Sergio Benvenuto

 

Keywords: Freudian Sublimation – The Beautiful and the Sublime in Kant – Art as Care – Sublimation in Raphael

 

Summary: The concept of sublimation in Freud is examined here as a corollary of the metaphysics underlying the bulk of his works: the human being as moved by Lust. The author focuses on artistic and literary sublimation seen – in contrast with the original theory – not only as a psychic process in the creator, but also as an experience by the spectator or reader. Tracing the paradoxical status that pleasure takes on in classic reflections on art – in Aristotle and Kant in particular – the author reinterprets the concept of Sublimierung, no longer exclusively in relation to Lust, to the dialectics of pleasure/displeasure, but as process leading to the Care (Sorge) for the world, the others and for the works of art. Sublimation, reinterpreted as an initiation to the Care, thus discloses its relationship to the inevitable absence of the thing, hence its “lacunose” quality.

 

 

In The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) close the entry on “Sublimation” with these words: “The lack of a coherent theory of sublimation remains one of the lacunae in psycho-analytic thought”. After over 40 years this judgment can easily be reasserted.

But is this lacuna accidental? Or is it not rather a necessary condition for psychoanalysis itself? On the one hand a sublimation theory is missing, on the other it remains a founding postulate of psychoanalytical practice. Indeed, most analysts believe that the goal of analysis is by no means anything like the Dutch Zuydersee, it doesn’t mean draining up our desires and drives (the unconscious), but rather sublimating them. As for Freud, he considered the ability to sublimate an essential condition for analytic treatment. Indeed, if sublimation is at once the basis and the goal of analysis – in the sense that every effective analysis leads to sublimation, in one form or another – to what extent can this goal be analyzed, reconstructed and/or deconstructed? How, in other words, can analysis analyze what appears to be the condition and objective of analysis?

 

1

 

Sublimierung is apparently one of the simplest concepts in the complex structure of psychoanalysis. Freud writes: “A certain kind of modification of the aim and change of the object, in which our social valuation is taken into account, is described by us as ‘sublimation’”.[1]

Therefore, sublimation is not a mere economic and dynamic process: it is pervaded by what I would call a sociosyntonic dimension, one of positive social judgment. According to Freud, partial drives are seldom in tune with social values: because of their selfish and private nature, drives tend to arouse mainly negative social judgments. Sexuality is approved of only within its socially determined frame, when it follows social rules (marriage, legitimate procreation, couple harmony, etc.). Sublimation, instead, reconciles us with our fellow humans – it creates “elevated” social bonds.[2]

The concept of sublimation seems inseparable from Freud’s “genealogic materialism”. Freud builds his theory upon the assumption that impulses and desires arising in the body – and aiming at one’s own or the other’s body – are more fundamental, more “explanatory”, than the impulses and desires not directly connected to one’s own or somebody else’s body. Hence, according to Freud, the stages of libidinal development are named after specific body parts – especially the mucosa: mouth, anus, clitoris, penis – and their respective functions. Freud finds the origin of aggressive drives themselves in the muscles and in physiological tensions.[3] (Hence, the difficulty psychoanalysis has to recognize the radical, probably irreducible, nature of certain drives that are not connected to the body – for example the competitive drive, which leads us to pit ourselves against others and makes us keenly follow contests between human beings. The sports’ appeal is by no means something simply reducible to aggressiveness!).

As a result, according to the basic metaphysics that inspire Freud’s theory, the arché of human life is in the body as Leib, as an experienced body. In Greek, the word arché refers to “that which commands”, “that which came first” in both the genealogical and hierarchical sense, the most primitive and essential thing – foundation and origin. Freud’s theory is that of the lüsterner Leib (the lusty body) as the arché of human ups and downs. Drives connected to the experienced body and its orifices are also primal – the rest is derived, substitutive, adaptive adjustment, deviation from truth or authenticity. For Freud, human truth basically lies in die Lust – an ambiguous term, because it means both desire (which Freud called libido) and pleasure or enjoyment. In other words, stating the ultimate truth on human beings means laying bear the power of sensual desire, which has enjoyment and pleasure as its goal.

Now, if I – Don Juan – spend all day long seducing women, I am expressing the authentic proper (eigen) truth about my being; if, on the other hand, I – Lorenzo Da Ponte – write the libretto of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, then I am sublimating. Insofar as seducing women leads me to satisfying my objectual libido, such achievement is more fundamental, more primal, than that in the Opera, which merely originates purely mental satisfactions. Librettos only consist of words, not of smelling and touching bodies. Thus, seducing audiences with a text derives from seducing women (don’t some artists actually claim that audiences must be seduced like ladies?). Not that the librettist suffers from particular symptoms (like the neurotic) or of split subjectivity (like the perverse), but the pleasure of telling the seducer’s story can be explained through the seducer’s pleasure, not vice versa – there is an epistemological and hermeneutical (but not ethical) primacy of the lüsterner Leib. Furthermore, the mythical figure of Don Juan ends up being swallowed up into the depths of hell, while the librettist becomes rich and famous.

Obviously – by enunciating the essential truth of human being as die Lust – Freud takes part in a line of modern Western thought, which aims at manifesting essence and origin of the human being in something in the order of bare life; in a vital source. Schopenhauer said that the human being manifests an essential truth of the living, the Will, a blind unconscious and wild impulse. Marx said that the essential truth for humankind is labor, the process of producing and reproducing. For Nietzsche the essential thing was the Will to Power, the human impulse of commanding and being obeyed. All these are basically forms of genealogical metaphysics: the “civil” human reality (political systems, moral codes, social institutions, religious ideologies, integrated modes of living and so on) has its sources in the bare life,[4] sources that tend to be hidden away from the eyes of civilized human beings.

If metaphysics is an enunciation of the foundation and origin, what Agamben (2000) calls the messianic is that which announces the accomplishment. Now, the temptation to turn the genealogical reconstruction of civil structures into a denunciation is a strong one: these structures, because they disguise the essential force that produces human history, are illusions, falsifications. Therefore, the genealogical thinker tends to become a messianic promoter of a mutation: gaining access to a form of humanity that coincides with one’s human essence, to a truly authentic way of living. Freud termed this truth to be re-actualized “the unconscious” – the place of drives and original goals. The inauthentic world for Freud is that of repression and splitting (Lacan added foreclosure, Verwerfung, the negation at source of psychosis), which produce delusions, neuroses, perversions and psychoses. And the cure (Behandlung) consists in reestablishing a spontaneous regime of truth – through returning to truth as source. Psychoanalysis states: “I don’t repress, I don’t split – I sublimate”.

Metaphysics goes back to the arché, messianism promises Salvation. Can we then say that for Freud the lüsterner Leib is the metaphysical arché, while sublimation is the accomplishment that saves us? It is true that the psychoanalytical “Good News” may seem rather modest compared to the Jewish or Christian (which promise eternal life!) or to Rousseau’s (who promised a return to a natural happy life!) or to the Marxist (which promised the end of unjust pre-history and the entrance into just History!): psychoanalysis doesn’t even promise happiness,[5] only “living according to truth”. It is a minimalist sort of messianism – but it is a messianism nonetheless.

Is psychoanalysis a matter of conversion, in the sense that the apostle Paul gave to the term? Does it promise accomplishment through a metanoia? This is a point in which psychoanalysts diverge; hence this question is not easy to answer. In psychoanalysis, the messianic announcement is noted down as a question regarding the end of analysis. In what sense can analysis come to an end? Some don’t believe there is an end. An analysis with a particular analyst may come to an end, but analysis goes on for the rest of one’s life as self-analysis – in other words, it is endless, it never reaches an accomplishment. Others believe that there is an end to analysis, that the turning of a new leaf can occur and that analysis really is messianic. Sublimation – or creativity, according to Winnicott, – is often invoked as an accomplishment. For others, analysis converts in the way that, for example, an agricultural area converts to industrial activities. Is sublimation, then, a messianic conversion or simply an adaptive conversion?

       Let’s also point out that Freudian genealogy – at once hermeneutical and metaphysical – diverges from the image that contemporary biology and the neurosciences give of the human being. According to the latter, bodily pleasures and desires have no primacy or priority over spiritual desires or pleasures, for the simple reason that the body is subjective only because of the brain. Ultimately, for modern biology, nearly everything is mind: the distinction between bodily pleasures and mental ones thus loses meaning (the brain has maps of the body, and physiological desires and pleasures have to do with these body maps, not with the body). There’s absolutely no need to explain a passion for mathematics or philosophy in relation to more primary drives, every pleasure is primal.

Freud probably imagined the primacy of the desiring body because of the evidence that desires and pleasures having to do with the body come across as “natural”, in the sense that they do not require any cultural learning. They are our animality. In certain animal groups we find Don Juans, but never librettists. Sublimated desires and pleasures, however, do need a cultural initiation; they are therefore mediated by Kultur. The distinction between primal and sublimated would thus overlap with the classic distinction between nature and nurture. The point is that in human beings this distinction is relative: with regard to all our desires, we never really know to what extent they are entirely natural or culturally conditioned. To what extent is our sexuality something we are or something we become through our social relations?

 The in thing today is the cognitive sciences: as the name suggests, these sciences trace back to the superior mental faculties that psychoanalysis traced back to the pre-rational arché (drives and the erogenous zones, the earliest affective mother-child relationships, primary autoeroticism and so on). If the cognitivists were also interested in deconstructionist elaborations, they would say that Freud’s theory is founded on metaphysics of the ancient or medieval type – namely, one that separated spiritual pleasures and those of the flesh following a hierarchical scale. And to say that the flesh comes before the mind and determines it, as Nietzsche and Freud do, to overturn Jewish-Christian spirituality, is indeed a way to remain within the bounds of this spirit vs. flesh division, i.e. within a Jewish-Christian metaphysics.

 

2

 

Should one then abandon the theory of sublimation and, with it, all the metaphysics that inspires psychoanalytical theory of which sublimation theory is the messianic aspect? Should we completely abandon the idea of the metaphysical primacy of lüsterner Leib as origin and source of human creations and achievements? Should we, following the cognitive scientists, abandon Freud’s metaphysical materialism (along with the metaphysical materialisms of Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc.) and limit ourselves to the scientific materialism of today, for which there is no fundamental arché in human life apart from our genome?

       Yet, even if we acknowledge all the scientific and historical limits of Freud’s basic philosophy, his thesis of sublimation does still carry on an unresolved ancient debate, one that I would briefly formulate in the following terms: if, as today’s scientific materialism admits, the human being – like every living being – is fundamentally selfish (is regulated by Lustprinzip – by the pleasure-desire principle), what is the source of altruistic or metaphysical activities, desires and pleasures?[6] What is the source of so many human beings wanting so badly to fight for ideal causes, reach goals that give no immediate personal satisfaction, sacrifice themselves in the name of a god, leave works or memories of themselves that will live on beyond their personal existence? What, in other words, takes human beings outside themselves, towards ecstatic achievements that transcend them? Freud, with his sublimation thesis, tried to provide a thorough answer to this question.

Now, Freud only deals with sublimation in the case of creators: artists, writers and intellectual inquirers (scientists, philosophers, psychoanalysts). He doesn’t talk of sublimation with reference to non-cultural professional activities, even when they’re carried out with pleasure and satisfaction. A grocer who loves his job does not sublimate – and claiming otherwise would cause some hilarity. Sublimation basically concerns creative activities, which one may define as “sublime”. This very restriction leads us to regard at sublimation from another point of view, namely that of the spectator or reader. The painter sublimates while the grocer doesn’t, because the painter produces particular objects that in turn make it possible for art admirers to receive a “sublimated” pleasure; while the pleasure of a bacon buyer is not sublime, even if it is the finest bacon in the world. The spectator or reader seems somehow contaminated by the creator’s sublimating process. Here we will then consider sublimation a unique process with the creator at one end and the spectator or reader at the other. In Kantian terms we might say that sublimation concerns both the genius (the creator) and the subject of the judgment of taste.

This is not only my approach. Hanna Segal (1952), a Kleinian analyst, wrote that through works of art we identify with the characters portrayed, but we also identify with their creator, with someone who has managed to pull something of value out of an experience of loss. In her opinion, through our identification with the artist, we manage to overcome our grief, perhaps by means of a transitory catharsis. In this way, through identification with the author, the spectator or reader experiences part of the creative process. We will return on this essential point: that artistic activity always “deals with” a loss or lack.

For the moment, we will focus on a specific “sublime” experience: that of the arts, also because Freud’s choice of the term sublimation seems derived from aesthetic reflections on the sublime from pseudo-Longinus onwards.

 

 

3

 

As soon as Western thought began to confront itself with artistic experience, it immediately thematized a deep-down affective ambiguity on behalf of the spectator. This ambiguity is already to be found in full in Aristotle’s Poetics and in his well-known claim that tragedy has psychic effects. Namely, it generates two passions, eleos (pity) and phobos (anguish); but then, oddly enough, there’s a purging (catharsis). Tragedy gets its audience worked up for nothing: it is as if a doctor inoculated us with a disease, and then cured us from it. What is to be gained in such a process? In fact, being purged of pity and anguish does not ipso facto leads to denying oneself any affect; this purging gives a specific pleasure, generated by sorrow. Basically, in dealing with tragic literature, Aristotle already noticed an essential implication between the unpleasant and the pleasant.

Late 18^th century aesthetics would then develop the notion of the sublime, as distinct from the beautiful. A sublime effect was given by forms of art that excluded human presence and sense of protection – such as thunderous skies, stormy oceans, and inaccessible glaciers. For Kant (Critique of Judging Capacity),[7] the sublime covers the area of unpleasant pleasure or pleasant displeasure (Kant distinguishes between the “mathematical sublime” – which causes a pleasure that displeases, and the “dynamic sublime”, which causes a displeasure that pleases). Like Aristotle, though in a different way, Kant connects (almost perversely) pleasure and displeasure, which here overlap. Like the topology of the Möbius strip or that of Klein’s bottle (figures referred to in mathematics as non-orientable), pleasure and displeasure don’t appear in the sublime as opposites like in and out, right-side-up and reverse, but as two moments of a continuum. Lust-Unlust, pleasure-displeasure makes up a non-orientable figure. Today, as our aesthetic vision promotes the sublime over the beautiful, we can say – in case Kant were right – that a profound implication between pleasure and displeasure characterizes aesthetic sublimation in general. Sublimation, in other words, concerns not only sublime art (romantic art), but art as a whole.

Freud, like other thinkers before him, asks himself this question: in what does the pleasure of both admiring and producing art consist of? And what kind of pleasure is it? More generally, what does lead certain human beings – or a part that perhaps exists in all human beings – to dedicate themselves to something “sublime”? I.e. to something too high or too low to be reduced to a domestic economy of one’s own pleasures and one’s own satisfactions?

Now, artistic artifacts give us various types of pleasure, so the point would be to establish which one of them may be referred to as “sublime”. If I look at a nice portrait of a dear deceased friend, I take a certain delight in it – which is why I keep it hanging on the wall of my study, nourishing my bitter-sweet nostalgia. But, clearly, this pleasure mainly derives from what the portrait represents, not so much from the actual art. In contemplating the portrait of my friend, I am not enjoying it as an artistic experience. Another example: let us assume that Michelangelo’s David gives me sexual excitement. Of course, in this case, the Michelangelesque work of art would have provoked an irrefutable effect on me. But could we say that I enjoyed the work as a pure artistic event? Kant’s answer would be “no”, because he defined aesthetic taste as “the faculty of judging an object or a representation by means of a pleasure, or a displeasure, without any interest”.[8] Because sexual attraction falls in the category of what represents an interest, to me the statue of David comes across as pleasant, but not beautiful or sublime in a purely aesthetical sense.[9] The same goes for the portrait of my friend, which I treasured mainly because it helped me keeping the memory of him alive. Art, on the other hand, has to produce a particular “disinterested” pleasure, i.e. one unconnected to the pleasure taken in the actual existence of the represented object. But what did Kant actually mean by distinguishing between interested and disinterested pleasure? Isn’t the very concept of “disinterested pleasure” a contradiction in terms? Don’t we automatically find everything that’s pleasant interesting (though we can’t say the same of the opposite)? Kant would say that the statue of David attracts me erotically insofar as beyond the statue I yearn to satisfy my pleasure with a David in flesh and blood; in this case, I would enjoy the existence of a real handsome David, not of the beautiful statue.

The Freudian perspective (like the Nietzschean before it) would seem to go against the Kantian analysis: the former tends to connect together the merely pleasant, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good. Freud articulates all these concepts genealogically, he doesn’t limit himself to distinguish them logically (but genealogical connection doesn’t mean identity or non-distinction). The Freudian theory aspires to also indicating the source of artistic pleasure, and in any case this source has to be – and this is the Freudian axiom – die Lust.

In art, this pleasure does of course have to do with a dimension of illusion: just consider likeliness effects, indispensable for us to involve ourselves in a work of art (our hearts palpitate for our heroes as if they were real people) and consider the effects of art insofar as they are produced by these illusions. We can safely say that generating illusions of likeliness or erotic arousals is not something foreign to art. We notice, however, that these effects of illusion can or must be felt, but also overcome for a truly artistic pleasure to take place. In other words, Kantian disinterest in judging “taste” is the point of arrival of a process which actually began with interest. In Hegelian terms, we might say that this judgment is the result of an Aufhebung, i.e. of an annihilation, conservation and overcoming of interest as Lust.[10] And, because for Kant non-artistic interest (which he called empirical aesthetical judgment) is connected to the real existence of the represented object, access to purely aesthetic enjoyment demands something very close to annihilation (destruction?) of the object itself. On the one hand, a work of art presents us with images or sounds that very often delude us on the presence of the things it imitates; whereas and on the other hand, it emphasizes an absence or intangibility in the real.[11] And this goes for both the producer of art and its recipient.

 

4

 

Modigliani once went to see Pierre-Auguste Renoir and found him painting the naked backside of a woman, something he’d been busy doing for days. Renoir told him he just had to continue working on it, until he would wish to penetrate himself those buttocks. Such a revelation seems to prove wrong any theory on art involving sublimating or pacifying. On the other hand, we notice how Renoir, instead of spending those days trying to find a real female backside, had devoted himself to painting one he would have never been able to penetrate in reality. Does this mean that art can initiate us to enjoying a frustration? Is art, in other words, a form of perversion? I would not go as far as claiming this, at least not as a general rule.

It is true that art excites and sometimes exasperates passions, even erotic ones. But the point is that we do not act upon these passions: art keeps them passive, it leaves them at their state of “passions”. With their representations, the figurative arts give us a flicker of enjoyment, but by making it impossible thus they push us towards a care (Sorge) for what we cannot enjoy. Art gives us a sublimated enjoyment insofar as it makes us enjoy what we cannot enjoy. It does of course exploit desire, but also disarms it. On the one hand, it makes us sharpen our weapons (it stirs patriotic, revolutionary, virtuous, vindictive, erotic affects and so on). On the other, from the moment we start admiring a work, our weapons remain idle, like those of Ares in Aphrodite’s bed.

 

A particular spiritualist tradition exploits this affective paradoxicality of art – from Aristotelian catharsis to Freudian sublimation via Kant’s “disinterested pleasure” – by insisting on art’s transfigurative function. Not only in the sense that art, whether figurative or narrative, supposedly idealizes the sensible it represents aesthetically, but also in the sense that it supposedly diverts us from brutal desires (whether sexual, political, pragmatic and so on) leading us to a spiritual refining of our affects. This transfiguration is supposedly double, giving an intelligible dimension to the sensible on the one hand, and transubstantiating our passions – directing them to an ethereal and purified delight – on the other. Hegel wrote that “art has the ability and vocation to soften the barbarity of desire”. He didn’t think that art abolishes desire, but that it softens it, in the sense that it somehow inhibits desiring actions and passions. Action is “barbaric”.

Other claims seem to contradict this, for example Hitchcock’s, who argued that in cinema “drama is life with the dull bits cut out”. Yet, even if we do conceive a film as a selection of real-life scenes that may amuse us, it still ends up idealizing life itself: thanks to cinema, life seems to us intensely experienced, lived to the fullest. A life with no idle time, life and nothing but life, is an ideal life, like the lives we see at the movies or of which we read about in novels. So, of course, a lot of movie-goers would like to imitate the lives of their heroes, even when they go through all kinds of ordeals: because they want to live a full life. As a result nature (that is, humanity) imitates art.

What today we refer to as “classical art”, wished to be an aesthetic idealization of the sensible. Classical art was never merely representative (like contemporary hyperrealism, for example): it always aimed at some kind of transfiguration of the real or imagined object. A transfiguration not only of the object, but also of the type of affect it causes, from sensible emotion to intelligible pleasure.

Let’s take Raphael’s portrait of a Young Woman (La Fornarina, the Small Bakeress). My choice of an erotic work is not incidental, nor is that of a work by Raphael. I did not choose the image of a Madonna, for example, because its presence in a museum would deprive it of any religious “consummation” among Catholics, while the erotic impact of a painting can work in a museum too. Raphael is also particularly enlightening because his works are Platonizing: by his own admission, every figure he painted tended to give visible form to an eidos, to an essential figure, setting itself as a paradigm of the sensible[12]. Rather than creating specula mundi like his illustrious contemporaries, he aimed at idealized representations.

       However, in the portrait of the Fornarina, Raphael gives us a real woman, his lover. He does of course give her to us as a poios (type) or eidos (essential form) of young feminine beauty – here the sensible (the particular) seems to transmute into the intelligible (the universal type). The Fornarina repeats the Venus type following the classical iconography, though in a “modern” version. At first sight the painting may appear as an artistic deification of a real girl.

       But let’s take a closer look at her. La Fornarina looks at us with an ambiguous gaze: a sweet one, but there’s no smile. She looks at us with a tender indulgence that is not, however, inviting. She seems a little embarrassed to be portrayed so scantily dressed, and her globular eyes slope down with a reserve tainted with sadness. But to our surprise, on her flattened orderly hair, lies a foulard, yellow with brown stripes. This is a “common” coarse item – we would never see it in an image of a Greek or Roman Aphrodite. Thus we are “stung”, moved by that detail. If up until now we had seen nothing but the poios – the feminine ideal, a veil suddenly falls before our eyes: she is, after all, only the daughter of a Siena baker! After the erotic incitamentum (incitement), a punctum suspends and moves us. The Fornarina’s shameless shyness ends up disarming us. We need, then, to look at the whole figure again starting from that cloth over her head. 

       Roland Barthes (1980) spoke about the punctum with reference to photography. He distinguished between studium and punctum. Studium is a cultivated, courteous, detached interest for a photographic image, which leads us to considering its meanings impartially. While punctum is “a sting, a small hole, a spot, a small cut” (Barthes 1980, p.27),  but also punctuation and macula. It is when a trait of the photo – a detail – shakes and moves the spectator. If studium is equivalent to “I like it”, punctum is equivalent to “I love it”. In other words, punctum is the often-incongruous detail that stings us, moves us and makes us feel pity for the entity being represented. This is made possible by the fact that photography is the chemical trace of real entities, not their transfiguring representation. But the non-photographic image too, the figurative image in general, makes us notice the entity; it can be admired with studium as well or – in particular cases – can authentically “sting” us.

Now, that striped foulard stings us because it shows the Fornarina’s humbleness; she’s nothing else, just a fornarina, a young baker girl. On the one hand, Raphael’s painting presents itself as a typo-graphical (idealizing) paradigm of a Renaissance Venus, beginning of mannerist intellectualism. On the other hand, the same painting leads us to forms of pity and anguish – eleos and fobos – for the creature being represented: she is touching because she comes across as unfit for the eidos she is supposed to incarnate. All of a sudden the being (ens) and its entire scandalous contingency is revealed to us. The painting’s grace is an effect of this double point of view (idealization and stinging compassion), of a sort of irony that the sensible plays with the intelligible – humanizing it and historicizing it. And this is possible because every work of art gives us an event or a thing that grabs our interest, but also suspends our pragmatic relationships with it. Art doesn’t present us with a sacred image so that we can devote a religious cult to it, it doesn’t present us with an erotic image for us to use it sexually. This dimension of Kantian “disinterest” (despite all the Dionysian mockeries) cannot be ignored: art makes us interested in what it represents or presents – insofar as the work itself is an event and a thing – to the extent that it suspends any selfish interests of ours that may reduce the event or thing to an object of ours. The Fornarina too, both as model and as painting, is an event that moves us, insofar as it ceases to be our object of erotic or fetishistic admiration: she/it is something that does not belong to us.

 

5

 

Aristotle considered entities as divided into two fundamental categories – praxis and pathos, acting and suffering. We should reconsider today these two categories. Works of art undoubtedly induce us to movement; they are an incitamentum to acting (praxis) using, above all, the hands. All “committed” art – in the religious cult, in propaganda, in moralization, in sexual appeal, in avant-garde provocation, in the fear of horror genre – pushes us to act, attack or escape, to get ready for a fight, I would say. Sometimes art becomes propaganda of itself and thus incites brawls – as in some futurist or surrealist provocations – like in the 20^th century, when art itself became a cause, a “party” to get ready to fight for.

Yet, at the same time, the kind of art we ultimately consider superior ends up blocking this movement – it ties our hands. “Noli me tangere”, the work tells us. The incitamentum is suspended by the punctum: we remain pure pathos, passionately passive. Art at once disturbs and pacifies us, it arouses and inhibits us, and it pushes us to act only so as to carry on. A paradoxical oscillation that, as we have seen, Aristotle too had picked out with reference to tragedy.

       I remember an artist, at a Venice Biennale late in the sixties, “taking action” by freeing thousands of butterflies. That was a praxic gesture, a political-ecological one, because it aimed at repopulating the Venice lagoon with rare or extinct butterfly species. The poetic happening ended in praxis, the artistic product was an action. Yet the action had a contemplative implication: the pathetic spectacle of so many polychrome butterflies combining with the colors of Venice and actually fated to a rapid death. The artistic act is one that, in the same way as for Hamlet, also induces towards a sort of reflexive cowardice: even when the work spurs us to action or is in itself action, it still inhibits the other into an aesthetic and ecstatic admiration of the act. Not incidentally do we consider music used to dance as a utilitarian, thus inferior, art form. Schopenhauer said that art frees us – though briefly – from the tyranny of the Will: by becoming spectators of passions, we detach ourselves from them. But what does this detachment consist of?

Let us remember Kant’s third definition of the beautiful (according to relation): “Beauty is the form of finality in an object, so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end”.[13] Another rather weird statement: how can there be form to the finality of something without an end being represented? In fact, through this paradox, Kant points out how in the beautiful the being (ens) – in the form of object (Gegenstand and Objekt), i.e. of being-in-front-of-me, of being-for-me – has itself as end, how it manages to free itself from any relation with any goals inherent to my appetites. One may disagree with Kant and say that one of my needs is to see or listen to beautiful things and that the beautiful object therefore corresponds to a goal of mine, i.e. my desire to enjoy the beautiful. We basically search for aesthetic emotions to escape boredom, the pit of enjoyment. But Kant’s distinction is dialectical, because the human goal of enjoying the beautiful is the goal of enjoying not a being, but the fact that a being is in itself an aim. It is the beautiful thing’s indifference to our hunger for beauty that makes it art and throws us into dismay. It is a kind of newly found self-sufficiency of beings in seducing us in art. It is what, for example, Freud saw as the source of our pleasure in cuddling cats.[14] The narcissistic cat attracts us just insofar as the cat does not aim at seducing us, it minds its own business, and it is just this indifference to seducing us that ultimately seduces us. The beauty of the cat is not meant for us. This is why Kant dares to say that of course art and the beautiful give us pleasure, but it is a pleasure that depends not on our faculty to desire! Can there be a pleasure without a corresponding desire, a pleasure that surprises us every time beyond any form of desire, in other words, a disinterested pleasure?[15] Now, this is what Kant is trying to tell us: that art gives us pleasure insofar as we rediscover behind our objects – whether they are beautiful, ugly, sublime – things themselves; a pleasure not planned by desire, one that will surprise us.

So, art, while offering to us desirable objects, persuades us to respect the being, which we then tend to safeguard in its independence from us. This safeguarding is the reflection of the passion into which art forces us, insofar as it dissuades us from action.

We cannot obviously safeguard the Fornarina, who died several centuries ago, but we can safeguard her portrait. We feel pity for works of art insofar as they are things. It distresses us if they are attacked, thus we go about preserving and protecting them as part of our patrimony. After all, let’s be frank, a lot of people suffered more greatly for the depredation of the masterpieces in the Baghdad Museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 than for the sufferings of so many Iraqis because of the war. This pietas for works of art – which sometimes exceeds, significantly, compassion for human beings – was attacked, for example, by Tolstoy in a well-known pamphlet. Yet this pietas protecting works of art – as beings we protect as if they were objects – is a crux where ethical respect and aesthetic affection surprisingly intersect and overlap: we feel in duty to save what seduces us as beautiful or sublime or as a monument (i.e. as something meant to commemorate, to preserve memory), so that this piteous rescue will allow the thing to keep on seducing.

       In other words, the modern spectator enjoys this responsibility towards what is today known as the artistic heritage – an inheritance from our ancestors not to be consumed or sold, but safeguarded.

No theoretical or practical aestheticism will ever manage to erase this ethical dimension that belongs to every aesthetic experience. This does not mean that art gives us direct ethical training, as in sermonizing or edifying works, but in the sense that access to genuine artistic enjoyment requires a fundamental choice of respect for the thing, which is the essential nucleus of all ethics. Aesthetics is the joyous dream of ethics. That which in ethical experience shows itself with the face of sacrifice, deprivation and pain, appears in aesthetical experience in the joy and emotion brought about by the very renunciation to consume. Hegel had said that art “is the Sunday of life”, a sort of after-work activity. In the same vein, Gadamer (1977) was to talk of art as a play, symbol or Fest (holiday, celebration). This festive character of art derives from the fact that in art we put our drives (political, erotic or religious) at rest. We renounce our working day manipulation, but this doesn’t necessarily mean relaxing or being amused. The ceremony of art is also a welcoming of new beings, a celebration of a new guest into our world.

       The desire caused by every form of figurative art turns into enjoyment when we relinquish satisfying it. All artistic enjoyment is chaste, though never innocent. Interested desire makes the work of art interesting, of course. But art snubs it and transcends it to a Sunday-type enjoyment of the work of art. The purely potential strength of works thus generates power in non-consumption of them. We can then also interpret sublimation as a letting go of power, a letting it slip away of our grasp. In other words, the object of art is sublimating insofar as it makes us give up the drives that generate our search for artistic objects in the first place. In a museum, for example, we look for objects that will satisfy our wish to look – but when we come face to face with the work, the desire to look is gratified ironically: in this case, we let ourselves be mastered by the work – and we savor the unexpected pleasure of this deposition from the cross of desire.

       Conversely, we call “consumer products” those works to which we deny artistic status: aesthetic products that satisfy certain drives of ours, even too much so, works that just satisfy us too much – that are not sublimating.

 

6

 

Of course, the prosperous, pink-fleshed and desirable women of some of Renoir’s paintings, for example, do celebrate a sort of overflowing of life beyond its forms; they make us feel alive. But how not to think, also, that Renoir’s beauties have long been dead? And, even if we had been his contemporaries, how could we avoid thinking that his models are not present? Basically, even the most sensuous art is reduced to traces of something that is no longer there or isn’t there yet. Art, by offering us something precious, reminds us at the same time of the loss of what is real. But this trace of something that is no longer there doesn’t stop at referring to the thing that is lost forever, to the event that we will never experience: as we have said already, the trace itself becomes something precious, a fragile being to safeguard in our space. In other words, we settle the work down, in private houses or museums. Or, as in the case of architecture, we turn it into our house, or the house of our god.

       On the other hand, and paradoxically, art helps us give up any idea of being satisfied by images and make us do with the images. On the one hand, art provides us with surrogates, fetishes, we could make do with for enjoyment – this is its illusory (perverse?) dimension, which Winnicott called transitional – and, on the other, art frees itself from Kitsch just when, in other ways, it manages to persuade us that we have to address our eros beyond artifices. In this sense, every art tends to reconcile us to the real. It is the “critique of judgment” that every art induces in us. Of course, the barrier between reality and image or sound remains, and all that’s left for the unreal creatures of art is our pity. This arises because we set aside desire, which lays itself down at the feet of the real. Thus, art always invites us to detach ourselves from the imaginary and to reserve our compassion, our passion, exclusively to what lives.

       Perhaps the difference between the figurative and classical arts as opposed to those termed “modernist” lies precisely in this: that in classical works we experience pity (eleos in Aristotle) for the heroes and the various characters being represented, whilst in modern works we feel pity for the works themselves. Not incidentally, a great modern sculptor like Brancusi said: “Think of all those nude statues standing in this very moment at the Tuileries or Luxembourg gardens, shivering in the cold, dripping with rain and icicles!”[16]

It is in this dimension of aesthetic experience as care (Sorge) of the being that Freudian sublimation theory should be situated.

“The sublime”, Freud says, is not only art and literature, but intellectual investigation too, i.e. practicing science and philosophy. We could prove here, if we had enough space, how science and philosophy as well attract us insofar as they open up to a care (Sorge) for the being. Science and philosophy also solicit us to welcome the being as part of our domus. (In brief: science, while making chaos ordered and predictable, thematizes it; insofar as it marks the horizon of the predictable, it indicates the hereafter of this horizon, the real as Chaos. Philosophy, as Aristotle already said, arises out of wonder for the entia, beings, but not to go beyond it: on the contrary, to take us back to the wonder for the fact that there are beings rather than nothing). What then makes particular objects and aims sublime is not the fact that these objects and aims are not sexual: I wonder whether Freud doesn’t term sublime something that doesn’t end at private consumption, that doesn’t lead to the immediate satisfaction of a drive, which is by its very nature partial. It is precisely in avoiding this private and partial consumption that the social and global value of art and literature (as of science and philosophy) affirms itself: the fact that they are public events.

       Now, Freud (1922) connects sublimation to Eros (as opposed to Thanatos): energy is sublimated “for it would still retain the main purpose of Eros – that of uniting and binding – in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego”.[17] Assertions of this kind may be interpreted in various ways. Ego Psychology has interpreted them in the sense of having to reinforce the Ego as a function of synthesis and composition. Another interpretation is the following: that sublimation is Eros just insofar as it leads drives within social bonds. As we’ve seen, the sociosyntony is a fundamental element in sublimation: it real-izes Eros precisely insofar as it tends to create works that link, if not the creators, at least their works to other people. And even from our point of view, which takes into account the audience’s emotions, the experience is sublimated insofar as the fruition of artistic, literary, scientific and philosophical works socializes us. Even when we have private access to works – when we read a book, for example – we never really feel alone: by reading or contemplating works, we become part of a broader circuit, of a social bond. But the “sublime” social bond, differently from other bonds – those, for example, that aim at action, as in politics, war or sport – has this peculiarity: that it puts us into contact with a lacuna, with an “it was” or a “perhaps will be” and it spurs us to become guardians of the traces of this lacuna. The sublimating production does not generate things to be enjoyed, but lovable traces of things we cannot enjoy, and that it makes available to be socially shared.[18]

       As for the creator of these traces, her aim when producing a work is to introduce a being into the world that can be acknowledged. Today, even non-analysts often talk of their works as children of theirs: to write, and especially publish, a book, means being its parent. Is every human being’s desire to have children, the zero degree of sublimation? Indeed, the relationships authors can possibly have with their own works are similar to those that parents may have with their offspring: some follow them anxiously and oppressively, others let them go around the world on their own and cease to take care of them. In any case, in contrast to those who produce “throwaway”, “disposable” objects, sublimating creators aim at permanently imposing their products on the world (and if they are not well-received, they may get the feeling they have produced nothing but poop). The important thing is for the works to detach themselves from their author, be dispossessed of them in a way, survive him and follow their own path in the world – the desire of creators is a paradoxical one, it is to produce something that is other with respect to their desire. Something that overflows outside their pleasure, so that they may gain pleasure from this overflow for the rest of their lives.

 

7

 

With the concept of sublimation, Freud seems to find again the famous image of the soul given by Plato in the Phaedrus.[19]

Here Plato describes the soul as a chariot, which has a charioteer and two horses. One of the horses is black, intemperate and troublesome; the other is white, temperate and well-behaved. The dialogue in question refers to pederastic eros: this representation of the soul is connected to the debate on the essence of eros. Now, when the psyche is faced with a beautiful seducing image – the handsome boy – the black horse tends to rush for the object, to “consume” it in coitus and possession; the white horse, on the other hand, stops, bridled by aidos. The latter term is often translated with shame, but in Greek it actually meant respect, awe, a form of shyness. Basically, the temperate man respects the desirable object, he doesn’t consume it. Today, of course, in a culture that prescribes a systematic satisfaction of all our wishes, the Platonic ideal of shame and respect may sound laughable. Yet, with regards to the artistic or literary object, the Platonic divergence between possessive rashness and respectful bashfulness inevitably comes up again. Both the production and admiration of art imply refraining from the act of consuming.[20]

However, the Platonic allegory of the soul is correlated to what matters most to Plato here, namely the relationship of our souls with ousia, i.e. “real reality”. Ousia, “patrimony”, was translated by the Latins with substantia. Well, it is just insofar as the soul does not allow the other’s body to be possessed (does not allow the drive to be satisfied through acting), that it may gain access to the vision of the ousia – of the real, in short. The aidos, which keeps us from the final consumption of the object, predisposes the soul to appreciating the real.

I wonder whether this hygiene, at once pragmatic and ontological, doesn’t actually describe what many centuries later Freud tried to designate as sublimation. The latter would then be the drive that makes us go beyond any object, i.e. which prevents us from reducing the other and the world to objects of ours. Sublimation prevents us from seizing things and enjoying them, turning them into objects of our gratification, but makes us respect them as for themselves and in themselves, in their absolute (i.e. absoluta, loosened from us) otherness. Art thus “stings” not because it gives us the consummation of ethereal and immaterial objects rather than carnal and material ones, but because it initiates us to the enjoyment of non-consumption. In the end, consuming ideals is no inferior activity to consuming food or bodies (isn’t after all mass production a voracious consumption of ideals?). It is not, therefore, the objects that overwhelm us that are sublime. Rather, whatever, beyond the object, leads us towards something that is not and never will be for-us, towards an inhuman nature we shall never possess, not even aesthetically, is sublime. Hence that sense of suffering Kant associated to the feeling of the sublime, suffering for our impotence before the greatness and power of things – a pang that is the specific condition of artistic pleasure.

Thus, art freezes us in respect, unless we proceed to acts of vandalism. Certain hubris leads some remarkable men or artists to defacing or mutilating works of art – since Antiquity. Alcibiades was accused of mutilating the Hermae of Athens. More recently, Dadaism shocked with a kind of vandalistic performance of adding a moustache to the Mona Lisa. And, indeed, Dadaism set out to be the anti-art, i.e. an appeal to the non-respect of works of art, as an overcoming of art which is always somehow a Platonic experience.[21] Undoubtedly, certain extreme avant-gardes set out to be absolutely anti-sublimating: more specifically, they don’t aim at sublimating aggressiveness, but at expressing it as a work of art in itself. I wonder, however, whether this iconoclastic destructiveness, this artistic rage against art, isn’t actually a polarity without which there could be no sublimation (aggressiveness is sublimated too). Art can act out violence, but inflects it in irony. The Dadaist iconoclasm is not a private vandalism either, but sets out to be a social act, appealing to consensus and complicity: destructive artistic happenings still work for sublimation, insofar as, as Freud understood, they socialize destructiveness – they eroticize thanatos.

Let us take two well-known Dadaist works: the 1917 exhibition of a urinal by Duchamp, which he called Fountain, and Man Ray’s 1958 Pain peint (Blue Bread). Duchamp made no changes to the American urinal he exhibited, while Ray painted the two typical French baguettes in blue. Perhaps these two works really are anti-art, but the sublimation at work is apparent. Even if Duchamp did bring a real urinal, it is for sure that thereafter nobody was allowed to urinate in it! As for Ray’s bread, the choice of blue out of all colors is not incidental: blue is as far as you can get from the edible (hardly any natural foodstuffs are blue, apart from moldy rotten ones, like blue cheese). In any case, that bread can no longer be eaten! The Dadaist ready-made also writes off consumption of the object, which is elevated to the status of trace. Dadaist aggressiveness always gives way to humor and irony. And indeed, not incidentally, we can say that most recent art – based on installations and constructions that require the using of all possible tools – is, essentially, effectively Dadaistic. Art even sublimates via anti-art.

 

8

 

We can now perhaps better understand why the theory of sublimation is, as Laplanche and Pontalis say, a lacuna. Sublimation is a lacuna in two ways. On the one hand, it is a lacuna in theory: the latter depends on the analysis – i.e. on the deconstruction – of the knots of desires and pleasures; but when it has to say something that goes beyond these processes, it can affirm this beyond only apodictically, not analytically. Indeed, psychoanalysis fascinates us when it talks of repression, splitting, foreclosure and their by-products. In other words, of the non-sublimated. When it extensively focuses on sublimations, it usually begins to sound boring and monotonous and smells of priggishness (hence the feeling of lacuna). Just insofar as sublimation is the Ideal of psychoanalysis – wasn’t Freud himself a champion of sublimation? – it becomes hard for psychoanalysis itself to analyze it. The analyst analyzes desire starting from sublimation; the very desire to analyze is a sublimated one. Therefore, sublimation is what all psychoanalysis seems to be hooked on, but for the same reason it cannot hook sublimation to itself. That would be acting like the Baron of Münchausen, when he escapes from a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair.

       What is more, sublimation also evokes lacunae insofar as it becomes possible starting from a loss, one that is perhaps similar to a neurotic, psychotic or perverse loss. Differently from philanthropists, who care for others in their physical living presence, sublimators, whether authors or spectators, care for traces: they experience delight trough objects which, albeit meant to form new social bonds, refer to something definitively missing or lost. Sublimation rotates round a kenosis, a void, i.e. a loss of the presence of life. Like grieving, sublimation constitutes relics and lieutenants; but, whereas grieving produces detachment from a formerly present object, sublimation makes present – as a trace – what is no longer or never will be. So, differently from mourning, which is an experience of pain, sublimation leads to experiences of delight. And, insofar as analysis is itself an experience of sublimation (and as such makes a more systematic sublimation possible), analysis is bearable: after all, analysands go back to analysts for years because they enjoy it. Being a sublimation, analysis is an initiation to the care as Sorge – with the hope that one day it will care not for traces alone, but also for present living beings. The effect of the analytic cure (Behandlung, Kur) is to make possible the Care (Sorge) of beings.

 

Bibliography

 

Agamben, G. (2000) The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford University Press, 2006).

 

Atwater, A. L. (1930) New York Herald Tribune Magazine, 12 January 1930, p. 12.

 

Barthes, R. (1980) La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Seuil, Paris. Transl. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Vintage, 1993).

 

Benvenuto, S.:

- (1988-89) “Réflexions de la modernité”, Ligeia, nn. 3?4, pp. 89?105.

- (1993) “Erotismo platonico e sublimazione freudiana”, Psicoterapia e scienze umane, 1993, XXVII, n.3, pp. 67-86.

 

Freud, S.:

-       (1895) “Studien über Hysterie”, GW, I; SE, 2.

-       (1910) “Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci”, GW, VIII; SE, 11.

-       (1914)  “Zur Einführung des Narzissmus”, GW, X; SE, 14.

-       (1922) “Das Ich und das Es”, GW, XIII; SE, 19.

-       (1929) “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur”, GW, XIV; SE, 21.

-       (1932) “Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse”, GW, XV; SE, 22.

 

Gadamer, H. G. (1977) Die Aktualität des Schönen. Kunst als Spiel, Symbol und Fest, Reclam, Stuttgart. Transl. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, R. Bernasconi, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

 

Kant, E. (1790) Kritik der Urteilskraft. Transl. Critique of Judgement, (London: Macmillan, 1914).

 

Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.-B. (1967) Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, PUF, Paris. Transl. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Maresfield Library, 1988).

 

Panofsky, E. (1924) Idea. Contributo alla storia dell’estetica (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1975).

 

H. Segal, H. (1952) “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics” in The Work of Hanna Segal (London: Free Association Books, 1986), pp. 185-205.

 

Shanes, E. (1989) Brancusi (New York: Abbeville Press).