Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Efrat Biberman, Shirley Sharon-Zisser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351698535
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis examines the relationship between art and death from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It takes a unique approach to the topic by making explicit reference to the death drive as manifest in theories of art and in artworks.

Freud's treatment of death focuses not on the moment of biological extinction but on the recurrent moments in life which he called "the death drive" or the "compulsion to repeat": the return precisely of what is most unbearable for the subject. Surprisingly, in some of its manifestations, this painful repetition turns out to be invigorating. It is this invigorating repetition that is the main concern of this book, which demonstrates the presence of its manifestations in painting and literature and in the theoretical discourse concerning them from the dawn of Western culture to the present.

After unfolding the psychoanalytical and philosophical underpinnings for the return of the death drive as invigorating repetition in the sphere of the arts, the authors examine various aspects of this repetition through the works of Gerhard Richter, Jeff Wall, and contemporary Israeli artists Deganit Berest and Yitzhak Livneh, as well as through the writings of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

First to articulate the stimulating aspect of the death drive in its relation to the arts and the conception of art as a varied repetition beyond a limit, Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis will be indispensable to psychoanalysts, scholars of art theory and aesthetics and those studying at the intersection of art and psychoanalysis.

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1

BEYOND THE ART PRINCIPLE

[E]ven if we were not mortal,

even if we had the promise of eternal life,

the question still remains open whether this “eternal life” [. . .]

is not conceivable as a form of eternally dying.

—Jacques Lacan, May 23, 1962, p. 269

More than a hundred years after Livneh’s singing soldiers met their end on the battlefield, other soldiers who had survived horrors returned home, physically intact yet wounded psychically. It was none other than Freud who was asked to give his expert opinion on how best to treat these shell-shocked soldiers. Freud’s encounter with the soldiers who returned from the trenches of the First World War generated several studies he published in 1919–1920. What astounded Freud in the phenomenon of shell-shock was the manner in which the traumatic event would be repeated again and again in the dreams and hallucinations of the suffering patient. This occurred although in terms of Freud’s view of the operation of the pleasure principle and of the dream as a fulfillment of a wish, the repetition of the anxiety-provoking event seemed unreasonable.¹ Freud reached the conclusion that the pleasure principle, which he had heretofore viewed as the driving force in human life, was not the only principle at work in the psychic apparatus. Another principle existed, functioning beyond the pleasure principle and embodying what Freud then found to be the very essence of the drive, the death drive. For Freud, and for Lacan who followed in his footsteps, the death drive is not an individual’s wish for annihilation but the repetition of a traumatic event in varying permutations. This principle functions within the psychic apparatus as a system of representations in their relation to a satisfaction that cannot be represented. Freud called this principle the compulsion to repeat.

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Until his theorization of the death drive, Freud assumed it was the pleasure principle that was the major principle operative in the psychic apparatus, an apparatus whose aim is to reduce excitation to a minimum and to function homeostatically. The pleasure principle as Freud conceived it is in effect a corollary of the tendency toward stability. Any eschewal of stability or deviation from it leads to the inverse of pleasure.² What then caused those shell-shocked soldiers who returned from the battlefields struck by trauma to repeatedly reproduce the horrors they encountered in their dreams? While trying to explain this paradoxical phenomenon, Freud recounts an anecdote of his infant grandson playing a game of disappearance and return with a wooden reel of string while his mother is briefly away from home. Freud inquires as to why the scene which the child repeatedly reenacts through the game is not the happy scene of the mother’s return but the presumably much more distressing instance of her disappearance, embodied by the vanishing reel. How might one explain, Freud asks, the relation between the compulsion to repeat such an unpleasurable disappearance and the pleasure principle?³

Freud’s conclusion was that the compulsion to repeat constitutes not an opposition to the pleasure principle but an aberration from it. At this juncture, Freud looks to the natural sciences and the conjecture that all organic matter ultimately strives not only to develop and progress but even more so to return to an ancient state of preexistence. The aim of all organic matter, Freud writes,

must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death.”⁴

How might this thesis be reconciled with the myriad instances indicating that the aim of any organism is its self-preservation? Freud argues that the living organism does seek to die, but above all, it seeks to die in its own fashion.⁵ For Freud, what transforms a life from mere biological existence to a subjective and unique mode of being, characterized by an inimitable style which includes the style of demise, is repetition, which more often than not is the repetition precisely of what causes suffering. This repetition straddles the subject’s life. It transforms this life from a straight line between the points of birth and death (in which case all trajectories of human life would be identical) into a singularly circuitous path. The operation of the death drive as repetition thus makes each and every life trajectory not only singular but winding, meandering as it repeats, and as such, longer than what would have been the direct progression of the biological organism from birth to death.

The monotonous repetition of what is most unbearable, however, is not the only form of repetition in human life. This kind of repetition, what Freud called the compulsion to repeat, is manifest in the subject’s recurrent encounters with difficult or painful events which have an unconscious connection with primordial trauma. Although such encounters are ostensibly imposed on the subject, it is the subject himself who facilitates their repetition and return, deriving satisfaction from the suffering they incur. Lacan calls this satisfaction in suffering enjoyment or jouissance. Psychoanalysis, however, makes it possible to think of another form of repetition which is of an entirely different nature. What this form of repetition involves is not the precise iteration of primordial trauma but its replication with a difference, one that transforms the trauma, attenuating its mortifying power. Such repetition is not necessarily charged with a high quantum of suffering. Far from being opposed to life, it invigorates and may be experienced as a joie de vivre. In psychoanalytic terms, this form of repetition involves desire (désir), which may be defined as a lack functioning as a motivating cause in human life. This form of repetition too can constitute the subject’s singular meandering path to die, as Freud put it, in his own fashion, beyond trauma, deferring and exceeding what would otherwise have been the short and direct path to biological extinction.

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Within Freud’s work, the discussion of the category of the double in the 1919 essay on “The Uncanny,” published one year before “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” where Freud first theorized the death drive, exemplifies the second, invigorating form of repetition. In “The Uncanny,” Freud considers the tendency to repeat, in the lives of children and in the course of psychoanalytic treatment, as indicative of an innate and fundamental quality of the drives.⁶ Freud finds one manifestation of this tendency in the motif of the double, to which Otto Rank devoted an extensive study. The double, Freud writes, citing Rank, “was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death.’” The “‘immortal’ soul,” Freud continues,

was the first “double” of the body. This invention of doubling as preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol. The same desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials.⁷

Freud, then, links the phenomenon of the double with the subject’s response to death and specifies it as a repetition. The confrontation with the utter and horrifying absence associated with death, he suggests, leads to the seemingly contrary emphasis on what is present, which is then subjected to a doubling and repetition which might keep the horror masked. This Freudian theorization of the tendency to double and repeat in the face of “the power of death” can help explain not only the ubiquitous cultural phenomenon of reifying the dead but also, not least, the preoccupation with the relation between death and representation in the theory of art starting with the writings of Pliny the Elder and Leon Battista Alberti.

Later in “The Uncanny,” Freud notes that the phenomenon of repetition, whose source he locates in the drives, is predominant in the unconscious to such an extent that it can override the pleasure principle. When writing “The Uncanny,” Freud had yet to theorize the compulsion to repeat upon its implication with the structure of the drive. Even then, however, he recognized repetition’s involving acquiescence to what exceeds the pleasure principle. A year later, Freud published “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in which he explicitly equates the compulsion to repeat, which in “The Uncanny” he had associated with “preservation against extinction,” with what he calls the death drive.⁸

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What this means is that the death drive as Freud theorizes it is an impelling force, an element inextricable from life itself. It is distinct from the actual death of an individual, which has no representation in the unconscious. In “The Uncanny,” Freud writes: “It is true that the statement ‘All men are mortal’ is paraded in text-books of logic as an example of a general proposition; but no human being really grasps it, and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality.”⁹ What is of much use for the unconscious, however, is the death drive in its manifestation as what impels a repetition that preserves and protects rather than destroys, such as Freud had spoken of when revisiting the phenomenon of the double in “The Uncanny.”

Lacan, who reads Freud rigorously while refuting traditional interpretations of his writings, pauses upon this second manifestation of the death drive as repetition, which we would like to isolate as paradigmatic to the field of the arts. “Life is the totality of the forces which resist death,” Lacan writes, quoting the great eighteenth-century French physiologist and anatomist François Bichat.¹⁰ If there is anything quintessential to psychoanalytic experience, says Lacan, it is the Freudian formulation of the vortex of death to whose edges life clings so as not to fall into it. Lacan then goes on to differentiate between death and the inanimate.¹¹ In other words, as Bichat had already made clear, death does not mean the absence of life. The death drive is to a great extent a driving force of life itself, which gushes all the more against death. Thus, in a paradoxical manner, the vortex of death is a condition for life in its capacity as limit, in view of which life gushes forth all the more forcefully.

As Lacan explains, Freud conceived of the pleasure principle in economic terms, as a principle seeking to regulate psychic energy (libido). Situated at the threshold of the psychic apparatus, the pleasure principle is triggered whenever this apparatus encounters stimuli. Its function is to reduce these stimuli to a minimum so as to maintain pleasure, that is to say, to keep the apparatus at the lowest possible level of excitation. But what exactly, Lacan asks, is this reduction of excitation to a minimum? Is it bringing the apparatus to an equilibrium, or is it, rather, the restriction of its activity to an absolute minimum, that is to say, to the point of its own extinction? Lacan recalls at this point that for Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” something other than the homeostatic pleasure principle operates within the psychic apparatus, and its name is the death drive. Lacan explains that the death drive is not a wish for annihilation but an inherent component of human experience. In effect, Lacan indicates, it was from the very beginning of his work that Freud discerned that the subject does not operate according to the pleasure principle alone. Indeed, the symptom which brings a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List Of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Re-Hearse
• Introduction
• 1 Beyond the Art Principle
• 2 What Never Stops Dying
• 3 On the Artwork as Cedable Object
• 4 Writing Their Deaths: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
• 5 The Art of Inters(L)Aying: The Inscription of Death as Stylistic Form
• 6 Between Two Deaths: The Case of Photo-Painting
• Epilogue: On Painting and Death
• Bibliography
• Index