On absence and joy – Francis Gooding in LRB:

“Freud smoked incessantly, including during sessions with patients; he is rarely pictured without a cigar, of the conventional style, in hand. It makes sense that Lacan, whose labyrinthine rereading of Freud is as revolutionary in its own way as Freud’s original work, should inflect the master’s habit with his own idiosyncratic, convoluted style.”

(…)

“Psychoanalysis has always liked twisting three things together: from Freud’s unconscious, preconscious and conscious, later refined into id, ego and superego, through the Oedipal nexus of the parents and the child, to Lacan’s own Borromean knot of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.”

(…)

“Across the room, a short clip of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver plays on a loop. ‘You talkin’ to me?’ De Niro’s Travis Bickle asks his reflection in a mirror, looking around. ‘Well, I’m the only one here.’ The problem with having a painting such as Narcissus open your show is that hardly anything else can match it. But the exhibition, which features more than three hundred works, makes a good recovery. Some of it is just what one would expect to see in a show dedicated to psychoanalysis: a lot of Louise Bourgeois; some evilly erotic Hans Bellmer drawings and an alarming photograph from the poupée series; a few superb Magrittes (La Condition humaine from 1933 in particular looks very grand in this context; Lacan’s formative connection to Surrealism is usefully emphasised throughout); a number of Duchamps, including one of the reconstructions of The Large Glass and his vicious little Female Fig Leaf; works by Claude Cahun, Brancusi and Dalí. As well as the Caravaggio, there are paintings by Zurbarán (Saint Lucy, holding out her eyes on a platter) and Velázquez’s Portrait of the Infanta Marguerite Thérèse. (Las Meninas, like The Ambassadors, doesn’t travel.)”

(…)

“It never ceases to amaze me that Lacan himself owned L’Origine du monde, which he acquired in 1955. In part, this is because it is odd to think that such an important work could so recently have been anyone’s private property, but mostly because Lacan’s ownership of it sends us right to the centre of the psychoanalytic adventure. In combining the visually erotic with a title that transforms it into an image of the maternal – indeed, the pagan and mythological maternal absolute, the mother of everything – Courbet’s confrontational picture presents the very image of Oedipal desire. It is the model of the lost object, suggesting the generative, creative interior of the maternal body while also stirring feelings linked to the act of sex. (There is a straightforwardly Freudian logic to the fact that Masson’s concealing panel recreates the image, but transforms it into a landscape, with forests, hills and rivers – a barely reconstructed translation of Freud’s notorious remark that feminine sexuality was a ‘dark continent’.) The painting belongs to the history of erotic and private art, and it was commissioned and owned by men, but what Courbet’s magnificent provocation means is that they were being asked to gaze sexually into the maternal cunt.”

(…)

“Moreover, Courbet offers a pre-emptive riposte to Lacan’s insistence that the subject is always organised around an absence, a gap, a fente at the centre: this origin is not a place of lack but of creation’s plenitude, not an empty space but the site of pleasure and joy. No wonder he asked Masson to help him hide it.”

Read the article here.

The absence, the gap, is the site of pleasure and joy.

And Lacan was a visual thinker, Freud wasn’t.

I’m not sure yet what this explains, but it could explain something.