The Aesthetic Clinic: Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art

Description

Examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience. In The Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation―Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector―to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draws on writing and other creative practices to conceive of unconscious processes and the transformation sought through analysis. Thus, the “aesthetic clinic” of the book’s title (a term Negrete adopts from Deleuze) is not an applied psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis. Rather, The Aesthetic Clinic privileges the call and constraints issued by each woman’s individual work. Engaging an artwork here is less about retrieving a hidden meaning through interpretation than about receiving a precise transmission of sensation, a jouissance irreducible to meaning. Not only do art and literature serve an urgent clinical function in Negrete’s reading but sublimation itself requires an embrace of femininity. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Acquired Permissions Introduction: On Freud’s Couch, Dreaming of Art Enigma, Excess, and Envy Dangers in Constructing a Clinical Aesthetics A Girl’s Fates Lack Femininity versus Ego A Girl’s Savoir, and Her Other Fates Dora and the Motive of Symptoms Dora and the Limits of Sex Unruly Drive Beyond the Limits of Culture Feminine Sublimation Part I The Transvaluation of Health Chapter 1 Louise Bourgeois’ Art of Hysteria 1893, 1993, 2018 . . . à l’infini How Do You Relate to a Hummingbird? Vital Beheadings Hysterics, Women, and Unintelligible Artists Resurrections and Revelations Hysterical Expression beyond the Moral World Other Tableaux: “À Baudelaire” “À une passante” Sublime Conversions Lack and Ambivalence From Hysteric Symptom to the Arch of the Drive Object a: A Conversion of Values Chapter 2 Transmuting Pain into Joy with Precious Liquids Vestibule The Inorganic Cause Challenges of Extimate Knowledge At the Threshold Lying Down: From Partial Objects and Flows to Objet a Rhythm Chapter 3 Lygia Clark on the Space–Body Problem What Can a Body Do? O agora: Rethinking the Work beyond Interpretation Topology and Psyche “Connect-I-cut” “A coisa decisiva” / “The Decisive Thing” “Mute Thought” Part II Love beyond Pleasure Chapter 4 (Re)Visions of Love: Marguerite Duras Saint Hommage, Sinthomage The Royal Road to a Knowledge of the Unconscious Losing the Name, Clearing the Stage The Name of the Place The Letters of the Landscape Encore: To Love Is to See Chapter 5 Developing Douleur exquise: Sophie Calle et al. Uncanny Narcissism Chronology Disrupted Douleur without Borders Sublimation with Symptom Part III For an Uncanny Ethics of Care Chapter 6 Water, Weather, Words: Le Temps with Roni Horn and Clarice Lispector Water Contemplation To Contemplate the Instant of the World The Now-Instant Rendre le Temps Sensible To the Lighthouse Weather-Appropriate Reading In Vatnasafn/Library of Water with Água Viva Anamorphic Mirrors Works Cited Index