The paranoid simulacrum in surrealism : from embracing madness to the mechanism of mental illness as the purveyor of individual meaning
Part of : Γράμμα : περιοδικό θεωρίας και κριτικής ; Vol.18, No.1, 2010, pages 119-133
Issue:
Pages:
119-133
Section Title:
The individual, modernity and the emergence of mass culture
Abstract:
This paper explores the way in which the cultural, psychiatric and psychoanalytic context of the 1930s acknowledged the potential of a specific mental illness, paranoia, to speak (of) individuality. The French surrealists, in particular, hailed a number of mental illnesses as an attempt at a flight from restrictive conventional meaning, that is meaning sanctified by the group or the mass. Among these mental states, paranoia was singled out by Salvador Dali, who utilized the paranoiac’s mechanism of interpretation, in order to contrive a systematic procedure for projecting one’s own way of interpreting, that is of assigning meaning to the objects of perception. The paranoid simulacra of Dali’s images of multiple figurations accommodated the unconscious of the individual, and were the outcome of the paranoid-critical method of interpretation that he devised. In this, he was assisted by Sigmund Freud’s elaboration of paranoia, as well as the attention that paranoia had attracted in the psychiatric circles of 1930s Paris. Jacques Lacan’s psychiatric treatise, in particular, was to confirm that the mechanism of the paranoid delirium assigned personal meaning to reality in a way that mediated the unconscious of the individual.
Subject:
Subject (LC):
Notes:
The individual and the mass: literary and cultural reflections., Περιέχει εικόνες και βιβλιογραφία
