This essay reads Jacques Lacan’s 1967 “Proposition on the Analyst of the School” from the perspectives of the metapsychology that upholds the Pass at the École freudienne du Québec and of aesthetic acts in Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral works. Specifically, it examines the aesthetic act as a possible path for the unbound drive upon traversing castration. It argues that the Pass is, specifically, a transindividual act of solidarity with desire that extends its ethics and efficacy beyond both the institutional frameworks of psychoanalysis and the control of cultures and civilizations. The essay relates Freud’s thoughts on transience and beauty to the end of analysis and concludes with a reading of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s “Les Roses de Saadi” to contend that the transmission of the Pass occurs on the level of sensation to attain, beyond cultural particularities, desire as the common cause of humanity.
The Aesthetic Pass: Beauty and the End of Analysis
fernanda negrete is an associate professor of French and the director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of The Aesthetic Clinic: Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art (State University of New York Press, 2020) and of articles on French philosophy, psychoanalysis, and modernist and contemporary writing and art. She hosts Penumbr(a)cast—The Other Scene, a podcast on psychoanalysis in theory and practice. She is coediting a forthcoming issue of Penumbr(a), on beauty, and editing a special issue of Angelaki on philosophy with Clarice Lispector.
Fernanda Negrete; The Aesthetic Pass: Beauty and the End of Analysis. differences 1 December 2022; 33 (2-3): 220–241. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-10124774
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