ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to build on Sheppard's discussion by assessing Dada in relation to psychoanalysis seriously and at length. In apparently very different ways, Dada and psychoanalysis are in part both an attempt to make (non)sense out of life, the First World War, and the mechanics of meaning, but there is little of obvious, extended relevance to psychoanalysis — or to any other formalized system of thought or theory — in the playfulness, nonsense language, absurdity and provocation for which Dada is popularly remembered. Avant-gardist culture and Lacanian psychoanalysis can circle around or approximate fixed, reliable signifieds in a variety of tones — gnomic, sardonic, playful, hopeless — but the fact of deploying words, paint or any other semiotic apparatus with which to render a subject is a sign that the subject will remain elusive to the result of that rendering.
