THE OPTICAL UNCONSCIOUS AND THE ABJECT IN A PARTIR DE MANHATTAN BY ENRIQUE LIHN

Abstract

In Enrique Lihn’s Textos sobre arte we witness a reflection regarding German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious”. Although there are different interpretations of this concept, Lihn understood it as a tool anchored in the capacity of seeing or “psychoanalyzing” societies traumatized by events of the twentieth century, in line with Lacan’s work. The article hypothesizes that there is a direct relationship between the conceptual appropriation of those two authors and the writing of A partir de Manhattan. A detailed analysis of this type of vision is carried out in three poems from the book in which the act of seeing is mediated by Francis Bacon’s painting, an aspect that creates a potential relationship between the “optical unconscious” and the category of the “abject”, introduced by Julia Kristeva. It is argued that in the collection of poems there coexists a double aspect of perception that is given by the “optical unconscious” in its procedural mediation (the way of looking at details) and in the dimension of contents (the abject itself). It is concluded that Lihn goes beyond Benjamin’s conceptual proposal.