An Intimacy of Strangers: An Aesthetic Clinic

Abstract

Abstract: Fernanda Negrete's The Aesthetic Clinic. Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art proposes art as a therapeutic that does not embrace the dream of homeostasis, but it is linked to a feminine enjoyment and to an experience of non-totalization. Through the work of Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector, Negrete makes art intervene in psychoanalysis and vice versa. Tracing an intractable and incurable jouissance , in which intensity overflows what is communicable and does not settle in the signifier or the Oedipal structure, she puts into conversation Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze. Art, Negrete argues, shares the experience of the excessive enjoyment of the feminine. Thus, critics desire the knowledge of the unconscious, a knowledge that cannot be mastered or totalized because it decenters not only the artist but also the viewers and the critics.