The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects

by Peter Schwenger

We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. 

Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. 

However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. 

Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and On Textual Envisioning, Letter Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word , and Phallic Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Genres: Theory, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art, Psychoanalysis, Research

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2006

Reviews

[Pamela]

I may never finish this book! I manage a paragraph or so a week before something in it sends me on another tangent. I feel sure it's a masterpiece. It may be my life's accomplishment to reach the final page.

[Brian Henderson]

Beginning with the presence/absence dilemma of the relation between words and things, and at the death of thing in the word (Blanchot), Schwenger moves through a wide range of art-making -- writing, painting, installation -- in a wonderfully evocative journey to examine how objects come to live through representation but not in it. Their lives remain forever elsewhere. Lacan, Freud, dream theory, Stein, Duchamp, Magritte,Woolf, Ponge, Perec, Joseph Cornell, Ben Marcus, Edward Carey, collectors and collecting, dictionaries, encyclopaedia, museums and their paradoxical presentations of their own impossibility, where "placement comes down to much the same thing as displacement". Really enjoying this read -- fuelling my writing, linking up in interesting ways with Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realisms too.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book on the nature of objects and our relations to them. In the end, too psychoanalytic for my tastes.

[Jonathan Frederick Walz · Rating 5 out of 5]

E X C E L L E N T ! ! !