The Lacanian body: studies of the unconscious in paintings and aesthetics

© 1990 Dr. Brenda Janice MarshallInsofar as this dissertation aims to explore aspects of a Lacanian aesthetics, its direction is to show what is at stake in a reading of works of art once one accepts as given that the unconscious is an aspect of the human condition and therefore must be accounted for in any explanatory theory of our interactions in what are called matters of aesthetics and the viewing of works of art. The basic procedure is to explore aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (such as the symptom, the death drive, jouissance, and desire, as well as the structures of neuroses [obsession, hysteria], perversion and psychosis), and to allow these to be elucidatory of the work of a select number of twentieth century artists. The intent is to give an understanding of how one sees things differently when the unrealised - the unconscious - is both apprehended and theorised, and thus to bring into a new viewing qualities both of those paintings and of one's own observation that perhaps have not been examined in accounts depending upon explanations that do not allow for the findings of psychoanalysis. Crucially, the unconscious/the unrealised is approached from its place in what is (unfortunately) called the clinic, that is, from the intricate and painful search taken there to discover what it is for each of us to have become our own human being, and how we each are to proceed once we have con1e to see that we are played in our lives by jouissance. The dissertation is somewhat ironically called The Lacanian Body: Studies of the Unconscious in Paintings and Aesthetics. While Lacan did not make a distinction between the mind and the body, but was concerned with the soul, one of my major tasks has been to rectify what has seemed to me to be an inappropriate emphasis on the conscious aspects of mind/language in academic studies of Lacanian theory. I deal centrally with the psychoanalytic symptom and jouissance for the place that they have in a system of meaning in their relation to language and speech, with the body posing one of the limits to the emergence of that meaning