ABSTRACT
Maurice Blanchot, in the novel Aminadab, likens the experience of the creation of what he calls the true work of art to the act of meeting Eurydice while not looking at her, thereby turning from this figure, Eurydice, that for Blanchot represents the essence of the work of art. Despite this intensely gendered typology of artistic creation, Blanchot nonetheless puts his finger on an aspect of aesthetics that is central to Francesca Woodman's intent in her later works: the willingness to risk the work on the brink or edge of legibility. If in conversation with 1970's feminist discourse, then her disarticulation of embodiment corresponds to larger trends in postwar aesthetics and should be placed in that context. As Barthes argues, the photographic is the realm of overabundance of signifiers. Woodman's images queer-or make strange or skew-photography's abundances, turning us through the trope of the skin of the image to the interior, that dark gaze that reads as edge.
