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Art: Sublimation or Symptom

Editor : Parveen Adams

Reviews and Endorsements

'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

With Art: Sublimation or Symptom Adams breaks new ground in a remarkable career during which she has made some of the most original and inspiring contributions to psychoanalytic theory, as it explores the artifice of cultural form. In the company of her gifted and insightful collaborators, Adams explores the psychic and semiotic crises of creation. The making of art as symptom, they suggest, engages the enigmatic "lack" or "void" of both sign and subject. Why do we take perverse pleasure in being strung out by the experience of art, placed somewhere between semblance and signification, beyond the mimetic consolations of coherence, reference, and recognition? Psychoanalysis may not have all the answers, but it has the deepest insights into the insatiable desire that drives us to ask such difficult questions. With Art: Sublimation or Symptom Parveen Adams has, once again, orchestrated a profound and patient inquiry into some of the most urgent cultural issues that face us today.'
- Homi K. Bhabha, Rothenberg Professor of Literature, Harvard University

'How productive is Lacan's concept of the sinthome? Lacan's idea of a writing that re-names the subject and produces a new ego through artifice, as well as his staunch refusal, to "apply" psychoanalysis to art, pave the way to radically new approaches throwing a sharper light on the links between body, ego, flesh, skin, and subjectivity.'
- Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania