Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes

Refiguring Modernism

by Margaret Iversen

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud observed that the life-enhancing pleasure principle seems disrupted by something internal to the psyche. He took into account the possibility of a “death instinct” bent on returning the living organism to its origin of undifferentiated matter. In Beyond Freud, Lacan, Barthes , Margaret Iversen uses the writing of Freud, Lacan, the Surrealists, and Roland Barthes to elaborate a theory of art beyond the pleasure principle. Lacan was in close contact with the Surrealists and, early in his career, exchanged ideas with Dalí. This book offers a detailed reading of Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical” tour de force, The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus , in which he demonstrates a method of interpretation that involves the projection and analysis of paranoid fantasies. The author later discusses the aesthetic dimension of the disintegrative death drive explored in Georges Bataille’s Eroticism and in Anton Ehrenzweig’s Hidden Order of Art , both of which inspired Robert Smithson. Iversen also takes up a postwar-era narrative that examines Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty . Beyond Pleasure shows that the aesthetics of Freud’s theory continue to resonate in the contemporary art world.

204 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2007

About the author

Margaret Iversen is one of the leading international authorities in the field of art theory and contemporary art. Her first book was on one of the founders of Art History as a discipline: Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (1993). Since then she has continued to write occasionally about the history of art history ('Retrieving Warburg's Tradition'), but has made her main areas of study psychoanalytic art theory, publishing Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (2007). Her present and future research is devoted to the overlapping fields of photography and contemporary art. She was director of a large AHRC research project called Aesthetics after Photography (2007-2010), an interdisciplinary project in partnership with Diarmuid Costello of the Philosophy Department, University of Warwick. Other publications include a monograph on the contemporary artist Mary Kelly and an essay on the American painter Edward Hopper which appears in the catalogue of the 2004 Tate Modern exhibition of his work. Recently published work includes a book called Writing Art History (with Stephen Melville) and two articles, 'Analogue: Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean' and 'Index, Diagram, Graphic Trace.'. She is currently working a book to be called Photography, Trace and Trauma.

Reviews

[John steppling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iversen is simply among the best contemporary thinkers on culture and art. An important book in my humble opinion.