Arts

Ever since Freud advanced the full insight into the possibilities—and envisaged the shortcomings—of using psychoanalysis to understand political action, art has been a ground for symbolizing the political subject. As this chapter shows, its function, in this regard, has been double. On the one hand, it has been used to imply the full extent of the workings of the unconscious and the drives as an inhibiting force. Freud posited an oedipal relation between subject, object, and pleasure that has been used to analyze the modern subject of paralysis in, for instance, the writings of Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, and Slavoj Žižek. In this sense, psychoanalysis when applied to art indicates the symptom of a contemporary condition. However, as this chapter also demonstrates, psychoanalysis can be used to give art political purposes, both in theory and in practice. Psychoanalytic theories and models have provided a ground for art’s insistence on the radical transformation of the subject. Here feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Laura Mulvey have been at the forefront, as well as artists such as Claude Cahun and Carolee Schneemann and filmmakers such as Claire Denis. Here, the normative use of the oedipal model has been questioned. Instead, the distinction between subject and object has been subverted. In this way, the political use of psychoanalysis in art has been cast not at the level of collective action but rather at the level of how political hierarchies, bodies, and the community of the senses is understood and acted on.