. He had finally realized that his words and the objective that all Magi pursued, known as the “Spiral of Origin,” were in contradiction.

It's why Reines laments the Clock Tower focusing on petty political squabbles. The heart of the world of magecraft miring itself in human emotions and concerns, forgetting their original esoteric goals in the process. This, to me, is far more illustrative of magi than the often repeated "to be a magus means to walk with death". (An aphorism which, as far as I can tell, is mostly the result of fandom telephone. FSN does talk "magus having death right besides them" and "the essence of magi is in death", but the specific formulation of "walking" with death is nowhere in canon I think, and I checked Mahoyo and KnK to make sure. But that's for another post.) Ironically, what spurred this on is that, that post I mention? It was someone arguing Sanda is the *worst* TM writer for how he wrote magi, and I, as Sanda's strongest fighter, had to fight for his honor to mixed results lol.

[power-chords]

"To endorse a hermeneutics of suspicion that sustains the position that aesthetic objects are collusive in their promotion of the commodification of culture means claiming access to a specialized, concrete knowledge about how such objects operate in the world, a specialized knowledge that is unavailable and perhaps even inaccessible to all. The proper mode of engagement with plurivalent objects of aesthetic worth requires a searchlight so that the person exposed to them is made aware of their demagogic powers and through such illumination, is able to displace their potential harm for the benefit of an otherwise helpless social order. Here it is assumed that the spectator is passive and unable to see the apparatus of illusion that dictates a horizon of fixed ends; the role of the critic is thus to cast light upon the mechanisms of misrecognition. With the posture of attention that is the betrayal of aesthetics, there exists only two potential subject positions: a passive and an active one, the audience and the critic." This guy KICKS ASS

[theeminentlyimpractical]

Darcy wants to present himself to Elizabeth as a proud gentleman, and he gets from her the message 'your pride is nothing but contemptible arrogance.' After the break in their relationship each discovers, through a series of accidents, the true nature of the other - she the sensitive and tender nature of Darcy, he her real dignity and wit - and the novel ends as it should, with their marriage. The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that the failure of their first encounter, the double misrecognition concerning the real nature of the other, functions as a positive condition of the final outcome: we cannot say 'if, from the very beginning, she had recognized his real nature and he hers, their story could have ended at once with their marriage.' Let us take a comical hypothesis that the first encounter of the future lovers was a success - that Elizabeth had accepted Darcy's first proposal. What would happen? Instead of being bound together in true love they would become a vulgar everyday couple, a liaison of an arrogant, rich man and a pretentious, every-minded young girl... If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the truth itself: only the working-through of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency - for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride; for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices.

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

[chinalawyerxu]

What is the difference between copyright infringement in China?

As an intellectual property lawyer with twenty years of experience practicing in China, I will provide a detailed overview of the differences between copyright infringement and trademark infringement in China. This article will discuss what constitutes copyright infringement, what constitutes trademark infringement, the differences between copyright infringement and trademark infringement, and the expertise of Michael Xu's legal team in intellectual property infringement legal services.

I. What Constitutes Copyright Infringement

Unauthorized Reproduction and Distribution

Reproducing Works: Reproducing copyrighted works such as books, music, movies, and software without the permission of the copyright owner.

Distributing Works: Distributing copyrighted works through the internet, broadcasting, television, etc., without authorization.

Unauthorized Adaptation and Translation

Adapting Works: Adapting copyrighted works, such as turning a novel into a movie or TV series, without the copyright owner's permission.

Translating Works: Translating copyrighted works into other languages and distributing them without authorization.

Unauthorized Performance and Display

Performing Works: Publicly performing copyrighted works, such as plays and concerts, without the copyright owner's permission.

Displaying Works: Publicly displaying copyrighted artworks, photographs, etc., without authorization.

II. What Constitutes Trademark Infringement

Counterfeiting Registered Trademarks

Using Identical or Similar Trademarks: Using a trademark identical or similar to a registered trademark on the same or similar goods without the trademark owner's permission, causing confusion or misrecognition.

Selling Counterfeit Goods: Selling goods that are known to bear counterfeit registered trademarks.

Unauthorized Manufacturing and Use of Trademark Labels

Manufacturing Trademark Labels: Manufacturing trademark labels identical or similar to another's registered trademark without permission.

Using Trademark Labels: Using another's registered trademark labels on goods or services without authorization.

Malicious Registration of Trademarks

Preemptively Registering Trademarks: Maliciously preempting the registration of a trademark that another party has already used and gained influence, hindering its normal use.

III. Differences Between Copyright Infringement and Trademark Infringement

Different Objects of Protection

Copyright: Protects the rights of creators of literary, artistic, and scientific works, covering books, music, movies, software, artworks, etc.

Trademark Rights: Protects the exclusive right of trademark owners to use their marks on goods or services, covering product names, logos, slogans, etc.

Different Forms of Infringement

Copyright Infringement: Mainly includes unauthorized reproduction, distribution, adaptation, translation, performance, and display.

Trademark Infringement: Mainly includes counterfeiting registered trademarks, unauthorized manufacturing and use of trademark labels, and malicious registration of trademarks.

Different Legal Protections

Copyright Law: Copyright is protected by the Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China, and infringement can lead to civil, administrative, and criminal liability.

Trademark Law: Trademark rights are protected by the Trademark Law of the People's Republic of China, and infringement can lead to civil, administrative, and criminal liability.

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[xenopoem]

In the doll, the body is not represented—it is disarticulated, dispersed, and grammatically undone. Within a pathogenic biolinguistic framework, the doll is not merely an object of erotic deviation, nor a critique of our normativity, but rather a biopoetic lesion: a zone where language and flesh collapse into each other, where morphology no longer follows function, but fester. This anatomical recompositions simulate a semiotic sepsis, a condition in which the photographic referent is saturated with incompatible signs. The doll is constructed in stages, like a pathogen’s incubation—initially skeletal, then muscled with fibrous linen, finally crusted with gesso like calcified language. What we witness is a reverse ontology: a death-born genesis where the image builds toward eroticism only to amputate it. The doll is not built to seduce—it is built to fail seduction, to auto-infect the gaze. This gaze, contaminated by the studies, is destabilized. Barthes’ field of “indolent desire” collapses under the pressure of indigestible signifiers: the girl's fragmented limbs, erotic poses estranged from the human, and recursive mise en scène in domestic interiors infected with misrecognition. This work functions not as pornographic exposure but semiotic sabotage. What appears as erotic is always already pathogenic—a dysphoric loop of expectation and decomposition. The first doll, made from wood, metal, fibrous linen and glue, is thus not a sculpture but a linguistic artifact under septic pressure. The artist appears beside the doll as a translucent phantom—a double exposure of subjectivity and objectivity, a spectral grammar that cannot speak but only rot in visibility. This is the pathology of photolinguistics—the speaking subject merges with the corpse of language. I photographed the death of the sentence. The doll’s fragmentation does not represent an accident of assembly but a programmed ruination, what Maurice Blanchot called the disaster—the unlocalizable event of total breakdown. In this view, each limb is an anacoluthon: a syntactic derailment, a limb-sentence that refuses narrative completion. The shoe, the stocking, the veiled crotch—each is a phrasal occlusion, a fetishized interjection that denies semantic resolution.

[belacqui-pro-quo]

While it must be reasserted, against all forms of mechanism, that ordinary experience of the social world is a cognition, it is equally important to realize—contrary to the illusion of the spontaneous generation of consciousness which so many theories of the ‘awakening of class consciousness’ (prise de conscience) amount to—that primary cognition is misrecognition, recognition of an order which is also established in the mind. Life-styles are thus the systematic products of habitus, which, perceived in their mutual relations through the schemes of the habitus, become sign systems that are socially qualified (as ‘distinguished’, ‘vulgar’ etc.) The dialectic of conditions and habitus is the basis of an alchemy which transforms the distribution of capital, the balance-sheet of a power relation, into a system of perceived differences, distinctive properties, that is, a distribution of symbolic capital, legitimate capital, whose objective truth is misrecognized.

— Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

[une-sanz-pluis]

Richard's reburial may thus be seen as Henry's exceptionally imaginative and adroit attempt to encourage and effect a form of transference — in this case, a transference of emotional affiliation from Richard's residual aura to his own. Remembering that misrecognition of the object of one's desire is an essential element in the process of transference, we may more precisely see Henry as attempting a form of "managed misrecognition" — offering devious but persuasive grounds for his subjects to shift their mistaken allegiance from the residual aura of their long-dead king to his own royal person. Having successfully put his guilty and excessively present biological father out of the way in Canterbury, and having instated Richard as the benignly absent guarantor of succession and rule, Henry V was well positioned to inherit the mantle of complete — two-personed — kingship and to exercise mature rule.

Paul Strohm, "The Trouble with Richard: The Reburial of Richard II and Lancastrian Symbolic Strategy", Speculum, Vol. 71, No. 1 (1996)

[paulaputrimaite]

Desire is, perpetual. The logic of this perpetuity, (what Lacan calls the metonymy of desire) is the endless striving for the "objet a" (the lost object of desire). This object doesn't exist and yet it sustains desire. The lost object, being an object by virtue of being lost, is thus a lack that sustains the whole fantastical structure. The "misrecognition" refers to the fact that even though the object is lacking(negation), desire recognizes the object as a positive and thus desire can exist.

“The drive divides the subject and desire, the latter sustaining itself only by the relation it misrecognises between this division and an object that causes it. This is the structure of fantasy.”

~ Jacques Lacan, Écrits

🎨 Eric Sandberg