Chaos, Territory, Art by Grosz Elizabeth

Author:Grosz, Elizabeth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI001000, Philosophy/Aesthetics, ART015000, Art/History/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

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SENSATION. THE EARTH, A PEOPLE, ART

Art reminds us of states of animal vigor; it is on the one hand an excess and overflow of blooming physicality into the world of images and desires; on the other, an excitation of the animal functions through the images and desires of an intensified life—an enhancement of the feeling of life, a stimulant to it.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,

THE WILL TO POWER

ART AND THE ANIMAL

Art is of the animal. It comes, not from reason, recognition, intelligence, not from a uniquely human sensibility, or from any of man’s higher accomplishments, but from something excessive, unpredictable, lowly. What is most artistic in us is that which is the most bestial. Art comes from the excess, in the world, in objects, in living things, that enables them to be more than they are, to give more than themselves, their material properties and qualities, their possible uses, than is self-evident. Art is the consequence of that excess, that energy or force, that puts life at risk for the sake of intensification, for the sake of sensation itself—not simply for pleasure or for sexuality, as psychoanalysis suggests—but for what can be magnified, intensified, for what is more, through which creation, risk, innovation are undertaken for their own sake, for how and what they may intensify.

Psychoanalysis has the relations between art and sexuality at least half-right. Art is connected to sexual energies and impulses, to a common impulse for more. But, for Freudian psychoanalysis, sexuality transforms or converts itself into art only through representation, through the transformation of an organ-oriented libido into the energy of creative material production: art is the expression of a sublimated sexual impulse, an impulse that must be renounced if it is to gain some partial satisfaction.1 This capacity for displacement, for transferring sexual intensity or libido into desexualized or sublimated creative activities is, for Freud, a uniquely human capacity, the result of the untethering of the drive from a seasonally regulated sexuality, that is, the drive’s capacity, through vicissitudes, to transform itself into something nonsexual.2 It is only the sexual drive, not sexual instincts, that can be deflected into nonsexual aims.3 It will my claim here that it is not exactly true that art is a consequence of the excesses that sexuality or the sexual drive poses, for it may be that sexuality itself needs to function artistically to be adequately sexual, adequately creative, that sexuality (as neither drive nor instinct but rather the alignment of bodies and practices with other bodies or with parts of one’s own body) needs to harness excessiveness and invention to function at all.

There is an involuted and oblique relation between the energies of sexual selection (rather than, as for Freud, sexual satisfaction or orgasmic release), the attraction to and possible attainment of sexual (though not necessarily copulative) partners4—human and otherwise—and the forces and energies of artistic production and consumption. Art is of the animal to the extent that creation, the attainment of new goals not directly defined through the useful, is at its core.

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