The Politics of “Atopia of the Intimate" in Contemporary Art: the View from Lacanian Psychoanalysis (a response to Gérard Wajcman)

This text was conceived as a dialogue with the preceding text by Gérard Wacjman, entitled "Intimate Exposed, Intimate Extorted." Three psychoanalytic paradigms of 'the intimate' are identified throughout Lacan's teachings: the unconscious, the fantasy and the sinthome. First I show that each of them is already in itself characterized by a particular form of atopia, meaning that it is impossible to localize their particular version of 'the intimate'. This atopia goes for the subject as well as for the Other, but neither of them is conscious of this. 
 
 This is where art comes in. In accordance with Wacjman's fundamental idea of art as an "exposition of the intimate", I show how this exposition of the atopia of the three Lacanian versions of 'the intimate' has to assume three different forms in order to convince both parties that 'it' really is beyond any grasp. 1. Art once used to stage the atopia of the 'intimate' of the unconscious, of our relation with language. 2. Nowadays the plastic arts continue to occupy themselves with extimising the atopia of the intimate of the fantasy, of our relation with the object of enjoyment. 3. Meanwhile the most interesting forms of plastic arts, for the future, are starting to monstrate the atopia of 'the intimate' of the sintom. Can we be confident that psychoanalysis will survive long enough in order to discover and conceptualize a fourth form of the intimate in time – and that some form of the plastic arts once again will able be able to expose the atopia of this intimacy in a way that once again reveals the utter impossibility of grasping it