There was a time when aestheticians would struggle to overlook the conservatism spread across Freud’s writings on the arts, when his denunciation of modernists and his narrow taste acted as roadblocks in the pursuit of a psychoanalytic understanding of artworks. Nowadays, we find ourselves somewhere else on the troubled spectrum. Freud’s elusive concept of sublimation has not only been restituted but become a catchall in aesthetic analyses; Lacan’s difficult concept of the gaze has produced various offshoots and is something of a banality in contemporary art circles. It is no longer embarrassing to note that one is writing on art and psychoanalysis, that one is something of a Lacanian art critic, even. Times change but the problem, as we see it, is that the force of the psychoanalytic challenge remains neutered. The radical insights it offers, that sex, as the impasse of formalization, lies at the base of all acts of formalization, has been diluted to the level of a truism that sees sex everywhere. But if sex exists everywhere, it is nowhere to be found. Rather than an entire re-thinking of the categories of aesthetic inquiry, we now find an increasing amount of work “applying psychoanalysis” to chosen objects, ossifying the radically indeterminate nature of its concepts into blunt instruments unable to cut through a world that is not already framed by them.

This seminar takes as its basis the following proposition: We need one more effort to think formalization for the 21st century. We want to bring together philosophers, theorists, critics and artists to rejuvenate the encounter between art and psychoanalysis, by focusing on the peculiar imperative to formalize as elaborated by Lacan. In particular, we are interested in papers that build upon, expand, and/or constructively challenge the significant interventions made by psychoanalytically inclined theorists such as Leo Bersani, Joan Copjec, Monique David-Ménard, Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič, among others, and their distinctive responses to the task of thinking formalization. In other words, while we invite papers that analyze artworks, performances, films, exhibitions, etc., we specifically welcome creative interventions in theoretical and clinical ideas of “aesthetic formalization”. One remembers very well that Lacan spoke often of an ethics of speaking well, and such ethics cannot be dissected from the frame of the psychoanalytic clinic as its own formalization. Indeed, speaking well must not only pertain to classical rhetorics in the service of persuasion, clarity, to go beyond the dogmatic conventions of reason. One must speak well, we must hear Lacan saying, of one’s desire, of that which doesn’t go outside reason but suspends the formalization of rationality. Put differently, how might we emphasize once again Lacan’s radical interpretation of the concept of sublimation: a formalization of the impasse of formalization?