A New Lease on Life: A Lacanian Analysis of Cognitive Enhancement Cinema

Abstract

Let me begin with two instances of ‘brain art’, an early modern ‘original’ and its cinematic parody. In 1656, Rembrandt van Rijn painted one of his famous ‘anatomical lessons’: a cinematic scene (an early modern ‘movie still’), featuring Dr Deyman, who has lifted the skull of a convicted criminal, exposing his brains. The convict, executed by hanging, seems lost in meditation, until we realize that his abdomen has been emptied. Rembrandt’s corpse is modelled on Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1490), so that Jesus and the thief changed places. The painting is actually a fragment: a substantial part was destroyed by fire. We see Deyman’s dexterous hands, about to perform the autopsy, as if the camera is zooming in. A mysterious, forbidden, ‘partial’ object, the human brain, is suddenly revealed, holding us captive: the inner core of what we are, detachable from the body. This is what the painting brings to light. The convict’s intestines have already been removed and the brain is the next body part to go. This artwork reveals (brings to the fore) the basic (Frankensteinian) truth of modern anatomy, namely that the human body is an aggregate of detachable ‘partial’ organs, of removable body parts (Zwart 2014b).