ABSTRACT
The coupling of psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts in aesthetic theory is as valid and natural as it is uncommon. Psychoanalysts rarely treated the production and consumption of art as social processes. The individualistic bias of psychoanalytic aesthetics reflects a tradition of mutual indifference between psychoanalytic and anthropological studies of art, a tradition which has been rarely disregarded. When Legendre describes dance as the enjoyment of an ideal body, an effigy, he invokes a concept that is rooted in psychoanalytic group psychology and in the anthropology of religion. My aim in this essay is to outline a view of dance, and art generally, as a form of ritual regeneration of an ideal collective body, to which I shall refer as the corporate body of the group. As we shall see, the corporate body which art ritually regenerates resides outside the group to which it belongs. The individual bodies partaking in dance, for example, do not form a single collective body, but delineate the contours of an absent ideal body which they revere from afar. The proposed view is inspired by anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of art such as Victor Turner’s account of art as a means for social integration and Hanna Segal’s work on aesthetics. After recalling some of the principal claims of these theories, the essay turns to expound the account of art as a ritual celebration of the group’s corporate body.
