ABSTRACT
As with Chapter 11 on Kazuo Ohno, this essay on Bausch recurs to psychoanalytic theory. But, in this case, because of Bausch’s version of Rite of Spring, the essay first addresses how dance became a subject of psychoanalytic reflection thanks to the mental disorders of Vaslav Nijinsky. The question of hysteria as a psychoanalytic motif of significance to modernism through the surrealists once again is noteworthy in its effects on postmodernism. This is the historical location within which we can most readily address the relation of symptom to expression and hence of pathology to art. If the Lacanian understanding of hysteria amounts to the impossibility of the symbolization of desire, this in itself may go a long way toward a deeper understanding of the fetishization of presence under modernism.
Movements thus seem to be a form of thought, the only one, as it happens, that can designate the subject in the place where he loses himself.
–Monique David-Ménard 1