STONE BLIND AND BESIDE OURSELVES: OUYANG XIU'S TOUCHING POETICS AND THE ENDS OF CRITICAL VISION

Brian Ford, The Secret Language of Life In looking at the vexed relationship between vision, language, and subjectivity, what he calls "the split between the eye and the gaze," Jacques Lacan focuses on the phenomenon of visual mimicry.1 For inspiration Lacan frequently turns to the work of Roger Caillois, who writes about mimicry and, as we will see below, about stones. Unprotected, but also unencumbered by the aggression of looking, Ouyang Xiu can approach the stone as a being. >> Stone Blind: A Meditation Found unfit to repair the azure sky Long years a foolish mortal man was I. My life in both worlds on this stone is writ: If a major thrust of the Lacanian project is the belief that Freudian psychoanalysis was not only informed by its creative encounters with art, philology, and literature, but in practice inseparable from them in fundamental ways, we cannot help but think of Freud himself as, above all, a reader of masterful acuity.