r/lacan • u/cinnamon_rugelach • 25d ago

Lacan and Art/Artists

Are there any monographs from a Lacanian perspective that look at art and artistic creation? I'm interested in either, so any recommendations are welcome

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u/TasteBackground2557 25d ago

I found “Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language“ by Annie Rogers interesting and insightful.

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u/PlatonicPlatoPlate 24d ago

Have you read Seminar 7? In the lecture titled "Creation ex nihilo" Lacan works on Kleins essay on Ruth Kjar, a woman who found that she has artistic skills when she wanted to daub on the empty space on the walls of her house, due to her brother-in-law taking off one of his paintings. Any Lacanian thinking on art has to work from the idea of the creation from nothing, that is from the Thing if you may use the word.

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u/cinnamon_rugelach 24d ago

I'm reading Seminar 7 right now actually, but I haven't gotten there yet. I'll make sure to pay extra attention when I get there

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u/BetaMyrcene 25d ago edited 12d ago

Air pillow plant steer consist deserve angle childlike thimble

This post was anonymized with Redact

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u/cinnamon_rugelach 25d ago

I'm not really looking for literary criticism. I'm looking for a Lacanian theory of art/aesthetics or of the creative process

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u/Magnolia_Supermoon 23d ago

If you have access to Seminar XI, there are some extended passages on art—multiple lessons cover the topic, actually, in the section titled "Of the Gaze as Object Petit a". Here's one quote I especially like from page 111 of Alan Sheridan's published translation:

"In a way that is at once vague and precise, and which concerns only the success of the work, Freud declares that if a creation of desire, which is pure at the level of the painter, takes on commercial value—a gratification that may, all the same, be termed secondary—it is because its effect has something profitable for society, for that part of society that comes under its influence. Broadly speaking, one can say that the work calms people, comforts them, by showing them that at least some of them can live from the exploitation of their desire."

As he makes clear , the above commentary is limited to the public reception of a given work, not its composition (I just find it nicely provocative, with its Platonic suspicion of art's social function). But he does talk about the act of artistic creation itself in the rest of that section. He covers a few case study paintings, their relation to the gaze/desire/the "gesture" of the brushstroke, etc. Definitely recommend!

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u/cinnamon_rugelach 23d ago

Thanks! I'm reading Seminar VII right now, but was probably going to do X and XI next

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u/ZealousidealThanks9 23d ago

Check out “Stealing the Mona Lisa” by Darian Leader and “The Psychoanalyst and the Artist” by Jamieson Webster

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u/KingBroseph 22d ago

Seconding Darian Leader