Many critics have explored the homoerotic message in the early portraits of the baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610). In this text the authors emphasize instead the impenetrability of these portraits. The tension between erotic invitation and self-concealing retreat leads them to conclude that the interest of these works is in their representation of an enigmatic address that solicit intimacy in order to block it with a secret. The book offers a psychoanalytic reading of the enigmatic address as initiating relations grounded in paranoid fascination. They study Caravaggio's attempts to move beyond such relations, his experiments with a space no longer circumscribed by the mutual and paranoid, if erotically stimulating, fascination with imaginary secrets. In this work, sensuality relevant to the most exciting attempts in our own time to rethink, perhaps even to reinvent, community.
- ISBN10 0262523132
- ISBN13 9780262523134
- Publish Date 19 February 2001 (first published 15 September 1998)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 17 November 2006
- Publish Country US
- Publisher MIT Press Ltd
- Imprint MIT Press
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 130
- Language English