Innommable anglais - Christian Jeanclaude

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The unutterable and artistic creation a counter-productive education which considers Art as a minor human activity - to illustrate which one need only take the example of the place reserved for teaching Art History in schools, which is virtually inexistent). EPILOGUE When, during the creative process, the tension of anxiety is at its peak, I think that the subject is flirting with the unutterable. He is drawing so near to a familiar area that is so familiar, the intimate core of intimacy, the essence of his psychobiology, closely attuned to his body/sensation that cannot be expressed as a psychological body, that this secret zone becomes unbearable to him. But in parallel, the archaic necessity of autonomy lurking at the base of his interiority, which already as a baby drove him to model instinctual urges with ever greater precision into fantasies and thus thoughts and language and meta-language (resurgences of the subconscious in dreams, symptoms, subconsciously deliberate mistakes, as well as psycho-material realisations) drives him once again to attempt to give shape to his unutterable. When the tension has reached its height, I think that the creator is trying to represent his unutterable, although naturally unaware of it and of course influenced by secondary processes, and thus in a stylised, aesthetic and thus distorted form. If, already in symptoms, the processes of distortion make reading the subconscious a virtually impossible task, what might one say of a process of sublimation as sophisticated as that of artistic creation, especially when it is rooted in this archaic zone that I have been seeking to pinpoint since the start of this reflection, namely the unutterable? I an convinced that any creator should not succumb to the temptation to seek to utter the unutterable in his creations: on the one hand because, as we have seen, artistic realisations carry far more meaning regarding the unutterable than a word might provide, and, on the other, because this attempt to work at naming and uttering might lead the creator into wanderings that I think would be downright toxic and counter-productive. By attempting to do what cannot be done, by questioning in areas where the answer cannot be found (and is already amply found in the creation), the subject puts himself in an ideal position to jeopardize his psychological equilibrium as well as his creative inspiration. In my opinion, the additional soulful touch of the creator focuses on the fact that he finds (in other words, he knows without realising it, instead of constantly seeking it) a meaning for his life, which is why we need him so much as a guide. He would be led astray by seeking to penetrate the mystery and the element of the unknown in his works. It is precisely this element that gives them their strength and their beauty. So long as artistic creations astonish their promoter, it means they carry their share of the unutterable, which is in my view the unmistakable token that we are truly in the field of Art. Since the dawn of time, I think that human beings would not have been able to live without creators, since they are unable to exorcise what most terrorises them: their inadmissible urges. By short-circuiting operational, cognitive, or practical language, meaning the language that deludes itself by believing it is saying simply because it has words, creators provide a canvas on which to depict the unutterable. And “language is happy(!)” because it can thus name things by pointing to the thing that is represented. Meanwhile, the creator has come up against (sometimes at great personal cost) the unutterable, without shrinking from the task. Serving as the vital lead between individuals, any work will speak to people when its element of the unutterable encounters the unutterable shared by all humanity, a kind of founding symbolon7??? 8
The unutterable and artistic creation Finally, creative activity, considered within our mercantile world as perfectly non-productive, is probably the most productive from a psychological standpoint: it enables people to breathe and to live. It would appear that the mercantile world in which we live can no longer stand to see human beings brimming over with life, because the power of money blocks the path of other values, and essentially those relating to thought, which are relegated to the status of antiques. In any case, the so-called primitive peoples that civilised man has so thoughtlessly massacred (especially when the massacre takes place insidiously by the destruction of the cultural ecosystem, such as for the Inuits), have always attached greater importance to creative activities than to survival activities, which are kept to the strict minimum. It is not easy to be an artist in our particularly barren contemporary world, a situation that only highlights the nobility of those who, remaining deaf to the injunctions of the new moralists (produce, consume and keep quiet!), choose to follow the voice of pure desire. 9 <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Jeanclaude</strong> F-68000 Colmar e-mail address in the address book of the website (http://www.oedipe.org/) NOTES 1 This paragraph is entirely inspired by the Foreword to the second edition of my book entitled Freud et la question de l'angoisse, Bruxelles, Paris, De Boeck & Larcier, 2002. 2 See my diagram in Freud et la question de l'angoisse, op.cit., p. 200. 3 JEANCLAUDE Chr., Les ombres de l'angoisse, to be published 4 ,5 and 6 Ibid. 7. Sumbolon (from the Greek), the etymological term for a symbol : object cut in two constituting a token of recognition which the wearers could assemble (sumballein) the two pieces. In Le Nouveau Petit Robert, Paris, Le Robert .
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Innommable anglais - Christian Jeanclaude

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