ABSTRACT
In the course of his lectures on sublimation, Jean Laplanche poses a question about what he considers to be the “particularly irritating” concept of sublimation: “Is there a nonsexual destiny of the sexual drive, but a destiny which would not be of the order of the symptom?” 1 From the point of view of aesthetics, this is an especially tantalizing question since it seems to suggest the possibility of something other than a symptomatic reading of texts. In film theory, it could be said that the treatment of the film text as repressive or hysterical—and, therefore, precisely as symptomatic—has been the dominant mode of psychoanalytic criticism, with the inevitable implication of a pathologization of textual activity. But repression and sublimation, according to Freud, are two distinctly different vicissitudes of the drive. Both involve a displacement of sexual libido onto what is nonsexual, but in repression the sign or symptom is characterized as occupying the level of the socially trivial: compulsive habits or obsessions, tics, disturbances of vision, paralyses, etc. Sublimation, on the other hand, has as its product the highest manifestations of human culture, that which constitutes, most exactly, the sublime. Freud claims that in sublimation “a higher, eventually no longer sexual, goal is set up. … We probably owe the highest achievements of our culture to energy which has been liberated in this way.” 2 Intellectual activity, art, scientific investigation, and the very process of thought itself have all been associated by Freud with sublimation. Hence, the concept has a decided advantage over that of repression in accounting for the social status of works of art, in acknowledging their weighty association with cultural value. Yet, Freud did not seem to be particularly interested in investigating the process of sublimation and he never gave it an adequate theorization. As Laplanche and Pontalis point out, “The lack of a coherent theory of sublimation remains one of the lacunae in psychoanalytic thought.” 3
