The aesthetic unconscious
By: Jacques Rancière ; translated by Debra Keates and James Swenson
Contributors: Keates, Debra; Swenson, James
Edition: English ed.
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Cambridge; Malden, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 95
ISBN-13: 9780745646435; 9780745646442
Work titles: Inconscient esthétique
Description: This book is not concerned with the use of Freudian concepts for the interpretation of literary and artistic works. Rather, it is concerned with why this interpretation plays such an important role in demonstrating the contemporary relevance of psychoanalytic concepts. In order for Freud to use the Oedipus complex as a means for the interpretation of texts, it was necessary first of all for a particular notion of Oedipus, belonging to the Romantic reinvention of Greek antiquity, to have produced a certain idea of the power of the thought that does not think, and the power of the speech that remains silent. From this it does not follow that the Freudian unconscious was already prefigured by the aesthetic unconscious. Freud's "aesthetic" analyses reveal instead a tension between the two forms of unconscious. --From publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: What Freud has to do with aesthetics; title: A defective subject; title: The aesthetic revolution; title: The two forms of mute speech; title: From one unconscious to another; title: Freud's corrections; title: On various uses of detail; title: A conflict between two kinds of medicine.