Invidia and Nvidia

Chun Young-paik The author is a professor of art history and visual philosophy at Hongik University. Jealousy has a powerful, destructive force. At times, it is strong enough to shake not only an individual's life but even the history of a nation. A similar but distinct concept is envy. Unlike jealousy, with its aggressive impulse, envy carries a more inward anguish and, depending on how it is used, can become a creative force. In Latin, it is called invidia, a word that first appeared around the fifth century in Augustine's "Confessions." Augustine illustrates the prototype of envy in this way: It is like the feeling of an older brother who looks on from a distance as his nursing baby brother rests in their mother's arms, their eyes locked as if they were one. The psychological mechanism behind this concept, then, lies in the older child's realization that the sense of unity and fulfillment he once shared with his mother is no longer his alone. Etymologically, invidia combines "videre", meaning "to see," with the negative prefix "in". It represents the wounded heart of the older brother who looks upon the younger sibling in his mother's arms with a "bitter look." Among Impressionist artists less familiar to the general public is the American painter Mary Cassatt. Her work "Baby's First Caress" (1891) fits the example above perfectly. The gaze between the baby and the mother responds deeply to the other, forming what appears to be a small universe of unity. Yet the protagonists I wish to focus on here are not the two figures inside the painting, but the baby's older brother outside the frame — and, by extension, the viewer looking at the painting. The core of the work lies in the emotion the older brother feels at the intersection of these gazes: the happy exchange between his younger sibling and their mother, and his own gaze upon them. In the painting, the baby and mother display a perfect unity without the intervention of any third party. This unity, in which the boundary between subject and other disappears, is the true prototype of love. For this reason, Jacques Lacan believed that once a child leaves the mother's embrace and acquires language, the child has already entered a paradise lost. From then on, human beings desire the lost unity and struggle to fill the lack left behind. The pale-faced older brother who sees his younger sibling in his mother's arms witnesses that lost "paradise" before his eyes and becomes keenly aware of his own "lack." It is something he longs for so desperately precisely because he does not possess it. The ultimate object of that desire is the unity we call "love." Lacan explained the structure of this feeling by saying that "desire has a structure inseparable from lack," focusing in particular on the act of "seeing." The unity of the gaze shared with the maternal figure is both the object desired by the subject and the essence of a love that can never be fully realized. And because vision precedes language, painting can be understood as expressing something primordial that language cannot yet articulate. Cassatt, a leading member of the Impressionist group in Paris, is estimated to have painted about 140 works depicting mothers and children. She is also known as one of the artists who most frequently painted mothers and children in 19th-century art history. She succeeded in capturing the deep, subtle psychology of the relationship between maternal figures and young children through precise depiction and delicate color. Surprisingly, however, she never had children of her own and remained unmarried throughout her life. What was Cassatt longing for as she observed and painted this subject again and again? Perhaps it was the emotional intimacy and bond between baby and mother that she herself never actually had. Or perhaps it was the close relationship she shared with her own mother, who moved from distant Philadelphia to Paris to accompany her daughter in her pursuit of becoming an artist...