Looking for the Aperture

Art has always threatened:

"Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination—all these are comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps only such a multifarious concept is adequate to the range of visual elements involved in the experience of reading fiction, or of writing it. Soon after the birth of the novel, doctors expressed concern that readers might be possessed by what they were reading, haunted by textual fantasms."

Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning
This 1999 book by Peter Schwenger on Stanford University Press features a photo-collage by David Wojnarowicz on the cover and this illumination:

"Wonjarowicz's work plays modes of representation against one another to the point that "there is no more world," if by "world" we mean a stable and unanimous vision.  At the same time this dissolution opens a way into possibility: in the absence of preinvented world, "there is no world yet" and politics can literally visualize a new one.  It is for this reason, and not some facile nihilism, that Wojnarowicz writes "I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness."  In seeking to crawl into the dark room of the camera, Wojnarowicz is not necessarily turning away from his life and his world.  For turning, as he has said, is "the moment that disrupts the vision."  It is the moment both of disappearance and appearance, of losing the form in darkness and finding it.  To turn into the darkness of subdivision is to enter the place where vision has always been made and can always be made again."

Others featured in the book include Italo Calvino, Derek Jarman, Gilbert Sorrentino, Coleridge and Rimbaud.