The hysteric asks a question to the Other: Che vuoi? (What do you want from me?). And even though hysteria seems to be a condition impairing the mind’s judgment, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses, developed in his seventeenth seminar of 1969–1970. The hysteric knows what the master, the university and the analyst do not.
Posted in Blog,Hysteria,Psychoanalysis
Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.
Her doctoral project, completed in 2010, investigated psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction, including an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik’s shoes as objects of desire, a disturbing encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s last work, and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks.She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric.
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