Kaja Silverman

Kaja Silverman (born September 16, 1947) is an American film theorist and art historian. She received her Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, the University of Rochester and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the University of Pennsylvania History of Art Department in 2010. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

Work

Her writing and teaching are focused at the moment primarily on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, the relationship of visuality to sexuality, and time-based visual art, but she continues to write about and teach courses on cinema, and she has a developing interest in painting. She is currently writing a book about photography, called The Miracle of Analogy, and her long-in-the-making book, Flesh of My Flesh, was published by Stanford University Press in fall 2009.

Silverman has written extensively on a wide range of artists including: Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Lacan, Gerhard Richter, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Ranier Maria Rilke, Terrence Malick, James Coleman.

Silverman's work on Jean-Luc Godard with Harun Farocki reflects the sensibility of a feminist film theorist with a close reading of eight Godard films.

Adrienne Harris of NYU writes: "Kaja Silverman's thesis, pursued over centuries of artistic work and thought, is that it is in the experience of analogy that an authentic approach to mortality is possible. Above all, her project is to illuminate the ways that the individual—artist, soldier, or citizen—is haunted by war and violence and that the metabolizing of such violence and horror requires relationality. From a psychoanalytic perspective in which intersubjectivity and relatedness are central, this is fascinating and welcome news."

Publications

• The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, 1983)
• The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1988)
• Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge Press, 1992)
• The Threshold of the Visible World (Routledge Press, 1996)
• Speaking About Godard (New York University Press, 1998; with Harun Farocki)
• World Spectators (Stanford University Press, 2000)
• James Coleman (Munich: Hatje Cantz, 2002; ed. Susanne Gaensheimer)
• Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford University Press, 2009)

External links

• Kaja Silverman lecture on Gehard Richter on YouTube
• "The Twilight of Posterity." Kaja Silverman Lecture at UC Berkeley.
• Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium audio from 'Lectures with Lindsay'
• Website

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