The Beauty of Family

by David Eng

The anxiety of influence tells us that imitation must be considered a clandestine desire for paternal eradication. The son hopes to replace the image of the father through a supreme act of mimesis that seeks to deny its past while promoting its future. In "The Twilight of Posterity", Kaja Silverman observes that, unlike his many imitators, Leonardo DaVinci did nothing to guarantee himself a posthumous existence. Leonardo did not have any children, and he chose his apprentices for their beauty rather than their talent or their eagerness to imitate him. Not surprisingly, none of them went on to become a Leonardist.

------

Leonardo's method of selecting his apprentices exempts him from such a drama of paternal eradication. His choice of "beautiful" rather than "talented" apprentices draws attention to beauty as an aesthetic act of singular rather than collective importance, and one of ephemeral rather than enduring significance. Leonardo's method of selection reconfigures traditional notions of beauty as an aesthetic category that serves the paternal mandate precisely through its facilitating of a tacit alignment between progeny and culture: the beauty of family and the artwork reinforcing one another as complementary forms of legacy.

------

My current research on family and kinship in the late-twentieth century focuses, in particular, on transnational adoption of Asian infants by white European and North American parents. In this presentation, I will explore how the mimetic relationship between parents and child is disrupted precisely at the site of the aesthetic, in the necessary valuation and revaluation of the beauty of an unrecognizable child. In what ways does transnational adoption serve to reconsolidate the paternal mandate in a global age of multicultural management? In what ways does it present us with an ethical possibility for a form of social organization indexed to Leonardo's unorthodox practice of beauty?