In his seminar “The Eye and the Gaze,” Jacques Lacan is forced to regard the problem of the unconscious through the grid of the Cartesian cogito. In the certainty of “I think, therefore I am,” which expresses the complete transparency of the self to its own apprehension, leaves no space for the ineffability of the unconscious. Lacan sees this proto-enlightenment certainty running through all perceptual mechanisms, as in Paul Valèry's poem “La Jeune Parque,” which declares, “I saw myself seeing myself.” Lacan turns to anamorphosis as a perceptual exception, in which there are two viewing points turned on the same object, neither coinciding with the other, such that classical perspective's fundamental unity of the perceiving subject is alienated from itself—a Spaltung , or split, that enables the unconscious presence of the uncanny and its castrative impression of death.

Rosalind Krauss argues that the 2020 Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art shows that the painterly side of this famously “anti-painter” artist was more pronounced than he would have ever admitted.

Rosalind E. Krauss discusses the origins and argument of Douglas Crimp's “On the Museum's Ruins,” celebrating it as embodying the epistemê of cultural rebellion.

Rosalind E. Krauss discusses William Kentridge's The Head & the Load .

Rosalind E. Krauss and Malcolm Turvey honor critic and film historian Annette Michelson, co-founder of October , who died in September 2018 at the age of ninety-five. They detail Michelson's contributions to the journal in essays, translations, and the editing of special issues, and announce a forthcoming issue dedicated to her scholarship.

In “Montage October,” which appeared in Artforum in January 1973, Rosalind Krauss argues that Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film was not only a celebration of a Marxist victory but also a demonstration of Marxist dialectical reasoning through montage. Krauss contends that rather than passively reconstructing the chain of circumstances that culminated in the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, Eisenstein hoped to draw a filmic equivalence between the leap of revolutionary consciousness, which opens up access to the future by transcending the real, and the leap of visual consciousness, which goes beyond the normal bounds of filmic space.