"This book extends our map of the articulations that link art and psychoanalysis into a new understanding of what they do for and to each other. Between Lacan and Freud, Caravaggio and Joyce, Hitchcock and Cronenberg, the authors work through the methods of art and the structures of psychoanalytic thinking about art to show us that the roles of sublimation and displacement, symptom and enunciation are at once discursive and aesthetic. The partial identifications of the object and discourse, their incomplete relationships and overlappings between them, constitute a new kind of knowledge. If there is one that lies outside the established boundaries of cultural and psychoanalytic studies, then these essays take a step toward disclosing it, inventing it, and giving it a name."
-Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University and author of Ingres: Then, and Now
"With Art: Sublimation or Symptom, Parveen Adams breaks new ground in a remarkable career during which she has made some of the most original and inspiring contributions to psychoanalytic theory as it explores the artifice of cultural form. In the company of her gifted and insightful collaborators, Adams explores the psychic and semiotic crises of creation. The making of art as symptom, they suggest, engages the enigmatic 'lack' or 'void' of both sign and subject. Why do we take perverse pleasure in being strung out by the experience of art, placed somewhere between semblance and signification, beyond the mimetic consolations of coherence, reference, and recognition? Psychoanalysis may not have all the answers, but it has the deepest insights into the insatiable desire that drives us to ask such difficult questions. With Art: Sublimation or Symptom, Parveen Adams has, once again, orchestrated a profound and patient inquiry into some of the most urgent cultural issues that face us today."
-Homi K. Bhabha, Rothenberg Professor of Literature, Harvard University
-Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University and author of Ingres: Then, and Now
"With Art: Sublimation or Symptom, Parveen Adams breaks new ground in a remarkable career during which she has made some of the most original and inspiring contributions to psychoanalytic theory as it explores the artifice of cultural form. In the company of her gifted and insightful collaborators, Adams explores the psychic and semiotic crises of creation. The making of art as symptom, they suggest, engages the enigmatic 'lack' or 'void' of both sign and subject. Why do we take perverse pleasure in being strung out by the experience of art, placed somewhere between semblance and signification, beyond the mimetic consolations of coherence, reference, and recognition? Psychoanalysis may not have all the answers, but it has the deepest insights into the insatiable desire that drives us to ask such difficult questions. With Art: Sublimation or Symptom, Parveen Adams has, once again, orchestrated a profound and patient inquiry into some of the most urgent cultural issues that face us today."
-Homi K. Bhabha, Rothenberg Professor of Literature, Harvard University
