The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of
perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary
world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in
France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few
pictures that show the features of a man, apparently blind, who begs for
money at a religious site in Paris, frequented by tourists. In
perceiving this stranger and the images his appearance projects, he
begins to imagine what this man's life is like and how he perceives the
world around him.
Written in journal form, the book narrates Desjarlais's pursuit of the
man portrayed in the photographs. He travels to Paris and tries to meet
with him. Eventually, Desjarlais becomes unsure as to what he sees,
hears, or remembers. Through these interpretive dilemmas he senses the
complexities of perception, where all is multiple, shifting, spectral, a
surge of phantasms in which the actual and the imagined are endlessly
blurred and intertwined. His mind shifts from thinking about photographs
and images to being fixed on the visceral force of apparitions. His own
vision is affected in a troubling way.
Composed of an intricate weave of text and image, The Blind Man
attends to pressing issues in contemporary life: the fraught dimensions
of photographic capture; encounters with others and alterity; the
politics of looking; media images of violence and abjection; and the
nature of fantasy and imaginative construal. Through a wide-ranging
inquiry into histories of imagination, Desjarlais inscribes the need for
a "phantasmography"--a writing of phantasms, a graphic inscription of
the flows and currents of fantasy and fabulation.
