Toda mi posesión está expropiada: supervivencia y subjetividad a partir de Aliento de Óscar Muñoz

Abstract

This paper explores the intimacy between the work of mourning and the structure of subjectivity in light of the artistic reformulation of specularity that is displayed in Muñoz’s installation, Aliento. Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas on the way in which intrusion and portraiture are implied in the constitution of the subject, it shows how the indexical images of the subjects who reflect/portrait each other as intruders on the mirrors’ surfaces stress the tension between self-appropriation and self-expropriation. The latter introduces a consideration on the way in which the limit of ex-appropriation that their interrupted reflection implies impacts our understanding of their subjectivities’ survival: the spectator’s subjectivity, as a metaphoric mourning subject, and the dead other’s subjectivity, whose face (dis)appears thanks to the action of his breadth.

Keywords

• Mourning
• survival
• indexicality
• specularity
• subjectivity
• Jean-Luc Nancy