Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms

Painting as Hysteria – Deleuze on Bacon

215 Painting as hysteria – deleuze on Bacon Tomas Geyskens Great clinicians are artists. When the French psychiatrist lasègue first isolated and defined exhibitionism in 1877, he did not begin his article with a description of cases of manifest exhibitionism, but, rather, with a story about a man who followed a woman in the streets each day. in order to introduce a new syndrome, it seems necessary to write a short story first and only then to describe cases of manifest pathology (deleuze, 2004, p. 275). during a discussion in the Wednesday circle, Freud, too, argued that case studies are pointless if they are merely objective reports of what has been said during the analytical sessions. Something of the unconscious can only be conveyed by case reports when they are presented in an “artistic” way, says Freud.1 The unconscious is a matter of style. on this point, le point littéraire, the clinical encounters the artistic (deleuze, 1989, p. 14; 1969, p. 273). But also the other way around: great artists are clinicians.Whoever reads the works of Sacher-masoch discovers a symptomatology of masochism that is far superior to the later attempts by Krafft-ebing, Freud and the dSm. Pleasure in pain, for example, which plays such an important role in the psychoanalytical idea of masochism, is of secondary importance for Sacher-masoch and must be understood as following from elements which are essential to masochism, such as the contract, the fetish, the education of the woman into the ideal cold mother, and the suspension of sexuality (Geyskens, 2006). one finds the same clinical acumen in Sade on sadism, in dostoevsky on epilepsy, in Burroughs on toxicomania, and in Bukowski on alcoholism. That these artists themselves may have suffered from one or another of these pathologies is less important than the fact that they are its finest symptomatologists: “For authors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients” (deleuze, 2004, p. 273). This critical-clinical project is continuously elaborated and purified in the development of deleuze’s thought. in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967) he still argued for a fruitful collaboration between literary criticism and psychiatric or psychoanalytical clinical work (deleuze, 1989, p. 14). more than ten years later, in his 1981 work Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (deleuze, 2003), 1 “eine gewissenhafte, aber ‘künstlerische’ darstellung wie in der dora” (quoted in lavagetto, 2002, p. 225). Figures_150810.indd 215 22/09/10 10:35 tomas Geyskens 216 this project has not been abandoned, but rather, transformed. deleuze now aims at a purely aesthetical clinic, which is independent of both psychiatry and psychoanalysis.2 Therefore, his Francis Bacon is not only a book about painting, but also about the clinical essence of painting, namely, hysteria.3 But how must we understand this clinical/aesthetical relation between painting and hysteria? and why is the work of Francis Bacon so appropriate to elucidate hysteria as the clinical essence of painting? and what is wrong with, for example, the psychoanalytical theory of hysteria, that it must be replaced with an aesthetic clinic that should remain totally independent of psychoanalysis and psychiatry? We shall try to answer this last question first, even though in his book on Bacon deleuze does not treat this question himself. aside from some sneering remarks, psychoanalysis – along with criticism of it – no longer plays a role in deleuze’s thought after 1980. according to Freud, the hysterical body tells a story. The hysterical symptoms, the convulsions, the anaesthesias and hyperaesthesias, the paralyses, the disorders of sensory activity, etc., are symbolic representations of traumatic memories or repressed fantasies. The most remarkable symptom of hysteria, the grande attaque, was also analyzed by Freud and Breuer as the expression of a psychic representation: “The constant and essential content of a (recurrent) hysterical attack is in the return of a psychical state which the patient has already experienced earlier – in other words, the return of a memory. We are asserting, then, that the essential portion of a hysterical attack is comprised in charcot’s phase of the attitudes passionnelles. in many cases it is quite obvious that this phase comprises a memory from the patient’s life and frequently, indeed, that memory is always the same one” (Freud, 1893a, p. 152). When such psychic content is missing, and the attack is limited to corporeal phenomena – epileptic convulsions or cataleptic sleep – Freud nevertheless finds a psychic representation to which the somatic symptoms seem to correspond: “even in such...