In Response to Echo: Beyond Mimesis or Dissolution as Scopic Regime (with Special Attention to Camouflage) [Paperback]

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid (43 BC - AD 17) tells the story ofEcho and Narcissus. Echo's love for Narcissus ended in a cruel twist offate. Already punished with an echo for a voice, the nymph sufferedfurther as she petrified and her bones became stones. The study of arthas long focused on the Narcissus-mirror syndrome as a paradigm forpainting (Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)). Echo had no place in thismasculine scopic discipline. Recent approaches have rehabilitated Echofrom a visual, cultural and gendered point of view. Echo cries; shecries for an alternative to the mirror paradigm and oculocentrism. Shehelps us break free from Narcissus in favour of visual modalities suchas dissolution, camouflage and contamination, in short, disappearance asan alternative to the scopic regime. In this essay I treat the impact ofEcho on art history through the lenses of: gender, speech and hearing;Echo as textilisation and sacrifice; Echo as chthonic art; and, finally,Echo and le d?sir mim?tique. With this approach, Idevelop a new hermeneutic to reintegrate the sonoric senses, camouflagetheory, gender epistemology, and the anthropological substrata ofnature, love and death into our Western obsession for mimetic thinking.