Translation of Contemporary Radical Thinkers
Aesthetic unconsciousness
L’inconscient esthétique
By Jacques lancier
Jacques Rancière
Blue river translation
Nanjing University Press
January 2020
01
content validity
In this book, Lancey does not use Freud's concept to interpret literary and artistic works. Instead, he is concerned about why such an interpretation plays a very important role in proving the contemporary value of psychoanalytic concepts. For Freud, in order to use Oedipus complex as a means to interpret the text, he must first produce a special concept of Oedipus, which belongs to the re creation of the concept of ancient Greece by Romanticism. In this way, a special non thinking and the concept of keeping silent speech are produced. From then on, it can not be concluded that aesthetic unconsciousness has given Freud's concept of unconsciousness in advance. Freud's aesthetic analysis reveals the tension between the two forms of unconsciousness. In this short and concise book, Lancey shows this tension relationship, revealing what is most important in the confrontation between two kinds of unconsciousness.
02
Author and translator
Jacques lancier
Born in Algiers, French philosopher, Honorary Professor of philosophy, Paris eighth University. Former head of the Department of philosophy, eighth University of Paris, in his early years, he co wrote "reading capital" with Al Du Jose. In the early 1990s, he began to focus on the study of aesthetics politics. His main works include the theory of aesthetics, the politics of literature, the philosopher and his poor people, the fate of images, the body of words, ambiguity: Politics and philosophy, the image of history, the name of history, dissatisfaction in aesthetics, the lessons of Althusser, etc.
Blue River
Professor and doctoral supervisor of the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University, researcher of the research center of Marxist social theory of Nanjing University, young social science talents of Jiangsu Province, with the main research direction of Marxism abroad and the radical left-wing thought of contemporary Europe. His main works are "being loyal to the event itself: an introduction to Badio's philosophy and thoughts" and "Forrest gumben's five lectures". His major translations include Badio's "being and event", "logic of the world", "century", "philosophy Manifesto", "second philosophy Manifesto", "little Pantheon", "overview of metapolitics", "Ode to mathematics", Forrest gumben's "sacrament of language", "open", "Ningfu", and Lancey E's dissatisfaction in aesthetics, etc.
03
Catalog
Chapter one what did Freud do to aesthetics?
Chapter two the defects of the protagonist
Chapter III aesthetic revolution
Chapter four two forms of silent speech
Chapter five from one kind of unconsciousness to another
Chapter six Freud's amendment
Chapter 7 different uses of details
Chapter VIII conflict between two types of drugs
04
Excerpt from the first chapter of the book
[this text was first reported in two lectures, namely, at the invitation of Didier cromophaut in January 2000, at the "School of psychoanalysis" in Brussels. ]
I am not going to talk about the application of Freud's unconscious theory in the field of aesthetics. I don't want to talk about the psychoanalysis of art, or even, in particular, about the large number of important borrowings of art historians and art philosophers from the professions of Freud and Lacan. Psychoanalytic theory does not belong to my field of study, and, more importantly, my interest is not here. I'm not interested in applying Freud's concept to literary texts or malleable works of art. Instead, I would like to ask why the interpretation of these texts and works occupies such an important strategic position in Freud's argument of analytical concepts and forms of interpretation. What I care about here is not only the works of several writers or artists that Freud devoted himself to, such as the biography of Leonardo da Vinci, the statue of Moses by Michelangelo, or the gradiva by Jensen, but also the various literary texts and personas that he referred to in his argumentation, such as l'interp There are many references in R é station des R ê ves, including Goethe's Faust, which has a glorious image in traditional national literature, and his contemporary works, such as Alphonse Daudet's SAPHO.
The reversal of methods does not mean that Freud's questions are completely inverted to oppose him. It is to ask why, for example, he is particularly interested in Michelangelo's statue of Moses or Da Vinci's Carnets. Colleagues have explained to us that the father of psychoanalysis is the guardian of the code, or that Freud confused the interests of the kite and the vulture. My purpose is not to analyze Freud. I don't care how the literary and artistic characters he chooses correspond to the analytic novels of the founders of psychoanalysis. What really interests me is what these characters are used to prove, and what kind of structure they are used to prove. In the most general sense, these characters prove that something has meaning where it doesn't seem to have any meaning; it's foggy where it seems to be clear; it burns the fire of thought where it seems to be commonplace. These characters are not the materials that can be used to explain these cultural structures. They are just some evidences to prove the existence of a certain relationship between thought and non pens é e, to prove that in some way, thought can appear in perceptual material, produce meaning in meaningless things, and produce some elements of freedom in conscious thought. In short, Dr. Freud, who explains the "plain" facts, has been abandoned by his positivist colleagues. He uses these "examples" in his proof because they are the signs of unconsciousness. In other words, if the principle of psychoanalytic unconsciousness can be explained systematically, it is because the mode of unconsciousness can be found outside the clinical field, and the field of art and literature can be defined as the specific field where "unconsciousness" can operate. Therefore, my research is based on the method of Freud's theory and anchored in the existing structure of "unconscious thought", that is, the relationship between thought and non thought. I think the first field that proposed and developed this relationship is aesthetics. Therefore, I interpret Freud's study of "Aesthetics" as the study of marking the trace of psychoanalytic thought within the scope of aesthetic thought.
This research plan naturally believes that we will be concerned with the terminology of aesthetics itself. I don't think aesthetics is the name of the science or discipline that specializes in art. In my opinion, aesthetics is a kind of thinking mode about the object of art, which is concerned with the display of the object of art as the object of thought. On a more fundamental level, aesthetics is a special thinking system and ideology about art in history. According to the concept of aesthetics, the thing of art is the thing of thought. As we all know, it is a recent thing to use the word "Aesthetics" in artistic thinking. Generally speaking, the genealogy of aesthetics refers to Baumgarten's aesthetica published in 1750 and Kant's critical de la Facult é de juger. But these symbolic things are very vague. For baumgarden, the word "Aesthetics" is not actually a theory about art, on the contrary, it refers to the field of perceptual knowledge, it refers to clear but "fuzzy" or unclear knowledge, it stands on clear and clear knowledge, namely logic. In the genealogy of aesthetic development, Kant's position is questionable. When Kant borrowed the word "Aesthetics" from baumgarden and applied it to the theory of perceptual form, in fact, Kant refused to give the word meaning, we know that perceptual concept is "fuzzy" knowledge. For Kant, we can't regard aesthetics as the theory of indefinite knowledge. In fact, judgment criticism does not regard aesthetics as a theory. Aesthetics is only an adjective, which determines the type of judgment, not an object field. Only in Romanticism and idealism after Kant, through the development of Schelling, the Schlegel brothers and Hegel's works, can aesthetics formally become an art thought, even though some people often think that the word is a bit inappropriate. Only in the later background can we see that the artistic thought (the thought activated by the artistic works) is equivalent to the concept of "vague knowledge" produced in the name of aesthetics. This new and contradictory concept makes art a field of thought, which appears outside itself and is equivalent to non thinking. Baumgarden defined sensibility as the concept of "ambiguity" and Kant, in turn, defined sensibility as something different from these views. These two definitions are unified. Therefore, vague knowledge is no longer the low-level form of knowledge, but the thought of things that have not yet been thought [1] (pens é e de CE qui ne pense PAS).
[1] Today we will hear again and again such a sad fact that aesthetics has been reduced from its true direction to criticism of taste judgment, which is Kant's summary of enlightenment thought. But only those existing verbs will fall. Because aesthetics is never a theory of interest. The desire to make aesthetics become a theory of interest again and again only expresses that it can "return" to a pre revolutionary state of "free individualism" which is impossible to exist.
In other words, "Aesthetics" is not a new name in the field of "art". It is a unique structure in this field. It is not a new title. What is contained in this title was previously contained in the general concept of poetics. This marks the transformation of the system of artistic thinking. This new system provides a place for the construction of a new special idea. My assumption in this book is that Freud's unconscious thought is the only one that can be based on this system of thinking about art, as well as the ideas that are inherent in art. Or, if you like, even though Freud's art refers to classicism, Freud's thought is the only one that can be based on the revolution from poetics to aesthetics.
In order to develop and evaluate these propositions, I try to explain that there is a certain relationship between a certain number of unique objects and models mentioned in Freud's theoretical interpretation and the changing state of these objects under the aesthetic framework of artistic thinking. Objectively speaking, we will start from one of the core figures of poetry in psychoanalysis, namely Oedipus. In the interpretation of dreams, Freud explained that there is a "legendary material", the dramatic power of the universality of this material, which corresponds to the universality data in infant psychology. This material is the legend of Oedipus and the drama of Sophocles. Freud believes that Oedipus' dramatic theme is universal from a dual perspective: the development of infant desire as universal and repressed desire