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It is in New York that one is most directly gripped by the clash between the images that come down to us from the old Christian or pre-Christian world and the images of an entirely different essence that go about moulding afresh the present generation’s individualism, with a diffuse, impersonal authority.
It is this clash, more visible in Manhattan than anywhere else in America or the world, that involuntarily refutes the neo-Hegelian idea, so in vogue in Paris, that a continuity or evolution in successive stages has made European Christian art the preface and prehistory of the massive proliferation of images of idols on the global market and in contemporary art.
Marc Fumaroli, Paris-New York et retour
This extract from his ‘Journey Through the Arts and Images’ sets out three theses dear to Marc Fumaroli. He says he verified them on the occasion of a recent long stay in New York. The first I agree with, the second I object to and the third one I do not find convincing. The first thesis has it that America is not uniform (a slightly trivial thesis but one too often underestimated) and that the contrasts or even the contradictions internal to the culture are more readily readable there than elsewhere.
The second thesis postulates that there are two types of image, each with their own ‘essence’: images corresponding to a learned art (stemming from the European tradition) and images corresponding to art of the ‘masses’ governed by marketing and media techniques. In reality the waters are much less divided. Marc Fumaroli himself shows in his book that the division between veritable art, ‘official’ art and entertainment is different from this. It is not obvious that modern art loaded with images borrowed from the most mundane reality (Warhol’s Brillo box being the iconic epitome of the “pop” factory of images) should serve an opposition between “cult” art and a mass art reduced to “entertainment”. Danto’s last book on Warhol comments on it eloquently. And besides we know since Lacan’s Seminar XI on the gaze that art is not only a matter of culture but also a matter of jouissance.
The third thesis regards the falsity of the thesis of an Hegelian dialectics between the American and the European art market. I agree with him that the change of the art market from Paris to New York just after the second world war is not a simple dialectical process. In my opinion it dates back to the famous 1913 Armory Show.
No matter how much we agree or disagree with Fumaroli’s positions his provocative book in its corrosive manner, introduces us to the difficult question of the nature of the art object in the global market civilisation, especially when representation is no longer aiming up, i.e., at the ideal of the beautiful, but aiming more at a ‘trash’ realism.[1]
Art for the masses and art for the elite: art marketing
Let’s follow in the footsteps of the French rhetorician and academician when he criticises a widespread anti-Americanism in Parisian art circles.[2] According to them, the post-war American art critics ruined the art market, which until then had been concentrated in Paris. New York allegedly concocted a takeover and brought us the mass-market art plague. Orchestrated by the two rival art critics of the end of the fifties, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, the alleged fleecing of Europe turned New York into the ‘world art capital’ overnight, thanks to marketing led propaganda in favour of the abstract expressionist painters (Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, etc.) and leaning on the media who supported these star critics. In any case, there was no doubt that Manhattan became the financial location where the art market prospered, boosted by its private foundations and industrial patrons, and that the shadow had fallen over Europe’s art (for instance, who today in the general public is familiar with the work of the likes of Fautrier?). Fumaroli blames notably the cultural policy of André Malraux. Without going into this complex debate, we nevertheless take it for certain that the market shift is not a mere economic effect but that it wends its way into ‘the depths of taste’ to use Lacan’s formula from ‘Kant with Sade’. And Fumaroli himself indicates as much very well at different points of his ‘Journal’.
The ‘neo-Hegelian’ analysis proper to Parisian circles, and which let’s not forget he refutes, indeed suggests that the art market’s shift to the USA is first and foremost a phenomenon of power and money, a manifestation of the dialectic of master and slave. By extension, it tends to unilaterally localise Stateside the sin of the popularisation of art, to turn it into a historical step and also to link it uniquely to the power of money. It consequently implies an idea of progress in art and a uniqueness of art wherever it is produced.
If one refuses to adopt this not very convincing vision, as does Marc Fumaroli, can one then content oneself with separating images out into those that would stem from European tradition and those that would have an ‘entirely different origin’, in other words, those that would be produced by a mass culture. Admittedly not all images are of equal value, but how can one separate them out into the art and the industry of consumption? The last chapters of the ‘Journal’ dedicated to the status of the sacred in art show the difficulty of operating in this domain from the starting point of the binary ‘cult art’ and ‘mass art’. This new quarrel of the iconoclasts is rife.[3]
Marc Fumaroli turns out to be more Lacanian than he might think, because in his book, while suggesting that the line should be drawn between art that is heir to the European tradition and what he reluctantly calls ‘contemporary art’, decking it out with deprecatory inverted commas, he shows nevertheless that the spread of mass art we are witnessing today covers ambiguous realities. In his way he is keen to what Lacan had stated in various ways in the seventies and which is summarised in the formula of ‘the object’s rise to the social zenith’: the art of the twentieth century testifies to the object’s rise on the art scene, whether with Duchamp’s readymades, Pollock’s drip paintings, or the accumulations of someone like Arman and even more since the Pop generation. The ‘good form’ par excellence, the shape of the human body (despite notable exceptions like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon’s work) has been disappearing in favour of works that are ever more ‘outside meaning’. Art is no longer aiming at the beautiful or transcendence, it has become critical, destructive, in a word, ferociously ironic.[4] An art critic as learned as Fumaroli finds himself disconcerted by it. He sees very clearly that it is not art’s link with money that is to be condemned but he is nostalgic for the time when art ‘used to uplift’ in the time of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ (even if to do so he has largely to reconstruct it because art has always gone from representational crisis to representational crisis).[5] Lacan resolutely introduced us to the time of the Other that doesn’t exist, he gave us the indications to move into it without nostalgia but also without illusions. The angle he traces makes the art object appear as the symptom of civilisation. To describe it in a short-circuit, it goes from the object that is ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing’ to an object that, like Finnegans Wake, doesn’t allow itself to be enclosed in any commentary and thereby puts generations of academics to work, this object whose opacity resists the power of the signifier’s elucidation. It is still true, despite what shifts, that the image is linked to a signifying articulation thus evoquing more what Lacan named a “Semblant” both included and excluded from the Symbolic register.
Object a and ‘lathouses’
In an article that mentions the Ghery museum in Bilbao and an exhibition dedicated to Bill Viola and Ortiz, Éric Laurent showed how we need to have at our disposition, following Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller, the concept of ‘the Other’s stratification’ to order the scattered universe of current art correctly.[6]
Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, furnishes an important point of reference to broach this concept[7]:
In 1970, faced with the revolting students, Lacan interpreted in his own way the challenge to consumer society that the Situationist political movement in particular was conducting with vehemence and talent. It was to Heidegger rather than Hegel that Lacan turned to support his remark as can be read in the expression he used to designate the world that taking shape at the start of the seventies: ‘Furrows in the alethosphere’.[8] This somewhat surrealist designation unites the agricultural metaphor of the ‘furrow’, in echo of Heidegger’s second period, with the reference to the sphere of the Greek aletheia (Heidegger again). Lacan uses it to designate ironically a new space for civilisation, marked less by the stakes of economy than by the overall impact of science and the techne. This globalised world, which presents itself as the era of the ‘transparent’ and ‘measurable’, will according to Lacan encounter ever more of a proliferation of objects of jouissance on the side of entertainment.
For Lacan, this object of mass industry has a name: he calls it the ‘lathouse’. This curious designation, previously unheard of, borrows as much from ‘ventouse’, the French for a suction cup, as from Ousia (which in Aristotle designates substance as well as Being).
Now, the lathouses that proliferate in the alethosphere are ‘false objects’. These objects that are proposed to us ‘pretend to transport the same libido into the fetishism of merchandise as was extracted from it by the labour necessary to produce or purchase them. […] The lie about jouissance consists in making us forget […] the particular circumstances of the extraction [of these objects] that will come to accompany the subject.’[9] Thus the quarrel over images that has been stirring up the art historians and critics is itself at base an off the track question about jouissance which in today’s world has taken on a global dimension. The true object would be Lacan’s object a (which moreover is a semblant, a logical consistency without substance), the false being the lathouse, i.e., an object that is made up of enjoying substance.
The fake object-object a binary – the latter being an object of the body but one which can be readily ceded – outclasses the other binary oppositions between elite culture and popular culture, ‘European’ art and mass ‘art’, and allows them to be treated.
Henceforth, the thrust of ‘ascension to the social Zentith’[10] proper to the objects of jouissance can in no way be read merely within the setting of the art market’s shift from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Actually, it is more subterranean and thus much more invasive and perhaps unsettling.
The object of art
Art is an object[11] but not all objects that call themselves an art object fall within the circuit of art. It has always been this way. Saying that art is an object means first and foremost that art is not a formation of the unconscious. Thus, the art object cannot be interpreted in the sense of the interpretation that changes the subject in analytic experience and which entails a subjective modification, but it can give rise to a learned discourse.[12] One has to faire causer, to give rise to talk, as Wajcman points out. However, nowadays one no longer reads the work as one did in Freud’s time when the art work could be read as a production of the unconscious with the same status as a dream or a symptom. One is right to recall Lacan’s famous aphorism, ‘the artist precedes the psychoanalyst’,[13] but one still has to grasp, following Éric Laurent, that ‘the politics of the symptom in art can remind us of how a personal signification comes to acquire a use for everyone.’[14] And to thereby distinguish between the art object as symptom of a subject, from the object of science and technology which is a product for everyone from the outset, without ever having been extracted from a living body. Thus, the lathouse does not go to ‘make up a symptom’, it organises circuits of jouissance by complementing the body. It doesn’t relate back to any ‘condition of extraction from another body’, it makes you enjoy – like a drug – without any pain being mixed into the pleasure. It makes you enjoy directly, but it also makes you forget, until lack is exasperated when the circuit that was blocking access to the unconscious ceases.
Since time immemorial, there have always been the recognised artists and then the band of those who try their hand, without succeeding, at becoming artists. The frontier between the artist and the honest artisan has always been porous. It often happens that an unknown or forgotten artist gets ‘rediscovered’ or even ‘discovered’. The ‘signature’ of a work, its correlation with a name, is moreover a big issue for artists and art lovers. This superposition of the proper name onto the object also constitutes an essential point of preoccupation for Lacanian psychoanalysis.[15] And this is why the art object is only an object ‘of art’ if it is welcomed into a symbolic bath. It needs ‘the chat’, as Wajcman puts it. The lathouse is anonymous because of the conditions of its production.[16]
Two punctuations
On two recent occasions which have been memorable for me, J.-A. Miller has spoken on the question of the object in the contemporary world. Once in a text entitled ‘Une fantaisie’,[17] the other one being “Psychoanalysis and Connexions.”[18] These two papers, in addition to the fact that they respond to one another, seem useful to quote here because they have provoked a certain turmoil among psychoanalysts.
Une fantaisie, a fantasia or a fancy, is a supposition, a fantasy, a piece of entertainment, in this instance one designed to unsettle the psychoanalysts or at least to awaken them. The fantasia in question consists in commenting on a remark of Lacan’s in “Radiophonie.”[19] Lacan says that soon everyone will be a psychoanalyst: ‘The rise to the social zenith of the object I have called small a would be sufficient for this, through the effect of anxiety that is provoked by the scooping out whose product is our discourse, on account of failing in its production.’
In his ‘Fantasia’, J.-A. Miller wonders whether this might not have happened, whether the object a has not risen today to the social zenith. If his text were exact (but that’s a ‘fancy’), the result would be the formula that Miller develops as the contemporary generalised discourse: a is in control, it is imposing itself on subjects by all the means of gadgetry (internet, television publicity, mobile phones, etc.) that come to plug up their want-of-Being. Its product is immediately assessable (in hard cash or as a speculative product as the artists’ work can be too). If this fancy were to turn out to be true, the result would be total relativism: everything would have the same value, everything would be equivalent, because everything would be definitively measured by the yardstick of the object’s market value. Without a doubt this is a strong trend in our society. Might it not be that we are seeing – as Miller remarks – a new writing of a discourse we are acquainted with, that of the psychoanalyst? Hence the question: might psychoanalysis itself have become a form of relativism in the Nelson Goodman sense, a machine designed to authorise all the fake forms of enjoyment and all manner of possible worlds? In other words, has it become liquid? In other words still, might it have no other function in our world than that of assuring the subject he may certainly enjoy without hindrance because everything is permitted, accentuating the lifting of inhibition that is already widespread in the era of the Other that doesn’t exist? ‘That would make of psychoanalysis the […] focal point of civilisation. In that case, we can only say “poor civilisation”!’[20] in Television, indicated that it was nothing of the sort.
And this is because Lacanian psychoanalysis rests on a conception of the object a that is not fed by the hypermodern source of the lathouses that correspond to the universal order of ‘sorted’, but to the order of the object a extracted from the body and which is accompanied by the inevitable failing linked to the absence of the relation between the sexes. Lacan always indicated that the a contained the minus phi of castration.
To quote Miller: ‘Freudian practice anticipated the rise of the object small a to the social zenith and this practice contributed to its installation. Besides, this object small a is not a star, it is a Sputnik – an artificial product. Lacanian practice has to deal with the consequences of this sensational success. Consequences that are felt to be of the order of a catastrophe.’[21]
And indeed one function that psychoanalysis held during the twentieth century was that of authorising forms of enjoyment that until then had been refused by the symbolic framework of the Oedipal family. In so far as psychoanalytic experience is not only authorisation, it supposes the extraction of a remainder. For the operation to be possible, there has to be belief in the unconscious.
Miller was thus proposing a direction for psychoanalysis that is neither one of derision nor of cynicism:
‘Psychoanalysis concludes today that it is the victim of psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysts, even themselves sometimes, are victims of psychoanalysis, victims of the suspicion that psychoanalysis instils and distils when they do not manage to believe in the unconscious. The semblants by which psychoanalysis itself was produced – the father, Oedipus, castration, the drive, etc. – have also begun to tremble.’[22]
Far from a nostalgic return to the authority of the father, the function of the father who is no more, psychoanalysis has the outlook of welcoming the ‘all at sea’ subjects of the twenty-first century, treating the unease through the bearings that are offered by the semblants. The sinthome is the road ahead.
The other paper by J.-A. Miller that was surprising was given in 2007 during the Paris-VIII Department of Psychoanalysis Study Day titled Lacan le savoir et les savoirs [Lacan, knowledge, and the different knowledges]. He observed that while psychoanalysis used to have a network of connections in the different forms of knowledge (the ‘affine’ sciences and the mathematical connections mentioned by Lacan in the ‘The Founding Act’ of 1964,[23] ‘in its current state today it is a minimal discreet structure, an unconnected point.’[24] In this I read an echo of the thesis of the Other that doesn’t exist and the thesis of the beyond of the Oedipus complex.
If Freudian psychoanalysis was able to find an echo in culture of an Oedipal normativation that it strove to promote without realising (even though it had run aground on the rock of castration), Lacanian psychoanalysis is today threatened with turning round and round in the forms of enjoyment obtained from these plugging objects and those that can be got from the body proper by way of extraction.
Due to the widespread absence of norms, nowadays there is no longer the psychoanalytic experience alone in which to treat the civilising questions of the father and woman for a subject (through belief in the unconscious). This is what is meant by the formula ‘to make use of the Father (as a semblant in analysis) so as to be able to do without him (without going astray in the confusion of forms of enjoyment).’
At a deeper level, what has been put into question by Miller is the nature of the hold psychoanalysis has on discourse, because psychoanalysis is not extraterritorial in relation to the thrust of the society it is part of, and yet in as much as it is a singular and intimate experience that cannot be communicated along the paths of mass discourse, if it is considered from another angle, it lies outside of society’s grip. In other words, psychoanalysis’s relationship is one of extimacy to the social.
Éric Laurent recalled this in his text ‘Bilbao’s G Spot’: in psychoanalysis, it is the cause that is at stake (the object a is the object-cause), and among the objects of the world there is no cause: ‘Causality does not proceed from the objects of the world. What there is in the world are sequences of repetition ruled by semblants.’[25] The practice of a psychoanalysis demands that one question and produce the series of signifiers (which moreover boil down over the course of the analysis) to the point at which the semblants that support them vacillate and the cause can be glimpsed beyond the good and the beautiful (a moment psychoanalysts refer to as ‘a crossing of the fantasy’).
From this point of view, the experience of psychoanalysis appears to us as a unique experience of unveiling. It touches the body and its enjoyment, it doesn’t forbid it (this is the permissive aspect of psychoanalysis) and it doesn’t prescribe it either, as such, but it tightens it around an impossible-to-negativise, which we call the subject’s identification with the sinthome at the end of analysis.
Running counter to this, the fake object draws a veil over the truth of the enjoyment it promises. It denies it. Perhaps we should consider that nowadays only Lacanian psychoanalysis allows one to question this veil in the productions of art, art criticism and art history turning out to be ineffectual without it.
In his analysis of the international art market, Marc Fumaroli has in any case underlined the fact that beyond an affair of fake objects there are bodies and names. In the last part of his journal, we see him searching for a point from which today’s art could be contemplated as something admirable.[26] He dreams of a name for the ideal in a time when the Name-of-the-Father is declining. This leads him to considerations in which the nostalgia of religious art peeps through; an art given over to a transcendental interpretative vocation for the artwork.
For Furmaroli, the name that encapsulates the rise to the zenith of ‘art business’ is that of Marcel Duchamp. He turns the name of ‘Marcel Duchamp’ into the main player and the dupe of what he contributed to establishing, namely, anonymous art and the series of industrially reproducible works…
The Duchamp Case
There is in the destiny of this notary’s son from Rouen some very marked breaks. In 1912, at the age of twenty-five, he puts forward for the Salon des independants the painting Nude Descending a Staircase. Both of his two main biographers note that the refusal of this painting which was without doubt the equal of Demoiselles d’Avignon, a major modernist work, had a traumatic effect on Duchamp. Robert Lebel[27] considers that this work surpassed everything that cubism and futurism had produced. The disarray that ensued pushed Duchamp to give up his career for a lowly librarian post.
The next chapter would see him becoming a not so prolific painter, but Nude Descending a Staircase found in New York the success it didn’t achieve in Paris. Fumaroli insists on the fact that the 1913 Armory Show in which the painting featured was ‘hung like a magazine kiosk’. Still, Duchamp went on to be recognised as one of the greatest contemporary artists in the USA, and this was so right up to his death in 1968.[28] When he went there in 1915 he was welcomed as the Pope of modern art. The painter refused by European modernism feels adopted by New York where he enjoyed his status of exception. He would spend his life between this city and Paris, without ever really being part of an artistic movement (though he did flirt with dada and surrealism).
Afterwards, this rather cold and terribly ironic man would turn into an adept of puns and a chess champion, a reluctant star. He would be recognised as a founder of abstract expressionism along with Pop art and conceptual art in their American form, and he didn’t do anything not to be. He became a ‘non-dupe’ and his position is in several respects reminiscent of the likes of James Joyce whose name Lacan made the equivalent of the Sinthome.
He slipped into this welcoming American clothing, ‘ready-made’ for him, without really believing in it and without seeking to exploit the financial advantages beyond what would assure a fairly modest comfort (nothing like the most famous of the Young British Artists, Damien Hirst). Nevertheless, from this place, he would never stop being an artist who attacked art. His most recent biographer, Bernard Macadé,[29] repeats this: ‘Duchamp spent his time putting art in question, testing the limits till in the end he admitted that it was his very life that constituted his oeuvre.’<[30]
Just like Joyce, he never stopped rolling back the frontiers of what was acceptable in the field of art. His most well known work which has become his emblem (his logo his detractors would say) is the signed urinal bearing the title ‘Fountain’ and which inaugurates the production of ready-mades. This iconoclastic and ironic gesture, inaugural for contemporary art, goes along with the decline of his painterly work. He would remake this ‘work’ on many occasions. Beyond what interests the art historians and feeds their quarrels, Duchamp questions us on the object of his art: what would we call it? Object a or Lathouse? Should we consider, together with Wajcman, that the contemporary era has modified the notion of sublimation? There would thus be the ‘uplifting’ sublimation, from the time of Freud, and ‘downward’ sublimation, the sublimation of the hypermodern era which gladly presents regular objects or objects of disgust – even scenes of torture as produced by body art – as art objects.
Hypotheses on art
I would propose a response to this questioning that is a little ‘to one side’ of what Wajcman has developed with such panache.
- First of all, it is by no means sure that the ugly is the opposite of the beautiful. (Fumaroli seems to be even more offended than the church by Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ). After all, Freud had noted very well that hysterical disgust is supported by a fantasy of sexual relation. One can love the ugly, even the horrible, one can be enchanted by it. (Fumaroli himself is in no way ignorant of Baudelaire, or Bacon, nor even Artaud or Grotowski whom he admits at his side). The fictions around which a particular field is supported, the semblants it imposes, may vary with time. But that zone of Das Ding that Lacan distinguishes in the Ethics Seminar and which he dubs ‘between-two-deaths’, beyond the barriers of the beautiful and the good, is something else. From this point of view, the merest nightmare is more loaded with the weight of the real than the most realistic horror film or the trashiest body art performance. The subjective destitution that Lacan designates as one of the elements of the Pass at the end of analysis is another name for this experience that makes the provocations of artists pale.
- The art object doubtless doesn’t have the same status according to whether it is considered from the point of view of the artist or the point of view of the viewer. For the artist, the art object is a unique object that stands out against a background of what we shall call ‘trauma’ to use a generic term. It is particularly clear in the case of Duchamp’s ready-mades. To face up to a threatening hole that is real, the artist ‘invents’ an object that keeps up a particular relationship with the body. It is also an object that takes on – in the best cases – a value in the world for everyone. Éric Laurent rightly pointed out that the art object deserves to be recognised as such, due to the singular conditions of its extraction. It is also what we say when we consider the artist to precede the psychoanalyst. We will have to come back to the theory of sublimation in light of the theory of the generalised sinthome.
From the viewer’s point of view, the question arises. It was asked by Lacan regarding the object gaze and the painting. Holbein’s Ambassadors gives an excellent metaphorical idea of the unveiling that the analytic experience allows one to obtain with regard to the object a. But the painting, to take just this object of art, is as Lacan indicates an operator of both separation and alienation. It is a trap for the gaze. Here lies the grain of truth that animates Fumaroli’s revolt against the levelling-off cultural policies of ‘art for all’. You might have ‘done’ Italy without ever travelling. You might have seen all the major exhibitions and contributed to their success at the door without learning anything. This is what the art historians and critics are battling against, more than the mass production of art objects (for example reproducible photos or cinema films fall no less within the field of art than a Louise Bourgeois sculpture in so far as they stem from what is most singular in an artist, what we call his style). Is it a ‘just image or just an image?’ asked Godard. The art image as such divides the subject within his/her jouissance.
- Nevertheless, the art object without a doubt falls within a category all of its own among the objects of the world: even if it no longer corresponds to the narcissism of ‘good shape’, even if it is not extracted from the body of the one who comments on or collects it, the following particularity distinguishes it from the lathouses: among the objects of the world it is the only one to show that enjoyment cannot be evaluated within the register of the useful. Thus, perhaps it still corresponds to the definition Lacan gave in the Ethics, it raises the object to the dignity of the cause. Because it calls upon a knowledge to be constructed around this object that divides the subject.
- Ultimately, the difference between the art object and the lathouse is that the art object (be it Duchamp’s urinal whose title ‘Fountain’ refers back to a classic art object) gives rise to a recourse to knowledge, regardless of the conditions of multiplication, whereas the lathouse object (drug or I-phone) doesn’t. It only calls upon a mute enjoyment.
Notes:
[1] Three lectures given by Gérard Wajcman in Bordeaux at the request of the ACF-Bordeaux are available as podcasts on the Librairie Mollat site. Listening to them has provided a base to the drafting of this article.
[2] To be paralleled with the often childish Americanophilia of certain managerial and political elites.
[3] Cf. for example Delacampagne, C., ‘Où est passé l’art ?’, Éd. du Panama, Paris, 2007.
[4] This was pointed out by Marie-Hélène Brousse in her Lausanne paper, 4 April 2009.
[5] Gombrich for instance in his history of art recalls the quarrel that set the partisans of Carracci against those of Caravaggio in the seventeenth century. Gombrich, E. H., The Story of Art, Phaidon 1950, p. —.
[6] Laurent, É., ‘Bilbao’s G Spot’, in Bulletin of the NLS, Issue 3, 2008, pp. 8-9.
[7] Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Norton, New York, 2007, especially the chapter ‘Furrows in the Alethosphere’, pp. 150-63.
[8] When establishing the Seminar, Jacques-Alain Miller chose this expression as the chapter title.
[9] From Éric Laurent’s conclusion to the 2008 NLS Congress in Ghent regarding a performance directed by Jan Fabre, published as ‘Metamorphosis and Extraction of the Object a in the Pragmatics of the Cure’ in Bulletin of the NLS, Issue 4, 2008, p. 12 [Translation modified].
[10] The expression features in Lacan’s 1970 text ‘Radiophonie’.
[11] Miller, J.-A., ‘Sept remarques sur la création d’art’ in La Lettre mensuelle, Issue 68, 1988, pp. 9-13.
[12] Fumaroli considers Malraux’s ‘Imaginary Museum’ to be a catastrophic example, running counter to the work of Elie Faure or Panovsky.
[13] Lacan, J., ‘Homage to Marguerite Duras, on Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein’ in Duras on Duras, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987.
[14] Laurent, É., ‘Bilbao’s G Spot’, Ibid.
[15] Anonymous mediaeval art, forgers and impostors go on making this question insist.
[16] It is not the fact that a work might be infinitely reproducible by technical means that makes it fall outside of the domain of art, it is the fact that it doesn’t testify to any extraction from a living body. Thus, a photograph for example can very well be an art work (Cf. Barthes, Camera Lucida), as can a work of cinema (Cf. I. Bergman for example) and also a sculpture. I remember my stupefaction the day I learnt that a monumental Henry Moore sculpture I was particularly fond of had been designed by the artist based on a model the size of a matchbox. He then instructs the founder on how to make it bigger and reduplicate it if need be. I learnt afterwards that this was commonplace, and had been for a long while. Jeff Koons makes conspicuous use of this procedure in his monumental sculptures of trivial objects.
[17] Miller, J.-A., ‘A Fantasy’, in Lacanian Praxis, International Quarterly of Applied Psychoanalysis, Issue 1, May 2005, pp. 6-17.
[18] Miller, J.-A., ‘Psychanalyse et connexions’ in La Cause freudienne, Issue 68, March 2008, pp. 130-4.
[19] Lacan, J., ‘Radiophonie’, in Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 414.
[20] Miller, J.-A., ‘A Fantasy’, Op. Cit., p. 8.
[21] Ibid., p. 11.
[22] Ibid., p. 12.
[23] Lacan, J., ‘Founding Act’ in Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, Norton, New York/London, 1990, pp. 99-100.
[24] Miller, J.-A., ‘Psychanalyse et connexions’, Op. Cit., p. 131.
[25] Laurent, É., ‘Bilbao’s G Spot’, Op. Cit., p. 14 [Translation modified].
[26] Fumaroli, M., Paris-New York et retour, Op. Cit., p. 481. Quoting Valéry, he defines what he is looking for in art and what he calls contemplation, referring to the contemplative religious orders. Lacan’s object a leads us by way of analysis beyond pacification, to the limit of the representable. This is a different path.
[27] Lebel, R., Sur Marcel Duchamp, Éd. Trianon, Paris, 1959, Re-edited and enlarged edition published by Centre Pompidou, Mazzotta, 1996.
[28] ‘If the New York public of 1913 fixed its attention on Ducamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase’ – says Fumaroli with a trace of acrimony, Op. Cit., p. 239 – ‘it’s down to their having instinctively sensed the affinities between their own iconoclastic tendency and the French dandy’s willingness to wring the art of painting’s neck, old and new.’
[29] Marcadé, B., Marcel Duchamp, Flammarion, Paris, 2007.
[30] Bernard Marcadé interviewed by Nathalie Georges, Yves Depelsenaire and Philippe Hellebois, ‘Marcel Duchamp l’anartiste’ in La Cause Freudienne, Issue 68, Op. Cit., p. 135.
Translated from the French by Adrian Price
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This is perhaps something of the difference between poiesis [alethia] and techne that Heidegger draws in “the difference between the art object and the lathouse” [gadget] of Lacan. In his Ethics Seminar VII, Lacan tends to praise the creative sublimations and products of tragic art because they involve “a passage from not-knowing to knowing”, crossing all fear and pity to show us the true pole of desire and “the reality of the human condition”, and he contrasts this to “designers of dresses and hats”, that is, to the gadgets and commodities of the lathouse which offer only a blind and “mute enjoyment”.
Relative to Heidegger, however, I think Lacan has a largely deflationary reading of what the art-object, as object of poiesis, unconceals as alethia [truth]. This truth for Lacan is more a subject’s truth, pertaining to the desire which comes from and inhabits the natural body, which is in part sexual, and the part Freud focused on. But Heidegger might only call this the Cartesian metaphyics of the “subject”.
For those not into scholastic or cosmic mysticism [looking for the truth or meaning of Being], and who believe their body is real and obvious via direct observation rather than the product of someone else’s metaphysics, Heidegger’s philosophy and his books may be considered to offer only more lathouse at the expense of real and actual truth and knowledge, that is, at the expense of a knowing awareness of a deeper, and more challenging, enjoyment [the real].
Nice comment, very subtle, I would also mention that some depreciation of “thruth” by Lacan enforces in return the poetic dimension of language and thus of the a object as a semblant related to the body from which it falls as a waste but also to the real of Jouissance as “plus de jouir”.