ABSTRACT
Using Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Adorno’s aesthetics as a guide, this paper moves through three understandings of what crying on screen reveals about truth, falsity, and art, beginning with a scene from Homer’s Odyssey.
When Odyseus, hearing songs of his own exploits in the Trojan War, covers his face to weep, we might imagine he is turning away from an artful untruth. However, from Lacan’s notion of tuché, a repeated encounter with the real, we can understand this aesthetic experience very differently: by drawing a veil over his weeping face, Odysseus is avowing himself as false, and the songs as true.
In our pandemicised world of small screens, doesn’t the eagerness with which we attribute falsity to our screen lives reveal, like Odysseus’s songs, the opposite relation? When we witness crying on screen, we sense the presence of truth, but somehow we know it is in our ‘wrong life’ that we have something to cry about. Perhaps, then, Odysseus’s screen is a camera obscura, and artworks the representatives of a truth that can only be experienced in an inversion. Awaiting us beyond the screen is precisely what the world is not, but should (and could yet) be.
