Beyond Pleasure: Refiguring Modernism

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 Dali. This book offers a detailed reading of Dali s paranoiac-critical tour de force, The Tragic Myth of Millet s 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 Bataille s Eroticism and in Anton Ehrenzweig s Hidden Order of Art, both of which inspired Robert Smithson. Iversen also takes up a postwar-era narrative that examines Maya Lin s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Robert Smithson s Spiral Jetty. Beyond Pleasure shows that the aesthetics of Freud s theory continue to resonate in the contemporary art world."