ABSTRACT
This chapter revolves around the occurrence of flies in 17th- and 18th-century Dutch and Flemish still life paintings, approached also through Bruce Chatwin’s 1988 novel Utz. It is interested in demonstrating that still lifes function as extinction event for the phallic subject, held captive in the pure exteriority of the other’s gaze. A crucial aspect of this argument is the concept of fascination and the function of the gaze developed in Lacanian thought, which organises my reading. Lacan’s analysis of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), though a figurative painting, serves as a further reference point for still lifes in which the ‘form’ of the fly occurs, using Steven Connor’s various studies on flies to reflect on the insects’ ‘unfigurability.’ In a first instance, then, it analyses how the mechanism of fascination works and how its various relations produce planes of desubjectification. The chapter moves on to consider the fly as trompe l’oeil and parergonal element—Derrida’s concept for that which arrives from elsewhere and disturbs the relationship between art work and ‘remainder’—to demonstrate that the interiority of still lifes gives way to the outside, a space that de-structures the so-called human subject. The chapter proposes that the historical form of the still life, as a polemic against the so-called ‘human’ subject, gains new critical importance in the age of species extinction.
