ABSTRACT
The artist is a patient. This is the common-sense assumption: the artist loses her mind and spirit to the work, which the viewer analyses. The artist is a doctor. This is Deleuze’s proposition: ‘the writer as such is not a patient but rather a doctor, doctor of herself and of the world.The world is the whole set of symptoms in which sickness is confounded with humankind’ (Deleuze, 1997: 3).1 The therapy that the artist offers consists in inventing, through ‘a new vision’, a people that is lacking, inventing ‘a possibility of life’ hollowed out by a kind of foreign language within a language, by ‘a becoming-other of language’ (15) that opens ‘an outside or flipside consisting of Visions and Hearings … These visions are not phantasies, but veritable Ideas constituted by the passage of life into language’ (16). The Ideas are not phantasies, but they are analogous to them.
