ABSTRACT
The machine-clean plasticity of Cindy Sherman's uncanny and hyper-sexualized prosthetic body desterilizes the purity of Kantian form even as it ironically dissolves into Sherman's content. Elizabeth Bronfen notes that Sherman "stages her memories of media images and personal fantasy images, and at the same time seeks to trigger memories and fantasies in her viewers by performing her very specific understanding of this culturally given image repertoire." Bronfen locates the psychoanalytic source of Sherman's representation of memory in Freud's understanding of hysteria, which, according to Bronfen, "involves the suffering from memory traces of a psychic trauma, whose origin is either unknown to the person affected, or which he or she has repressed." The chapter explores the function of the scream as a veritable constitution of the logos—to the extent that this function is indicated in Merleau-Ponty's thoughts on Cezanne's perceptual uncertainty.
