ABSTRACT

If it is a feature of modernity's self-consciousness to know that its works, paintings, are essentially fragments, unfinished and unfinishable (what they begin is continued by the respondent), the writing that reading adds to painting is already part of it from its beginning. Criticism seems to begin with the hope of being true to painting, by meeting its need - by being its necessary supplement; knowing itself to be part of the work of art, its Desire is to begin the interminable work of fulfilling painting by supplementing it with writing. But what draws the need to supplement into the region of the work to begin with? Perhaps art's lack is complemented by a sense of lack within the respondent - a lack which art alone may partially overcome. If anything else would do just as well, and the selection of art to meet the lack was arbitrary, contingent, then art would raise no passions, no commitments. Yet art is precisely the possibility of maintaining, of re-membering the scandal of Desire in our culture. And criticism begins in the midst of this Desire, this need to preserve, this need to write for the scandal of painting, of art, in a calculative culture.