CFP: Artefilosofia

DOSSIER: ART, AESTHETICS, PSYCHOANALYSIS

The first question that comes to mind when addressing the relationship between art and psychoanalysis is the following: By what right and on what grounds, or yet what entitles psychoanalysis to take upon itself to issue judgment upon art and/or upon artists? This first question immediately unfolds into many. To what extent can a theory of the psychological unconscious extrapolate its primary field of application to head down to theaters, museums, concert rooms, canvases, sculptures, installations and so forth? Being an eminently clinical discipline, do we run the risk of transforming psychoanalysis into a worldview? Into a totalitarian system capable of deciphering the meaning of everything that presents itself upon the suspicious gaze and attentive ears of the psychoanalyst?

Freud's excursions into the many artistic domains are well known from theater and literature to the fine arts. Let us start with his interest in the Greek tragedy. A popular concept such as the "Oedipus complex" is the most evident approximation between psychoanalysis and the Greek theater. But is it about psychoanalysis lending itself to art or is it the other way around?

It is well known that, in regards to the German literature, Freud establishes connections with the writings of Schiller, Goethe and Heine, among others. In addition, Freud's well-known excursions into the psychology of prominent artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo; writers such as Goethe, Jensen and Dostoyevsky provide further example. As a rule, these texts aim to reveal psychic and pulsional mechanisms underlying the artistic creation. Many commentators highlighted the great privilege given to the works' contents, even more than to their formal aspects or even, material aspects. But does it exhaust the Freudian aesthetics? To what extent does the theoretical apparatus created by Freud provide us with the necessary tools to read the works of art? Not to mention the theoretical contribution of Freud's contemporaries and followers such as Otto Rank and Jacques Lacan. The inventory of questions and problems brought to light by psychoanalysis is yet to be made. Many philosophers such as Adorno, Marcuse or Rancière have also pondered about this relationship between artistic thought and psychoanalysis. Between art and psychoanalysis. Inversely, countless artists - in many diverse manifestations - took over psychoanalytic ideas and concepts. The present dossier intends to make a further contribution to this inventory.

Thematic axes

- Archaeology of the unconscious in the aesthetic thought  

- Art and psychoanalysis

- Clinical aesthetic dimension

- Madness and art

- Vienna fin-de-siècle

- Sublime, sublimation and its paradoxes

- Psychoanalysis and contemporary art

- Philosophical readings in psychoanalysis

- Stylistics of subjectivity

- Aesthetic of the real

Deadline: 10/08/2017

Editor: Dr. Gilson Iannini