In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Italian Turn:A Certain Tendency in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Aesthetics
  • Mauro Resmini (bio)

Difference, split, contingency: it is through these all too familiar and thus unheimlich terms that we can conceive of what I will call an Italian turn in psychoanalytic aesthetics. The word "turn," as I will use it here, brings to mind a shift of direction or tendency; this essay will highlight the series of separations that define the contours of this shift and that make it a new and unique tendency in contemporary aesthetics. Born midway between the couch and academia, the Italian turn has not yet attained the privilege of living within the safe walls of a school, nor is it sustained by any will to secure itself as a system. It invites us instead to imagine it in the precarious terms of a possibility, an occasion, an opening. In that sense, the Italian turn is also Italy's turn back toward the limelight of critical theory.1 Yet its very existence remains to be argued for and demonstrated—or rather, inaugurated as an opportunity to ask different questions about art and about psychoanalysis itself. This essay pursues such an inquiry.

To explain the nature and promise of the Italian turn I will identify the shared questions—and different answers—offered by various participants in the new direction. They form a diverse group, including: the psychoanalytic clinician and academic Massimo Recalcati; the literary theorist Giovanni Bottiroli; the scholar of aesthetics Fulvio Carmagnola; the film and media scholar Andrea Bellavita; and the philosopher Silvano Petrosino. My search for common traits among them will require a synthetic and inductive approach. Although I am well aware that any act of naming implies violence and subtraction—that is the price to be paid to introduce what is named into a shared discourse—I will refrain as far as possible from oversimplification and unwarranted generalizations. [End Page 271]

A Return to Lacan

On a fundamental level, the Italian turn in psychoanalytic aesthetics is by and large informed by Jacques Lacan's return to Freud and in this way it reflects a split or separation within the psychoanalytic field as a whole. The authors of the Italian turn possess to various degrees a deep engagement with Lacanian theory, but they also recognize Lacan's lack of an organic aesthetic theory. While references to art appear throughout Lacan's oeuvre and while they serve as more than mere examples to illustrate a theory, they do not provide a solid ground upon which to erect a systematic aesthetics. In the preface to the English edition of Seminar XI on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, even Lacan openly admitted to his "embarrassment where art—an element in which Freud did not bathe without mishap—is concerned" (1998, p. ix). The representatives of the Italian turn appreciate and somehow share Lacan's "embarrassment." Acknowledging the necessarily contingent, a-systematic character of thinking about aesthetics with Lacan, they make no claims for "Lacan's aesthetic theory" but instead apply aesthetics "à la lacanienne."2

In a Nietzschean vein, François Regnault (1997) reminds us that "not creating a system" ("ne pas faire système") in psychoanalysis amounts to remaining always attentive to the experience that is capable of destabilizing our theoretical assumptions (p. 5). This claim translates perfectly into the Italian setting. For the Italian turn, non fare sistema means that the experience of art forces psychoanalysis to scrutinize its own theoretical tenets thoroughly, starting with the "continent," as Freud called it, that defines the boundaries of its discipline— namely, the unconscious. In Recalcati's words, "the classic notion of psychoanalysis applied to art should be substituted by the Lacanian idea of a psychoanalysis implied in art. It is the artist who teaches psychoanalysis something that concerns its innermost object of study"3 (2007, p. xi) and not the other way around—as happened in some of the darkest corners of a flawed Freudianism.4 [End Page 272]

Bringing the Plague

Another separation that defines the Italian turn is located within the Lacanian turf and concerns these authors as readers of Lacan: What kind of position do they adopt in their encounter with the Lacanian body of...

pdf

Share