Avello Publishing Journal Vol. 1, No. 1.

2011

Lacan and the Concept of the Beautiful

Filip Kovacevic, University of Montenegro

In this article, I examine the relationship between the form of the Beautiful and the nascent human subjectivity from the standpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Supported by references ranging from Kant and Sade to Heidegger and Adorno, I argue that the Beautiful has an indispensable role to play in the formation of subjectivity. Psychoanalysis made philosophy re-consider the world it had rejected. The world of the unintentional, the contingent, the minute, and the particular, which philosophy had stripped of meaning and importance, had stripped of rank, and in this way kept out of the brightly illuminated hall in which it has feasted on the universal, the permanent, and the intentional for centuries. But there are things light does not reveal. Only from darkness come its limits and its beyond. Freuds thought encompasses this darkness, because it gives voice to its despised children. It is exactly the refuse of the physical world that speaks through it.1 Or, as Lacan would later affirm, the Vorstellungen are structured in the manner of signifiers.2 Hence the fragmentary memory of a yellow-striped butterfly provided a clue to the most significant aspects of the Wolf Mans neurosis, as Freud says, to

The account offered in this article is based on Lacans work prior to the 1960s. For a discussion of similar issues, which incorporates Lacans later work as well as the recent theoretical formulations of Jacques-Alain Miller, see Ellie Ragland, Psychoanalysis and Courtly Love, Arthuriana, (1995), Vol. 5, 1-20. See Theodor W. Adorno The Actuality of Philosophy, Telos (1976/1931), 126-129. 2 One can think of the Vorstellungen as denoting the imaginary and the symbolic representations of objects governed by the laws of metonymy and metaphor. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: Seminar VII, 1959-1960, Trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 60- 61. See also Moustafa Safouan, Pleasure and Being: Hedonism From a Psychoanalytic Point of View, Trans. Martin Thom, (New York: St. Martins Press, 1983), 21-32.

his weightiest secrets.3 Likewise, the unobtrusive action of a young woman to position herself several times a day by the stain on the tablecloth of her dining room table and then call her maid to come in spoke the original situation that her neurotic symptom was attempting to put right.4 Her husband was impotent on the night of their wedding and, to avoid the embarrassment at the gaze of the maid, he spilled a bottle of red ink (creating a stain!) in the place he expected the maid to look to find the young womans virginal blood. In psychoanalytic terms, the womans reaction to her husbands deceptive action, which was played out in terms of the described symptomatic act (no matter how insignificant it seemed compared to other daily activities), articulated her unconscious demand, the demand that the Other not be lacking (in terms of impotence), that she be an object of the Others tangible (a)rousing love, and, as such, it constituted the ontological core of her neurosis.5 This article takes its cue from such psychoanalytic attentiveness to the minute and the particular. It was inspired by a single sentence, a sentence by Lacan in the work that marked his first significant encounter with the psychoanalytic Establishment. In speaking of the constitution of subjectivity (and thus involving himself with the question that the greatest philosophical minds of all ages grappled with What is consciousness?), Lacan refers, as if in passing, to the question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erotogenic.6 3
Sigmund Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918) in Three Case Histories, Ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 281. Considering that the recollection of this butterfly was more important for the course of his neurosis than his dream of wolves, I think that the Wolf Man should be renamed the Butterfly Man. 4 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915-1916), Trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 323-327. 5 Jacques Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire in Ecrits: A Selection, Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 321. It is interesting to note that even her husbands action contained neurotic tendencies: he also attempted to fix the lacking Other (particularly the Other seen in terms of the standards of a patriarchal culture). 6 Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience (1949) in Ecrits, 3. This focus on one sentence brings to mind political philosopher Leo Strausss concept of the esoteric writing. Strauss, whose work was mentioned by Lacan in Seminar I (p.260), argues that there could exist two types of writing within the same philosophical treatise:

Beauty (or the beautiful) is not mentioned again, but the factors surrounding the formation of subjectivity are delineated, and my claim is that it is in connection with them that one can expect to find the clues about the nature of the beautiful itself. The principal carrier of the formative process is described by Lacan as being the Gestalt. It is the self-enclosed totality, the total form of the body that the emerging subjectivity perceives in the mirage of the mirror-image.7 This Gestalt exists as external to subjectivity and therefore creates a distance, a space that makes possible the dynamic of the subjectivitys unfolding. It elicits the movement from the non-differentiated to the differentiated, because it provides the image of the ultimate difference. In a dialectical process resembling that described by Plato, what-is-not reaches for what-is in order to become it, in order to really come to be.8 But that what-is (that which is taken as what-is) is primarily what-is-not; the subjectivity being constituted essentially misrecognizes the what-is-not nature of Gestalt: it remains forever oriented or fixed in the fictional direction, in what Lacan calls the imaginary.9 This understanding of Gestalt is later incorporated by Lacan into his notion of das Ding, which is examined in depth in Seminar VII.10 Das Ding is conceptualized as a fundamental hallucination which serves as an indispensible reference in structuring the subjects relation to the Umwelt, to the external world.11 It occupies the place of
the exoteric and the esoteric. The former is socially approved, or at least has a useful societal function: it does not question the values and principles the society is built on. The latter is addressed only to the initiates. It does not become apparent until after a persistent questioning of the text. The understanding of its meaning requires a prolonged, committed study and acute attention to details, such as sentences that appear only once or that contradict all that the author had written previously about the subject. These may not be the manifestations of a blunder, but may be presented in this way in order to slip unnoticed by the gaze of those who read the work superficially, and also by the possible censors, the enforcers of social values. (see his books The Art of Writing (1945) and On a Forgotten Kind of Writing in What is Political Philosophy and Other Essays (1958). One wonders whether Lacans work should not be classified as esoteric under the definition given here. 7 Lacan, The Mirror Stage, 2. 8 See Republic, Trans. Grube & Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 180-185. 9 Lacan, The Mirror Stage, 2, 6. 10 It is also worth noting that 'for Derrida, following Levinas, traces, unlike Hegelian forms (Gestalten), are not visible' (Crockett & Malabou 2010: 22). 11 Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), 52-53.

a primordial object to which the subject is irresistibly drawn, but which, ontologically, it cannot attain, because it is located beyond the reach of the primary process of psychic functioning, the pleasure principle. In fact, it is exactly insofar as there exists a distance between the subject and das Ding that the pleasure principle can function, it is only in this detour that the chains of the Vorstellungen it governs evoke sensations of satisfaction. Beyond it, there is das Ding and there is pain.12 As pointed out by Freud in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, this field of pain, the field holding out the lure of the impossible, of the fusion with das Ding, is the original starting point of all that is living, the source from which the life drives emanate.13 It is the ancient Heimat to which they strive to return, the goal of their pursuit being that which reveals that their future is actually their past, that their dynamic is actually the product of inertia which marks their essence. Their ceaseless Fort is nothing else but an immobile Da: their guarding of life no more than a masquerade for their proper function as the myrmidons of death. The same insight is affirmed by contemporary philosophy. In The Rome Discourse, Lacan quotes Heidegger: death is seen as that possibility which is ones ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable.14 Death is an axis around which ones life is organized, in relation to which one perceives and is conscious of the outer and inner world. Life exists in a detour, in a meandering path, from death15 to death. Hence it is death that occupies 12 13
Ibid., 57-59, 63. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam Books, 1959), 70-72. 14 Jacques Lacan, The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, in Ecrits, 103. See also Heideggers exposition on the being-toward-death in Being and Time, Trans. Joan Stambaugh, (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), 219-246. Realizing that the essential feature of ones Da-sein is being-toward-death provides an access to authentic existence, because death marks out the radical individuality and particularity of one as Da-sein. In this way, Da-sein is enabled to break out of the enchanted circle of the deceitful and superficial they (das man). Or in Heideggers words, When Da-sein is imminent to itself as this possibility [death], it is completely thrown back upon its ownmost potentialityof-being. Thus imminent to itself, all relations to other Da-sein are dissolved in it. Ibid., 232. 15 The A.O Prickard translation of Longinus' On the Sublime offers us: 'Only for us, when we are miserable, a harbour from our ills is reserved in death; the gods, as he draws them, are everlasting, not

the space that is das Ding, but death can manifest itself in several guises. It can be dressed up as the Mother.16 Even on a superficial level, which unfortunately represents the limit beyond which some schools of psychoanalysis never advanced, the union with the Mother connotes the world of disappearance, of primordial non-differentiation, of the nature that is akin to the inanimate. Only in the distance from the maternal object can ones separate life path be developed, only in this margin do the networks of the Vorstellungen acquire an opening necessary to cover over the real, to escape from the real.17 This escape is facilitated by particular defenses articulated by the principle that organizes the play of the Vorstellungen, the pleasure principle. Freud refers to them as the resistances that maintain the repressions,18 and, in the particular case of ones relation to the Mother, the defense manifests itself in terms of the prohibition of incest. Lacan conceptualizes desire as a defense against certain level of excitation (jouissance) being reached,19 and hence the desire for incest exists precisely insofar as it is barred from attaining the desired object. The same fundamental relation between the subject and das Ding is also revealed by the eleventh and twelfth century phenomenon of Courtly Love.20 If one examines the technique used by the troubadour poets in singing praises to their Lady, one will notice in it the presence of a certain barely visible, but still structurally marked gap that forever divides the two parties. Something stands between the poet and his Love: she is his good neighbor, but never his bedroom companion. Rather than reflecting the particular circumstances of the Ladys life, such as the fact that she lived next door to the poet or that she was already married, this neighborly relation, which is destined to fall short of
in their unhappiness' (1906: 17). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lacan, Seminar VII, 67-68, 106; Subversion of the Subject, 311. Lacan, Subversion of the Subject, 304. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 77. Lacan, Subversion of the Subject, 322. Lacan, Seminar VII, 145.

16 17 18 19 20 5

fulfillment, cannot but refer to an ontological condition.21 The Lady is always beyond reach exactly because she takes up the place of das Ding. She is located in the realm of the beyond-of-life: the sole type of love for her that can generate pleasure is amor interruptus. Hence she must remain inaccessible: (once again) it is insofar as she is inaccessible that she is an object of desire. 'Cross-dressing unhinges certainties and disturbs the familiar' (Wakefield 2011: 274). Freud himself stresses the significance of the figure such as the Lady for what he calls the erotic life of mankind.22 Her remote and self-absorbed manner elicits the recollection of the early period of infantile development, of the stage of the narcissistic indifference to the outside world: it brings one back into the time of the closest encounter with das Ding. Freuds account seems to suggest that there is a point at a specific distance from das Ding that, once the subject positions himself in it, calls forth the most intense sensation of pleasure, which in its most profound moment turns into pain.23 This point is at the very limit of the functioning of the pleasure principle: it is permeated by the traces of that which lurks in (or lures from) the beyond. It is to this point that the recognition by the Lady carries the enamoured troubadour, it is from this point that the beautiful speaks. But the speech of beauty is in part that of emptiness. It speaks of its various imaginary guises that cover over the fact that das Ding as such is empty, that the Other has no Other.24 It is precisely in a specific relation to this emptiness that that which is art, the activity that concerns itself with the creation of the beautiful,25 becomes a component of human endeavor. Lacan refers to this relation as one of Verdrangung, of repression.26 21
Lacan, Seminar VII, 151-152. One is reminded of Heideggers claim in his Letter on Humanism that man is a neighbor of Being. 22 Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914), in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. John Rickman (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 113. 23 Does this not confirm the truth of the ancient saying res severa verum gaudium (true delight is austere)? 24 Lacan, Subversion of the Subject, 310-311. 25 Lacan calls artists the creators of beauty. Seminar VII, 238. 26 Ibid., 130-131.

Art represses das Ding in the sense that it lures the subject into believing that das Ding is not there where it is, but is there where it is not. It reveals the presence of das Ding in its absence through the anamorphotic nature of its activity.27 Art is able to make appear, in the realm governed by the pleasure principle, that which is excluded from it, that which by its nature is an eternal outside. The objects in which art is embodied, the products of its activity, are far from being the imitations or reflections of the external world.28 They are in fact masked amplifiers: they transmit the speech of das Ding. That art speaks of the primordial fantasy is also hinted at by 29 Freud. What is involved in the artistic activity is not a simple undirected shaping of the matter, but an essential raising of the given material onto a higher ontological plane. Freud contends that in this way a new kind of reality is created. It is a reality infused with displaced pleasure, with the satisfaction of the drive in an object, which differs from the one that the drive originally aims at.30 Art works therefore constitute the reality of sublimation. Something takes the place of something else, and in light of that comes to share (or as Plato would say, participate) in the same level of being, even if imperfectly and also deceptively because it hides the nothing. The deception is revealed when the object itself speaks from the position in which the sublimatory activity has placed it. It becomes clear that it has the nothing as its core, that it is articulated around

27

An object marked by anamorphosis is that which yields a coherent image (only) if it is approached from a specific perspective. In other words, it enables the birth of a something out of an (apparent) nothing. Lacan, Seminar VII, 135. Here one is reminded of the concluding paragraphs of Heideggers The Question Concerning Technology, Trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), especially the following sentence: Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our look into that which grants [that is, Being or das Ding] and our trust in it?, 35. 28 Lacan, Seminar VII, 141. 29 Sigmund Freud, Formulations Regarding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911) in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. John Rickman (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 44.

30 7

Lacan, Seminar VII, 110-111.

that which is the hole. The artist and his or her audience prefer not to hear the objects voice, because it rends the veil. In Freuds parlance, they repress what they know that they know, which is the knowledge that their desire is in fact a desire for the nothing that is not nothing, the nothing that is the something constituted by nothingness. They would rather believe in the unbroken, complete and wholesome nature of the object of their desire, as it is presented in the products of their sublimations. This is why the troubadour poet refuses to blow [his Ladys] trumpet.31 He refuses to be close to her thing, to encounter her thing in its nakedness, because, as the verse of the troubadour poem affirms, it is not fitting that he who puts his mouth to that pipe be a favorite.32 In other words, once one has to recognize that the object of ones sublimation, the object one saw as being capable of representing a higher realm of being, the realm of das Ding,33 does not possess the harmonious and lack-less features one sought to find in it, one can sublimate no more in relation to that object, one can be an artist, the favorite of the Muses, no more. Of course this does not mean that the link between this object and das Ding dissolves: on the contrary, it is even more strongly confirmed, but the nature of the link is revealed to be different from the kind one hoped and wanted to find and get to know better. However, this (un)truth of sublimation is not without its watchmen, without the guardians of its limit. The foremost among them, the one that overlooks and protects its outer edges, is the beautiful. In order to chart the coordinates that define the location of the beautiful in the psychic field, Lacan refers to Sade, and specifically to the philosophical system of one of Sades characters from Juliette, the Pope Pius VI.34 31
See the troubadour Arnaud Daniels poem. Lacan, Seminar VII, 162. As Lacan points out, the Lady is in effect saying to her devoted troubadour: Just blow in that for a while and see if your sublimation holds up, 215. 32 Quoted in Lacan, Seminar VII, 162. 33 Lacan, Seminar VII, 112. 34 Lacan, Seminar VII, 210-211.

It turns out that Pius VI was also concerned with sketching out the nature of a relationship between something that is outside the signifying chain of meaning, and yet establishes its structure, and the creatures who are shaped by that original act of creation and have no choice but to live within such an always-already-there structure.35 He calls that which is in the beyond Nature, and its conceptualization resembles in many ways Freuds Ding. Nature, as the ultimate creator, establishes the laws of the animate and inanimate realms by setting in motion the self-enclosed cycle of generation and corruption of matter, the perpetual flux that fuses life and death in a framework reminiscent of a serpent biting its own tail. It is necessary for Nature to assume the role of creating ex nihilo only once, after which it can withdraw, considering that the structure of the established mechanism enables it to function on its own.36 As Lacan points out, Being therefore is not manifested in being, but the two must be thought of as ontologically distinct.37 Nature, Being, das Ding, or God do not concern themselves with the affairs of their creations, not at least until the possibility of creating everything anew emerges once again. But another creation ex nihilo necessitates the complete annihilation of the order of beings and laws which is already in existence. It requires the second death. According to Pius VI, there are two kinds of death. The first death, the one that is denoted as death by ordinary discourse, is actually no death at all: it simply leads to a transformation of matter from one shape to another, so that what was once an animal body becomes a flower plant, a fruit tree, or a worm nest. This kind of death is in reality more life-enabling than life-threatening.38 The second death,

35
766-767.

The Marquis de Sade, Juliette, Trans. Austryn Wainhouse, (New York: Grove Press, 1968),

36 37

Sade, Juliette, 769. Lacan, Seminar VII, 214. Heidegger refers to the same point to show that neither the claims of philosophical realism nor those of philosophical idealism are entirely right (or entirely wrong). The world is not separate from consciousness, but neither is it created by consciousness. Beings cannot explain being, but neither can being give birth to beings. But for Heidegger (as opposed to Kant, Sade, Freud and Lacan), the two are equally primordial; they come into being together; they are present in the relation of being-in. (Being and Time), 124. 38 Sade, Juliette, 770, 773-775.

however, is quite different. It goes to the heart of the functioning of the cycle of generation and corruption, and aims at stopping its recurrence. It seeks to disable the regeneration resultant from the corpses we bury,39 and in this way rupture the existing laws of the animate and inanimate realms. It hands back to Nature the possibility of exercising its primary power; it lets it engage in an act of original creation once again. The field of the second death is therefore the field of radical desire, of the impossible raising of oneself to the godlike position, of ones becoming what is unthinkable that one can ever be, the rescuer of Nature (that is, of das Ding) itself. It is at the entrance into this space of absolute annihilation, at the very limit of the Hades, that a form, a presence, surges forth: the knife falls from the murderers hand, the glass filled with poison is spilled, the sleeping figure awakes from a dream of destruction. This moment marks the appearance of the beautiful, the appearance of the appearance, which holds one back.40 It is not that one stops in ones tracks with the will to move as if spent, because of what this beautiful form is in itself, but because one glimpses something that is behind it, something that gives it support, from which it has separated in the final bid to prevent this planned plunge into death.41 It might even be said that in the beautiful there is embodied the desire of the evil, the evil protecting itself from itself, shielding itself from its own repetition compulsion. One of the faces of the beautiful is that of the Sadean fantasm. This fantasm is given birth by the suffering object, by that victim of unspeakable tortures and never-ending torment. Yet it represents the victims indestructible double, something that is impervious to all pain: bizarre atrocities devised by Sades libertines cannot affect it.42 It is exactly this inability to be affected, this indifference to the state of the object giving rise to it, that constitutes the essence 39 40 41 42 10
Sade, Juliette, 772; quoted in Lacan, Seminar VII, 211. Lacan, Seminar VII, 216-217. Ibid., 238-239. Ibid., 261; see also Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, Trans. Helen Lane, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 23-24.

of the beautiful. One is reminded of Kants definition of the beautiful as that which elicits a contemplative stand, an attitude of the imaginary that manifests explicit unconcern with the consequences that the actual existence of the object may have on the way reality is structured.43 The real lurks behind the beautiful, but it cannot touch it.44 It is not the case either that the beautiful can be touched by the one perceiving it, the one that is on the way to das Ding. But the beautiful stops this traveler: what the understanding of its message provides is none other than a source of jouissance. In fact, one of the fundamental conclusions Lacan draws from the Freudian discovery is that all satisfaction first takes place in the realm of the imaginary, it is hallucinated, it represents a psychic Besetzung into something that proved to be capable of pleasing in the past. It is only after this initial surge of pleasure that an effort is made to connect this experience for the sake of its continuation with something that approximates the hallucinated (the pleasurable) object out there in the external world.45 In this respect, the beautiful can be seen as exactly that site toward which the imaginary is oriented, the site revealing both the limit of the most intense jouissance and the production of fantasms that constitute it.46 The beautiful is therefore the space of a peculiar generative process. Any object that enters it becomes an inscription, a cut around which a network of the Vorstellungen will be established. Transformed in this way, the object is incorporated into the functioning of the pleasure principle: it comes to be permeated with jouissance at the same time as its substance undergoes a qualitative modification. In order to speak from the position of the beautiful, the object has to become a

43

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Trans. James C. Meredith, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), $2, $4. 44 Lacan, Seminar VII, 239. On the subject of the autonomy of the beautiful, see Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 197. 45 Lacan, Seminar VII, 137-138. 46 Ibid., 298.

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form, a semblance, an Erscheinen. Its content, whatever it might have been before being captured by the irresistible pull of this field of the limit, is unimportant. Heidegger has shown, for instance, that the wornout shoes Van Gogh painted mirror that which is beautiful as convincingly as a statue of a Greek god, or even Titians Birth of Venus.47 The only thing that matters then is that the possibility of the objects further metamorphosis is taken away: its new identity represented by a signifier - makes it die for the second time. It becomes forever joined to a mouth that is closed.48It is at this point that one can perceive the connection between the formative and the pleasurable aspects of the beautiful hinted at by Lacan in that sentence from the Mirror Stage, which guided the desire behind the creative endeavour of this entire account. One can therefore say that the beautiful is none else than a constituting field, which creates forms, due to its nearness to that closed mouth, to that silent, ultimate shaper, and, which pleases for precisely the opposite reason: it makes distance from it possible. In the beautiful, one uncovers ones future as ones past in the non-existence of ones present. In other words, the impossibility and the necessity of existence. Bibliography Adorno, T. W. The Actuality of Philosophy. Telos 31 (1976/1931): 120-133. Crockett, C. & Malabou, C. Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and Theology. Political Theology. [11.1 (2010) 15 - 34] Freud, S. Formulations Regarding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911). In A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by John Rickman. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Freud, S. On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914). In A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by John Rickman. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Freud, S. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915-1916). 47 48 12
Ibid., 296-297. A verse by Paul Eluard quoted by Lacan. Seminar VII, 154.

Translated by James Starchey. New York: Norton, 1966. Freud, S. From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918). In Three Case Histories. Edited by Philip Rieff, 187-316. New York: Collier Books, 1963. Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Bantam Books, 1959. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Sambaugh. New York: SUNY Press, 1996. Heidegger, M. The Question Concerningv Technology. Translated by Wiliam Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Kant, I. The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Translated by James C. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1911. Lacan, J. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan, 1-7. New York: Norton, 1977. Lacan, J. The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious. In Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan, 292-325. New York: Norton, 1977. Lacan, J. Freuds Papers on Technique: Seminar I, 1953-1954. Translated by John Forrester. New York: Norton, 1988. Lacan, J. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: Seminar VII, 1959-1960. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992. Paz, O. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. Transled by Helen Lane. New York: Hartcourt Brace, 195. Plato. Republic. Translated by Grube & Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Sade, M de. Juliette. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1968. Safouan, M. Pleasure and Being: Hedonism from a Psychoanalytic Point of View. Translated by Martin Thom. New York: St. Martins Press, 1983. Schiller, F. Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Translated by Elizabeth Wilkinson & L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945/1988

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Wakefield, J. Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations. Film Philosophy Journal. Vol 15, No 1. 2011.

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