Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 3, December 2009
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Ronen, Ruth: Aesthetics of Anxiety. New York: State University of New York Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 183 + illus. ISBN: 978 – 0 – 7914 – 7667 – 3. $65.00 HC
Reviewed by
Aberystwyth University
Ruth Ronen’s philosophical study re-views propositions by Aristotle, Freud, Lacan, Foster, Lyotard and Badieu, considering possible links between anxiety, subjectivity and artistic achievement, and in so doing goes beyond the idea that there is anxiety in aesthetics to place anxiety at the very heart of aesthetic experience of beauty, genius and even pleasure. As she acknowledges, this ‘aesthetics of anxiety requires a radical rethinking of aesthetics, as anxiety depends on an understanding of aesthetic pleasure as superseding the distinction between positive pleasure and negative displeasure’ (6).
Ronen suggests in her first chapter that anxiety, in its fundamental relation to desire, ‘is raised on a somewhat paradoxical account: that of the possibility of the object of desire not being encountered in the image actually present, and, at the same time, that of the possibility of coming too close to the object that is the cause of desire’; moreover, ‘anxiety in aesthetics involves a displeasure that transcends the pleasure principle and is not simply to be perceived as the opposite of pleasure’ (7). Indeed, she notes how displeasure and the displeasing effects of the encounter with the disgusting, repulsive and ugly, are especially associated with modernism in art. Ronen’s first chapter aims to show that in the aesthetic domain, as it emerges from Kant and from many post-Kant aestheticians, ‘displeasure fulfils a necessary intervening role in every aesthetic experience’ (13). In Kant’s terms, ‘displeasure constitutes a real phase in the experience of the sublime’ (22); while Gasché distinguishes ‘the restful state of the feeling of the beautiful’ from ‘the agitation of the mind caused by the effort imposed on the imagination when experiencing the sublime’ (23). Ronen deduces that the ‘pain that accompanies the encounter with the magnitude of the sublime ... emerges from the fact that the imagination fails in totalizing the object desired in a manageable form’ (27).
Freud at first thought of anxiety as being caused by insufficiently discharged sexual libido (which is the cause of anxiety neurosis), or by the return of suppressed sensations (which appear through repetition compulsions). Ronen’s prime angle of approach to Freud is through a focus on his theories of confrontations with the uncanny, which constitute ‘an aesthetic experience that cannot be correlated with positive sentiments, nor simply equated with extra-artistic experience’ (9). Ronen notes how Freud suggests that anxiety ‘has an unmistakeable relation to expectation ... it has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object’ (30), where what ‘is felt as unpleasure ... in fact signals a moment of libidinal excitation’ (14). This provides a relevant context for Ronen’s development of her previous research on the unsettling power of dolls, in the context of Freud’s notion of the uncanny as ‘an effect produced where the distinction between inanimation and animation collapses ... [as when] we face entities that are neither alive nor dead and as such transcend (or precede) the differentiation of objects’ (47). Here, ‘the machinated doll, the animated object turned inanimated, materializes the imposition of the death drive on the living body’ (48), and also ‘the indistinction between life and death’ and ‘the collapse of the dualism of inside/outside’ (52). She reminds us that historically the doll is ‘not only a prop in children’s games but also a device in various rituals and ceremonies of a malignant nature’; within this ambivalence, ‘dolls, in their innocent and menacing aspects, are paradigmatic for the relation of beauty to anxiety’ (41).
Next she progresses to an examination of the role of anxiety in Lacan’s aesthetics. Lacan suggests that Hamlet is the character ‘whose function is to refuse the encounter with the object of desire, a refusal that causes anxiety in the spectator’ (31-2). Moreover, Lacan ‘claims that beauty is the limit of the tragic’, and ‘associates beauty with an indefinite thing, which is agonizing, menacing, and even lethal’, where ‘The beautiful image stands for the desire to what lies beyond’; for example, Antigone ‘embodies ultimate beauty because she defies death, not only the death of the organism (by risking her life in declining to obey the ruler) but the symbolic death of common belief and meaning (by rejecting human law and the limits of signification)’ (36). Ronen observes, what is ‘essential to the tragic image of Antigone, in her terrifying splendour, is the fact that her deeds cannot be identified as responding or corresponding to good or evil values’ (50: an observation which made me conjecture as to the pertinence of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in this context). Ronen claims that if the doll is ‘an object that eludes the symbolic patterns of conventional mapping’, then it ‘reproduces the same resistance to symbolization with which Lacan has characterized tragic heroes .... The doll refers to an absolute Thing that cannot be semanticized nor dialecticized’ (52), and thus ‘presents the idea of strangeness in intimacy’ (53). This paves the way for an identifiably Lacanian reading of Aristotelian catharsis: ‘catharsis as the purgation of pity and fear is presented as a solution to the excitement involved in the encounter with the image of the tragic figure [who] constitutes an image beyond imaginary or symbolic codification’ (71).
Ronen’s second chapter, ‘The Beautiful Thing’, contains the resonant observation: ‘In the case of masochism and other forms of perverse pain, the subject of perversion is not affected by anxiety; the spectator, however, is’ (51). Beyond characterizations of masochism or ‘perversity’, this seems relocation of anxiety seems relevant to the work of explicit body performers such as Stelarc, Franko B and Orlan. Ronen refers briefly to (only) the last of these artists (alongside the films of Lars von Trier) at the end of her fourth chapter. More regular and detailed references to such experimental practitioners might have rendered Ronen’s more abstract considerations specific and physically (even viscerally) grounded.
Ronen’s fourth chapter brings us to the point where Freud and Lacan radically differ. For Freud ‘Anxiety has to do with an Other as absolute, an Other that has no need of the subject and in its enjoyment raises the possibility of annihilation of the subject’ (86, an observation which reminded me particularly of the increasingly nightmarish world of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus). Contrastingly, ‘Lacan argues that it is the lack of separation rather than the danger of separation that causes anxiety in the subject’ (83).
According to Lacan, ‘fear camouflages the object that effects the subject, while anxiety exposes it’ (116). It was at this point, when Ronen writes of ‘the “crushing degree of certainty” that Lacan attributes to anxiety, a certainty caused by anxiety being “the only connection of the subject to the Real”’ (91), that her discussion provoked me to consider the achievements, and possible boundaries, of the drama of Sarah Kane. In Kane’s drama, there does indeed seem to be a ‘certainty of anxiety’ that ‘has to do with its correlation with desire as the cause of knowledge’ (96), where ‘anxiety signifies the entry of certainty into subjectivity by suffering: it signifies the moment prior to the doubtful domain of the signifier and the articulation of knowledge’ (97). Ronen’s (perhaps too brief) account of Jacques-Alain Miller’s reading of ‘the psychotic creation’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis might have particular pertinence for Kane’s final writings, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis: ‘the signifier marking the place of the Other is vacant, and this is where the psychotic work of art is produced, to replace the place of the foreclosed name of the father (104)
The strongest section of Ronen’s admirably ambitious study begins in her penultimate chapter, running up to and continuing into her final chapter, ‘The Subversion of the Genius and the Dialectic of Creation’, which hinges conceptually on the distinctions between definition and indefinition. She notes how ‘the postmodern interest in the sublime is formulated as a question regarding what cannot be said or represented and yet is included in representation’, as when Lyotard characterizes the sublime as ‘the unpresentable which ... is put into presentation itself to mark the “lack of reality”, which is the raison d’être of any modernism’ (113). Correspondingly, Derrida’s use of ‘the colossal’ provides an image of something generally incomprehensible, ‘a presentation of something which can be taken without being able to be taken, by hand or eye’ which ‘serves to point to the referent of the sublime as being present in the image that is split between the presentation and between what is too great, almost too great to be presented’; hence ‘the splitting effect that the colossal has on any schematization’ (114).
At this point, Ronen’s study brought me most to entertain more consistently the insights and imaginative provocations in Stephen Booth’s splendid and underrated study, ‘King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’, Indefinition and Tragedy (Yale University Press, 1983), which suggests how Shakespeare’s major tragedies permit the human mind a brief but creative confusion of the definite, containing man-made form with that which it contains: a confrontation with the indefinite, the incomprehensible and otherwise unimaginable. In the terms of Booth’s analysis, King Lear offers an experience very close to the process delineated by Ronen: ‘The sublime elevates an image or sign to the dignity of the Thing, so the Thing can be presented in its unpresentable totality, thus causing the subject in art both anxiety and the deepest satisfaction’ (130).
This leads Ronen directly to her definition of the genius: s/he who ‘produces the impossible thing that is both determinate in form and indeterminate in “material”’ and so ‘uses her imagination to demonstrate what is impossible to demonstrate’ (133).
Inevitably, ‘the work of the genius raises anxiety’ because ‘the support of common meaning is absent’ in the formulation and unfolding of an artistic event which ‘exceeds the limits of one’s [other forms of] experience and creates an expression of one’s own for which no given meaning can account’; this brings us to the paradox: ‘How can the incomprehensible work of genius be met with the reader’s dismay and anxiety and yet be taken as beautiful? (132)
Ronen approaches this question through the paradigm of Joyce, an artist whose work is never finally decipherable, and who cannot become ‘exemplary’ in the sense of spawning a school of imitators, but whose genius may at least partly reside in his ability to ‘predict in a way what kind of desire his writing would elicit in others, yet he is unique in his form of address to readers, in that he tricks them into looking for meaningfulness in the “wrong place”’ (134). This seems an appropriate recognition of qualities in those forms of innovative art which both elicit and elude interpretation, from works by Shakespeare to those by Beckett, and beyond; how ‘The genius’ faculty of the imagination is exemplified in a presentation that exhibits a concept yet provokes thought to the extent that it can never be comprehended within a determinate concept’ (138).
In these terms, Ronen suggests ‘the genius is a particular subject in whom an indeterminate rule of language dwells’ (149), to the point where the name Joyce has also become ‘the name of a particular hole in language’ (154) – alongside which, the reader may seek to add others. Ronen:
Joyce’s traumatic encounter with language, which is particular to him and hence cannot be universally deciphered through the interpretive endeavours of so many critics ... is something that is purely of the subject, yet can elicit the interest of the reader (135) [by provoking] an encounter that paradoxically stages the genius’ unconscious knowledge ... of how to create this encounter in forms that others can relate to, yet will always remain “other” to them. (136)
Thus, the genius ‘bypasses the appeasing law of the Father in order to reveal something about the locus of a hole in the symbolic, a locus that resists signification’ (150).
Ronen’s analyses link with Booth’s, in my mind, in valuably indicating a definite sense of the achievements of the most innovative artists, who offer us a precise scaffolding by which to glimpse, momentarily but unforgettably, the indefinite and infinite. My own associations ran to the imaginative efforts demanded by not only by classical Greek tragedy and Joyce, and the aforementioned Shakespeare and Beckett, but also by David Rudkin and Howard Barker (whose uncanny animations and provocations of anxiety might constructively be approached and appreciated using Ronen’s terms). In the final glowing light of Ronen’s description of the genius as ‘a vanishing mediator’, I was left to wonder: does Sarah Kane ultimately vanish in and through her work – or not? Does her drama offer a self-transcendence, or consign the dramatist to the role of eternal revenant?
Ronen’s study constitutes a determined stare into the vanishing point of conceptualization and definition. It is properly demanding in its delineation of artistic and imaginative courage, rigorous in nuance and articulation, and marvellously dissolutive of everyday limits.