Elizabeth Newman: Staging Desire

Lecture at the “Lacan Contra Foucault” conference, American University of Beirut, December 4, 2015. I propose a Foucauldian way of looking at psychoanalysis, which cuts against the grain of some of Foucault's own views, and a Lacanian perspective on Foucault's ideas about subjectivity, the unconscious, sexuality, and the death of man. The analysis of Foucault and Lacan's differing interpretations of Las Meninas forms the centerpiece of the presentation, with an emphasis on the notions of fantasy and the gaze. The transcription has been edited and a number of parts modified, although I’ve retained the spoken character of the original. The material here is very much a working draft.

This document gathers the material evidence of the existence of a collective effort, undertaken under the name Pensée. This group was constituted with the primary objective of studying the work of Jacques Lacan. We set out to read Lacan through the shared commitment to go beyond the mere adherence to the limits of the already-established reception of his work, given that, at least within the psychoanalytic community, these well-known routes of investigation have clearly exhausted their capacity to orient the necessary transformations in psychoanalysis today. What was not clear for us at the time of the collective’s formation, however, was that accepting such a challenge would ultimately reveal that psychoanalysis cannot be thought alone - besides the necessary theoretical engagement with its “silent partners”, psychoanalytic thinking is in fact an inherently collective activity: even when it seems to be the product of one sole thinking head, one can be sure to find there a hidden accomplice, who can - sometimes unfortunately - turn out to be no one but this thinking head’s own unconscious. The notes gathered here testify to the painstaking labor of separation that is needed for a thought to come to know its own content. Pensée was born out of the wager that such a struggle is a collective one.

A look at what it means to begin a work of art, a piece of writing, and the detours involved in making and writing.

This paper argues the waterfall paintings of Hiroshi Senju present a challenge to and a revision of the modern aesthetic category of the sublime. Using Barnett Newman’s essay "The Sublime is Now" as a touchstone for the modern view of the sublime, I compare and contrast Senju with Newman through formal analysis of their works, their own comments on art, and by drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John Milbank. Finally, I suggest some of the metaphysical implications of Senju and Newman's respective visions of art.

Hyper Real, edited by Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Brigitte Franzen and Susanne Neuburger, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, p. 343, 2010

A first attempt at a rational linguistic distinction of the real that separates the determination of characteristics from the absence of this determination-this being an attempt to assign the real to another space other than the reality in which it currently exists, which one might suspect is only a construct-is the same as the distinction between the representational and the nonrepresentational. This ex negativo concept of the real would fall into the latter category, as it is the coded denotation, the characteristic-filtering gaze, and the eyes schooled by the conventions of seeing and the desire for categories that give any form of realism the ability to deceive us with its temporal and stylistic artificiality. Either from a Kantian concept of a fundamentally unapproachable reality or from the constructivist view of artificiality that is void any reality whatsoever, if when looking at something the viewer takes into consideration the means of viewing, the methods, or the experimentation, then the real is often seen as precisely the area that is able to elude the symbols created by both the sciences as well as art, even though the real provides the very inspirations for all of the insights, discoveries, and inventions that they create.

Puts the Who's Afraid paintings in the context of Margaret Mead's "prefigurative" inter-generational society, and discusses the works in terms of the changing geography of downtown Manhattan.

The book studies a psychological phenomenon called natural symbolization coined by the famous twentieth century French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan was a follower of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. He expanded on it with inputs from social anthropology and linguistics. He is read widely as one of the post-modern thinkers and there are numerous books on the subject. The focus of this book is on the juxtaposition of psychoses with creative genius. In Lacanian theory nothing is irrelevant. Therefore focus has been on his seminars where the discussion of poetic skill appears along with identity, primary symbolization and delusion. For ages man has grappled with the question of birth and a growth from a tiny speck to sophisticated machinery that is human. The native acquires social and cultural features to grow further into a being. An author is a queer being. He is eccentric, rebellious and unreasonable. He writes. The book explores what is to be an author and what is the value of his writings for him.

In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud asks how and if the dream, which is made of images, can express its connective structure, and in particular the negation. This can be made only by interpretation. This question represents the thread to examine the problem of the critical import of figurative arts, by comparing Adorno's and Heidegger's theories. According to Adorno, the artwork is mimesis: the capability to express negativity coincides with its autonegation, with its disappearing. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the artwork is first of all a work, and interpretation is the reconstruction of its genesis, or better, the understanding of it as temporal. In the last part of the text the problem of the relationship between negation and image is tackled discussing Magritte's painting «Ceci n'est pas une pipe»: the structure of this painting (it is formed by images and words) makes it a rebus (like the dream, according to Freud), the deciphering of which carries a conceptual and interpretative work. Only this interpretation can account for the negation that it, as image, could otherwise not express.

Seaweed, the symptom, becomes caught and swept into the hard bone of symbolic, inside a matrix of rock lace, and wears it into another pattern within, within the coral, another shaping, another shifting. Jouissance is underwater, jouissance is captive, but spills over through openings into a labyrinth of white and pink cartlige breathing under water. It rips open the symptom against the coral-the symbolic. There is a dark blue moving into turquoise or perhaps a sea green that plays with a magenta light refracting off the sheen of reef …blasting colors onto the shifts and waves of an origin. The sea from which we evolved. Outside of language before…the origin of the universe whose coordinates can be located in numbers and geometry…we agree on this. We cannot locate the other side of our beginning, yet it is with us…this trace…of the universe of which we are matter…to which we belong which can also be located in numbers and geometry. We agree on this.