Laocoon, Lacan

I think I'm just going to start posting the couple dozen or so of my favorite photographs from Rome. At the very least, it'll make flipping back through older entries more visually stimulating. This, like the Boxer, is a Hellenistic Greek sculptural group called Laocoon. It was dug up in Rome in the early 16th century (Michelangelo, who was inspired by this type of emotional, writhing, athletic figure, was present at the disinterment). The group depicts the tragic fate of the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons; Apollo sent one of his sacred pythons to strangle the three of them after Laocoon warned his countrymen not to accept a certain wooden horse the Greeks were offering (obviously you can guess whose side Apollo was on in this tiff).


The statue now stands in the octagonal sculpture courtyard in the Vatican, right near the equally-famous Apollo Belvedere. I took this photo in between tour groups that generally cluster so tightly around the damned thing that you can't get a shot of it. It's a beautiful statue, and what's more, it perfectly captures my mood right now, struggling as I am against my own version of a murderous python, the 20-page paper I have to turn in in three weeks. In other words, Lacan, my old enemy.

Loving puns and wordplay as he did, I'm sure he would have appreciated the similarity between his own name and the statue, but he probably would have followed it up with some incomprehensible crap about how this sculpture symbolizes the anguished desire that is supposedly the chronic condition of every human being, since we are tormented by the lack of the Real, lost when we entered into culture via language. Right. The only thing tormenting me right now is the desire to be DONE with this paper. Except I haven't started it yet--this is just the note-taking portion! Ahhh!