Read the following passage and answer the questions given below.

Basquiat’s paintings are obscene. They are obscene, not in the quotidian sense of the depraved, offensive or lascivious, but rather in the etymological sense of ‘the obverse side of the scene.’ Whenever the ob-scene is encountered, an otherwise concealed element of the specular has turned up or disclosed itself. What is obscene, it could thus be said, is the un-presented content that belongs on the other side of a present vision. It transgresses visibility, is no longer the visible, and moves out into a region of displacement and destabilization.

The obscene, in this sense, articulates the anamorphic: the morphoses of a quotidian and so-called normative regard is subtended, subverted or returned back (ana-) to something ab-normal, in order that this previously hidden scene (often othered because of its taboo content we repress) may exhibit itself. As anamorphic, an obscene exhibition is thus a showing of what was previously hidden by the normative regard. This hidden, other scene is structurally privative in relation to the present scene, in the sense that it is a lack, void or depth into which the scene is inherently prolonged or elongated. The obverse side of the scene tests the very security of the image’s foundation. It is this structure of disequilibrium and unease that the Basquiat can reveal. Though his paintings do not reveal the sexually obscene, they are nevertheless an expression of the lack inherent to erotic displacement more generally. But they do not express erotic displacement merely. I argue that Basquiat’s images express the death that induces an anxiety beyond eros. Whereas the erotic conveys a lack in the way of displacement—a lack that constantly needs filling by some object or another—anxiety is before a lack of lack.

The erotic, which only ever arises as invested in something, in fact keeps us from becoming anxious, since anxiety is the very void implicit in eros-of fleshly enjoyment- appearing for a subject as such. Anxiety, in this sense, comes upon the subject because the subject is presented with the nothing itself through his paintings. Basquiat’s work will re-acquaint us with this previously unseen or unnoticed void with which we may be secretly familiar, but this is not to say that it is content just to convey the anxiety before this void. The repeated image of the corpse in Basquiat’s work, I argue, places the dead body within a structure of lacking and marginality in such a way as to go beyond the particular object, no longer functioning as a thing but opening up into the very lack of lack—death as the induction of anxiety. Basquiat’s corpses can thus signal the emptiness of death itself. The erotic and death: these two terms do not stand against each other in the Basquiat canvas.

That a Basquiat canvas reaches towards death is possible because of its fundamental orientation to the obscene and the marginal. To stand in front of a Basquiat is to have the norms to which one subscribes interrogated by a hitherto unnoticed profundity. To this end, Basquiat’s work is sometimes seen in the context of a post-colonialism (especially African Diaspora). But of course this post-colonialist reading also understands Basquiat’s images to depict the trauma resulting from being uprooted (specifically feelings of loss and estrangement).