The Pleasure in Drawing

Consenting to Self

Consenting to Self There is no art without pleasure. This does not mean that art is foreign to strain, anxiety, or pain in all values of the word. But it does mean that art always proceeds from a tension that searches for itself [se recherche], that enjoys reaching out, not in order to reach the goal of relaxation but to renew this tension infinitely, which also means that pleasure’s (ex)tension carries with it displeasure, or that this distinction itself is blurred. The emotion to which we have previously referred is none other than that by which tension forms itself, just as form reaches out, extends, erects, and projects itself [se bande et s’élance]. This emotion gives the sense of the form that feels itself forming and opening—to nothing other than itself, to its own sense of form, to the sensation, sentiment , and consent of the movement that receives and approves itself and that makes repeated demands on itself [se redemande] at its own birth. 31 C O N S E N T I N G T O S E L F The pleasure of drawing plays out in this assent, in this consent toward the self of a movement whose most fundamental law is a fidelity to itself and to its own impulse—to its thought and emotion, and not to the reproduction of a given form.15 The pleasure of drawing is the pleasure of those who do not acknowledge any given form. One could even say, of those who do not acknowledge any form but who find themselves in the world as if the first form had just come to distinguish itself in the motion of its tracing out [tracé]. At the same time, if this form opens space in delimiting—in delineating—areas, it is nevertheless not satisfied with separating, as one says sometimes too exclusively of the line [trait]. (Heinrich Wölfflin distinguishes in this way the ‘‘linear’’ from the ‘‘painterly.’’16 ) The form that draws itself shares space in all senses of the word: it divides it, it spreads it out and connects it with volume and depth; it lets in its resonance and pulse, tonalities and color. Insofar as this consent toward self consents to an impulse and not a given, to a birth and not a figure, it consents to an outside, to an other—to an alterity or alteration that, before all beginnings, will have mobilized the gesture without pre-scribing [prédessiner] or predestining it but tracing out [frayant] a path—opening up an attraction, an appeal that precedes the mark [une attirance, un attrait avant le trait], the pleasure of a desire. ‘‘Consent toward self’’ could be a formula for the pleasure specific to art or even, perhaps, to pleasure in general —to pleasure and, indissociably, to the exigency and effort that are necessary to it. If, in texts and discourses on artistic practices, emphasis is most frequently placed on work, pain, sweat, and anxiety, it is perhaps due to the 32 C O N S E N T I N G T O S E L F domination of hard work as a value in modern culture, but it is also certainly due to the effectiveness [effectivité] of hard work that art demands—in other words, the ars, technē, and mechanisms of production that give their all, art’s means and ends, bereft as it is of any natural engendering . (In fact, it follows that the ‘‘imitation of nature’’ has never truly been anything other than the imitation of the inimitable forming force of a germination or of a reproduction and growth presumed without art, in other words, without artifice and thus without search or effort.) The fact remains that these same texts—or even more so, those that take the viewpoint of ends that are sought and of the work’s reception—never fail to mention ‘‘pleasure.’’ (Grace, charm, success, finesse, magic, rapture, delicacy, or force, and finally beauty itself or sublimity, among numerous other terms, cannot be dissociated from pleasure, however complex or subtle it might be.) When one speaks of an artist at work, love, pleasure, and joy are never effaced by work but rather only modulated and rendered nobler. There is a remarkable passage in which Félibien places in a mise en abime the pleasure taken in seeing the representation of passions...