Chaos and the speaking body: spitting on Hegel with Lygia Clark and the limits of language in psychoanalysis

Ana Carolina Minozzo

doi:10.20919/exs.10.2020.247

Abstract

The Hegelian dialectics, inherited by Lacan, assume a division between the Subject and historical time, or, assuming a Symbolic system that is mediated by the phallic law, that only re-produces subjugated subjectivities, without a chance to create something new or be in touch with any chaos outside this phallogocentric system. So, echoing the 1977 essay by Italian feminist Carla Lonzi: “let’s spit on Hegel” – maybe with Lygia Clark’s Anthropophagic Slobber. [...] Guided by Clark’s chaotic vibration, we can think through what happens to the body in/of the world and to the world with/of bodies through the potency of a subjective full/void that vibrates independently from any Other. In chaos we avoid the total reign of language and identity as well as materialist biological reductionism of experience. We meet chaos in the frontier of the vibrating ‘full-void’ of bodies.

Highlights

With the publication of Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (1968) and Spinoza - Philosophie pratique (1970, 2nd ed. 1981), two monographs that mark the continuous and remarkable influence of Spinoza in Deleuze and, later, Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking and writing
What I am adding to this historical debate of the body − one shaped by Cartesian dualism, medical biologism, psychoanalytic ideas of desire and lack thereof, as well as affect theory − departs from a series of art/therapy practices by the late Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, who was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis in her practice
My intention is to discuss the limits and problems of a conceptualisation of the body through the dichotomy inherent to the Freudian and Lacanian ‘drive’ − a founding psychoanalytic concept that presupposes a division between language and flesh; between the realms of a castrating Symbolic and a chaotic body

Summary

Introduction

With the publication of Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (1968) and Spinoza - Philosophie pratique (1970, 2nd ed. 1981), two monographs that mark the continuous and remarkable influence of Spinoza in Deleuze and, later, Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking and writing. I follow Brazilian psychoanalyst, art critic and scholar Suely Rolnik, who coined the term ‘corpo vibratil’ − or, ‘vibrating body’ − to address the potency of the body in Clark’s practices, especially towards the last stage of her career in the 1970s and 1980s, when Clark developed the series Structuring of the Self2.

Results

Conclusion