Synopsis

Each of the contributors addresses the theoretical questions by pursuing a definite artistic problem, including a close look at the relation between the image and the object in Hitchcock's Vertigo, the sexual aesthetics of Caravaggio, the artistic pen of Barthes, and how Cronenberg's film Crash functions as a sinthome.

Description

'This book extends our map of the articulations that link art and psychoanalysis into a new understanding of what they do for and to each other. Between Lacan and Freud, Caravaggio and Joyce, Hitchcock and Cronenberg, the authors work through the methods of art and the structures of psychoanalytic thinking about art to show us that the roles of sublimation and displacement, symptom and enunciation are at once discursive and aesthetic. The partial identifications of the object and discourse, their incomplete relationships and overlappings between them, constitute a new kind of knowledge. If this is one that lies outside the established boundaries of culture and psychoanalytic studies, then these essays take a step towards disclosing it, inventing it, and giving it a name.' - Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University and author of Ingres, Then and Now.