Beyond Pleasure

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud observed that the life-enhancing pleasure principle seems disrupted by something internal to the psyche. He took into account the possibility of a death instinct bent on returning the living organism to its origin of undifferentiated matter. In Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Margaret Iversen uses the writing of Freud, Lacan, the Surrealists, and Roland Barthes to elaborate a theory of art beyond the pleasure principle. Lacan was in close contact with the Surrealists and, early in his career, exchanged ideas with Dal. This book offers a detailed reading of Dals paranoiac-critical tour de force, The Tragic Myth of Millets Angelus, in which he demonstrates a method of interpretation that involves the projection and analysis of paranoid fantasies. The author later discusses the aesthetic dimension of the disintegrative death drive explored in Georges Batailles Eroticism and in Anton Ehrenzweigs Hidden Order of Art, both of which inspired Robert Smithson. Iversen also takes up a postwar-era narrative that examines Maya Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty. Beyond Pleasure shows that the aesthetics of Freuds theory continue to resonate in the contemporary art world.