O sopro mudo das imagens : estudo sobre a impropriedade do gesto artístico

Abstract

We say that we feel inspired when something has touched us in such a way that it demands that we do something. Thus, we resort to the metaphor of inhaling (or rather inspiring) the air suggesting that it is the fuel for our creative act. Several aspects make the notion of inspiration a particularly poignant case study: the persistence of its use, its origin in a historical period of undifferentiation between art and religion, the way in which a certain philosophical discourse tried to absorb it, as well as the suspicion that arouses today when someone still uses it. Through inspiration we can grasp the difficulty and bewilderment experienced when we strive to understand the permeability and transitivity of the artistic experience, its simultaneously interior and exterior, profoundly relational nature, and what this says about our “identity”. In the first part of this dissertation, I propose a reflection on the articulation between the creative gesture, the representational act and the process of subjectivation or the construction of identity, through an investigation of the notion of inspiration. More specifically, I propose to clarify the reasons for the ambivalence that we can feel towards this experience that has been given the name «inspiration», since it reveals an essential indeterminacy of the human being or what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe called «constitutive impropriety». The theses of Richard Onians, Julian Jaynes and Jean-Pierre Vernant on the historical origins of subjectivity serve as the basis for a proposal for the historical origins of this ambivalence in Greek Antiquity. The contributions of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on mimesis, as well as those of Tomás Maia regarding the origins of the artistic image, guide the articulation between the aforementioned proposal and the current configuration of the ambivalence we may feel towards the experience of inspiration, while also translating it into an understanding of the artistic image and the silencing that it induces. This reflection on the relationship between the experience of inspiration, representation and the formation of identity is complemented, in the second part, by an analysis of the film The Captain (2018), by Robert Schwentke. Finally, in the third part, I present some images and texts from my artistic project, which I developed in parallel with the research and writing of this thesis, a project which has always acted as its driving force