ABSTRACT
Cézanne, in the argument, stretched a materialist language of bodies as far as it could go, and the ultimate interest of his art lies precisely in its ‘happening on the powers and limits of a particular system of representation’. What a succinct statement of the work of analyst and patient, which might precisely be defined as a process of ‘happening on the powers and limits of a particular system of representation’ (ibid.): the patient’s and the analyst’s particular ways of staying caught in certain representations of self, other and world. Clark explicitly uses ‘phantasy’ in the sense that Laplanche and Pontalis give the term, that is, a dimension whose structures ‘are irreducible to the contingencies of the individual’s lived experience’, and that has ‘coherence, organization and efficiency’ all of its own. The interpenetration of bodies in the painting—‘the shift between buttocks and shoulders’—can be understood ‘as a figure of one body necessarily being in another.
