Clinicians can often benefit from some more creativity, from stretching our imaginative capacity beyond the tenets of classic texts. When welcoming a patient expressing their struggles with anxiety—what we call a ‘complaint’, in psychoanalysis—we are invited to listen and pay attention to different things: repetitions, patterns, structures, functions or escapes. Whilst any ethical listener in our field is attentive to singularity, or simply attuned to avoiding making generalised interpretations and putting others in a box, formative myths of the unconscious are frequent guests in the way analysts think or speak. Oedipus, castration, family, gender and sex identifications. What will become clearer as we move along in this book is that such anchors are not without consequence and there are benefits, clinically and politically, about stretching clinical interventions psychosocially.

Anxiety complaints are commonly bodily complaints: my heart, my stomach, my hands. I sweat. I shake. I wake up at night. I stop. Lygia Clark, as an artist of ‘borders’, found a way of listening to the body in her inventive and unorthodox art/therapy practice. For this reason, as we will see in what follows, there is value in thinking about her experimentation with that which anxiety captures in our daily phenomenological experience of it: our bodies. Her practice will ground our imagination in this abstract and fugitive path within the guts of classic texts by Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari that feature in this book, helping us to arrive there with more (feminist) creativity.

In order to hold onto the crossroads of anxiety itself, paralysing yet moving, I suggest we travel far from classic epidemiologic or clinical discussions and, before going there, embark on this psychosocial cartography of anxiety to discover together the idea of the ‘full-void’—which we will pack in our suitcase in this first moment.

Moving Beyond the Limits of the Plane

A prominent artist of her time and to this day one of the biggest names in Brazilian art, my compatriot Lygia Clark was very influenced by her experience in psychoanalysis as a patient. Working during the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from the 1960s to the 1980s, and witnessing the very early announcement of neoliberal politics in Europe, the United States and Latin America, she developed, in the later stage of her prolific career, a practice marked by what she named an ‘abandonment of the art world’. Clark is notable for her singular practice involving the body: her body, the body of viewers and the possibilities of bodies. Specifically, hers was a practice called ‘Nostalgia of the Body’, which she defined as a process of corporeal fragmentation towards and through the process of reconstructing the body as a ‘collective body’ (Rivera, 2013). This trajectory of leaving the art world and embarking on a psychotherapeutic proposition can be followed in her essay ‘Nostalgia of the Body’, published posthumously in 1994 in the October journal, which we will examine together.

In a passage entitled ‘Death of a Plane’, Clark qualifies the discontent with the elementary form of artistic practice—the ‘plane’, or the square, the canvas—that led her to embark on a journey beyond such a ‘false idea of reality’ projected by humanity within this limiting frame:

The plane is a concept created by humanity to serve practical ends: that of satisfying its need for balance […]. The plane arbitrarily marks off the limits of a space giving humanity an entirely false and rational idea of its own reality […]. It’s also the reason why people have projected their transcendent part outward and given it the name of God. In this way the problem of their own existence is raised in inventing the mirror of their own spirituality […]. But the plane is dead. The philosophical conception that humanity projected onto it no longer satisfies—no more than does the idea of an external God persist. In becoming aware that it is a matter of an internal poetry of the self that is projected into the exterior it is understood at the same time that this poetry must be reintegrated as an indivisible part of the individual. (Clark, 1994, p. 96)

The plane is charged with her cosmological dissatisfaction with the need for an ‘external God’ as an obstacle to an ‘internal poetry’ that pertains to the self. In this sense, I suggest one could interpret the ‘plane’ as what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the net of signifiers anchored in an Imaginary relation to language and culture that is always dependent on a transcendental Other, as Lacan calls it, to have any consistency. Perhaps, if we may, the same thing universalising coloniality has deemed to be the ‘World’ of the ‘Human’, all in capitals. Following this logic, Clark’s move towards a practice that liberates this ‘internal poetry’ is akin to an endeavour of tracing an ontological possibility that gives space for an immanence in desire that is not reliant on the relationship with the Other and the inscribed Oedipal Law-of-the-Father, as psychoanalysis demands and we will consider together, but to several ‘others’ in space, tracing a different ecological cartography to the subject. This is Clark’s feminist twist, as I quite like to think of it: against universals and proposing an ethics of multiplicity. Her endeavour is exactly of the order I wish to find conditions for in the psychoanalytic clinic of anxiety, and this will require, from us, some creativity and imagination too. As we dive into her world, can we hold onto the possibilities and necessities of the ‘many’, rather than the ‘one’?

Practicing art since 1947, when she moved to Rio de Janeiro from her native Minas Gerais, Lygia Clark’s most significant breakthrough in the artistic scene came with the publication of the Neo-Concrete Manifesto, in 1959. Her association with the Neo-concrete group and their push towards sensibility over the rationality of Concretism already carry something of her travel ‘beyond the Plane’, which is present in their discontentment with the standardised practices of artists and curators around her. Clark’s bolder ‘killing of the Plane’ starts in the 1960s, in her departure from the formalist geometrical painting and sculpture that ignited her career, and in the development of works such as Bichos and Caminhando (1963–1964), which called the viewer to a closer contact with the artworks, touching and participating. Bichos, a series of multidimensional metallic forms joined by hinges, invites the spectator to be co-author of the piece by moving it. In this work we see a dual interaction of entities (human/aluminium structure or spectator/artist) brought to the same level by movement. Or, we could say, in this early interactive piece we see a ‘levelling of the Plane’, before Clark really moves into perforating it.

In Caminhando, a Möbius strip appears as the topological resource to bring her flight beyond the limits of the plane to the debate between in/out, where not only the relation between subject/object was questioned but the actual reality of ‘being in space’. In this work, for the first time in her career, the ‘act’ thus gains more importance over the ‘object’. The piece moves towards a rupture, as each repetition tightens and slows the movement of scissors over paper. As I see it, this movement towards rupture via a repetition, present in this piece, is also her move beyond the ‘plane’. The action of Caminhando offers a metaphor of the psychoanalytic fantasy, or of the Death Drive, which implies a constant repetition, moving without leaving the same spot—this being Lacan’s view that all ‘drives’ operate as a repetitive ‘death drive’ (Lacan, 1966, p. 848), clearly leaving us, in times of eco-feminist catastrophes, thirsty for some rays of Life. In this sense, Clark’s Caminhando is a subversion of the status of the subject, which in her work is not confined to the tragic repetition of the same but is moving towards a rupture. The subjective crisis in such metaphoric gesture is, as Tania Rivera (2008) sees it, a subjective awakening upon the exit of specular alienation. From then onwards, objects would not mean the same to Clark (limited to the status of ‘art objects’), and would no longer represent the limiting spatial cut of the ‘plane’. From Caminhando until her death, in 1988, “the object would lose its thingness to become, once more, a field of living forces that affect, and are affected, by the world, promoting a continuous process of differentiation of subjective and objective realities” (Rolnik, 2013a, p. 76; 2013b). Her work thus crosses the plane and embarks on a journey through the body and affect.

Bodies of/at Work

While Clark ‘kills the plane’ and slowly ‘abandons the art world’, her surroundings shift dramatically. On a very concrete level, the Brazilian Military coup of March 1964 inaugurated two decades of dictatorship in Brazil—a period of repressive censorship and violence that also loomed over other Latin American countries. In the art world, censorship was explicit. Just like at universities, the artistic environment was severely sabotaged, controlled and violated by the dictatorship—and to practice art (or any cultural/intellectual practice in general) that worked in opposition to the regime meant the risk of arbitrary arrest, and of further threats such as torture and assassination. After the promulgation of AI-5, a 1968 institutional act that worsened suppression and torture practices, many artists were forced into exile, either due to the toxicity of the environment or direct threats of imprisonment.

Clark’s fleeing of the dictatorship and her subsequent move to Paris in 1968 mark another moment of her working with the ‘body’. At first, there is a clear ‘collectivist’ necessity characterising the work, which opens up micropolitical grounds more clearly, in order to pave the way to the final pieces called ‘Structuring of the Self’, where a vibrating, immanent body is most in evidence. From 1972 to 1976, Clark taught a course called ‘The body and the space’ at the Faculté d’Arts Plastiques St. Charles in the (post-1968) Sorbonne. The pieces she developed during this period were characteristically focused on collective interaction and envisaged the generation of a collective bodily experience and consciousness/perception, breaking with the subject-object dichotomy and playing out over the surface of the body. She developed a series of propositions with her group of students named O Corpo é a Casa (the body is the house) (1968–1970); Fantasmática do Corpo (Phantasmatic of the Body), and ‘Collective-Body’, the latter beginning with the well-known piece ‘Anthropophagic Slobber’ (1973). In this piece, a group of around 60 people receive thread reels to insert on their mouths and subsequently unravel the threads over other people’s bodies who remain blindfolded at the centre of the group. Wet with saliva, the massive tangle of thread is untangled before the members of the group, who share their experience verbally. Their bodies, together, open the way to the word.

The way I invite you to see this is that instead of the Other as the source of language, as we learn in psychoanalytic texts, words emerge in this collective effort, as a co-poiesis. Whilst this (co-poiesis) is not Clark’s own phrasing, I find it alive in her creativity, and borrow from the feminist psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger (2005, 2006, 2019), who explains it so precisely, linking it to her life’s work:

the aesthetical and ethical creative potentiality of borderlinking and of metramorphic weaving. The psychic cross-imprinting of events and the exchange of traces of mutually (but not symmetrically) subjectivizing agencies, occurring via/in a shared psychic borderspace where two or several becoming-subjectivities meet and borderlink by strings and through weaving of threads, and create singular trans-subjective webs of copoiesis composed of and by transformations along psychic strings stretched between the two or several participants of each encounter-event. Thus, a matrixial borderspace is a mutating copoietic net where co-creativity might occur. (Ettinger, 2005, p. 705)

It is in such co-poiesis that Clark’s practice is rather unique. Her propositions challenged the problematic constitution of subjectivity via the body, collectively. Her early 1970s work sees bodies that affect other bodies in a complicated way that allow for a ‘cast’ to be formed on the affected body that is then ‘anthropophagically’ incorporated, generating a new ‘becoming’ (Rolnik, 2000). This trope is also particular, as Anthropophagy was an early twentieth century movement in Brazilian modernist art, of great importance. The 1922 publication of the manifesto by Oswald de Andrade in the Brazilian Modern Art Week has a strong connotation of early decolonial artistic expression. The 1922 Modern Art Week happened one hundred years after Brazil’s ‘independence’ from Portugal. In this way, when Clark incorporates, anthropophagically, a body in her proposition, a transformation beyond a colonial Plane is implicit.

In a letter to Helio Oiticica dated 6th July 1974, Clark writes that “it is the phantasmatics of the body that interest me, not the body in itself” (Clark, 1974, p. 223). With regards to the process of ‘Anthropophagic Slobber’ she concludes: “Afterwards I ask for the vécu [the ‘lived’, in French in the original letter], which is the most important, and like this I will go on elaborating myself through the elaboration of the other…” (Clark, 1974, p. 223). This slobber seems to open up space for an ethics of a multitude of affecting ‘others’ that does not need to cross any anchoring transcendental referential, or Other, to be realised.

The presence of the body in this period comprises an invitation for the subject to speak of their body (sensations) and through their body, in this way, bodily experiences must give way to speech (Rivera, 2013). The parallels between this period of her work and psychoanalysis are, of course, rather potent. Indeed, during this time Lygia Clark was in analysis with Pierre Fédida in Paris, and this experiment with the ‘phantasmatics of the body’ brings together the therapeutic process she is going through, a ‘sewing in of the body’ and an exploration of fantasies that can also be seen in her published letters exchanged with Oiticica. In the letter from the 6th of November of 1974, Lygia Clark writes extensively about fantasies that may verge on some kind of ‘conscientious delirium’, that are very surreal about nature, sexes, bodies, serpents coming out of her vagina, a ‘tête d’abeille’ (bee head), etc., that she explored in her analysis. She writes: “In all the points of my analysis my work fits in a total manner, this is what impresses me a lot” (Clark, 1974, p. 248). The relation to the processes she has been proposing to her students and her journey in analysis with Fédida is spelled out in this long letter, where Clark is very focused on the potency of such ‘phantasmatics’ of the body, as she calls it. She writes to Oiticica:

I think that all of us who create are this and the difference between us and the psychotics is that we are capable of extending this bridge to the world by communication, or else … ai de nós! [Untranslatable]. Through this you see that my work is my own phantasmatic that I give to the other, proposing that they clean it and enrich it with their own phantasmatics: then it is anthropophagic slobber that I vomit, that is swallowed by them and added to their own phantasmatics vomited once again, added until the last consequences. This is what I call a live culture and not a dead culture, which is the expression of the old support. And society, that is afraid of what is alive because it is necrophagic, it swallows everything today because everything expressed in the old support is irremediably dead. (Clark, 1974, p. 249)

It is not completely clear, certainly not fitting to any pre-established psychoanalytic concept, what Clark means by ‘phantasmatics’. What we can grasp from this passage is that it relates to sensation, to exchange and possibility, to collective ‘becomings’. In this same letter, Clark writes, fittingly, right after speaking of jouissance (in French, in an obvious reference to Lacanian psychoanalysis), that “everything is libido, everything is sensation” (Clark, 1974, p. 248). A new moment, and the one that interests this cartography the most, unfolds in her practice soon after. We may see this as an announcement of her encounter with the limits of this communication or collective experience and verbalisation model (perhaps constituted by too much of the ‘dead old support’, as per her letter) and her interest in a new method of propositions.

The Paris years working in groups with her students at the Sorbonne and her intense analysis with Fédida were very potent in Clark’s journey and foundational to what came next, which was her establishment in the ‘frontier’ between art and clinic. In the end of this same November 1974 letter to Oiticica, Clark talks about the impact some of her works have had on some participants, whose lives and ‘ways’ have changed dramatically. She writes: “Sometimes I unblock people in one experience and, at other times, more time is needed. I had thought before being in this psychoanalysis of becoming an analyst, but now I want to continue at the ‘frontier’, because this is what I am and it won’t do it wanting to be less frontier [pois é isso que sou e não adianta querer ser menos fronteira]” (Clark, 1974, p. 254). Clark returns to Brazil in 1976 and finds in her ‘frontier’, her borderspace, the realm to develop ‘Structuring of the Self’, her last piece, carried on until she was close to the end of her life, in 1988.

Clark’s contentment with the ‘frontier’ is very important since it challenges any easy interpretation of her project of ‘abandonment of art’ as ‘not artistic’ as such. It is not that she moved into being a therapist—she did not train, get accreditations nor affiliations with any society or school of psychoanalysis—yet she did not remain an artist in any traditional sense of the word. She became a creative clinician, or a clinical creative.

The transformative character of aesthetics and interaction were, to Clark, the real aim of her path as an artist: her abandoning of art and self-titled ‘therapeutic work’ in the ‘Structuring of the Self’ series from 1976 to 1988 worked as the climax of her practice, challenging the clinic/art divide and parking right at the frontier, the edge. In other words, Clark chooses to abandon art by not becoming exactly a psychotherapist, but instead, exploring this threshold, this in-between, as creative and generative. This abandonment or her desertion from art practice was, conversely, her greatest artistic endeavour. This work, decades later, still leaves some open questions that are relevant to the discussion around the limits of language as a Symbolic structure and of words, sounds, noise or vibrations that cross the body in the form of symptoms or affects that are central to our journey into a creative clinic for anxiety.

Structuring of the Self involved one-to-one exchange sessions designed to reach one person at a time, moving beyond the collective performances she was working on in France, but still challenging the status of the individual by invoking a singularity, or an individual potency, that was connected to one’s experience of the world. In other words, Clark was concerned with “the reactivation of this quality of aesthetic experience in the receivers of her creations” (Rolnik, 2007, para. 9). Or, as Rolnik expresses it, Clark’s move to this place in the ‘frontier’ was concerned with promoting the Structuring of the Self, “that is, the capacity of letting oneself be affected by the forces of objects created by the artist and the environment in which they were experienced; but above all, as a consequence, the capacity of letting oneself be affected by the forces of the environment of one’s daily life” (Rolnik, 2007, para. 9). This vocabulary of ‘affect’ echoes what Deleuze and Guattari (1983) take from Spinoza’s monism, accepting that humans and non-humans all share the same ‘substance’ and equally affect and are affected by each other constantly, without the need of a transcendental mediation à la Hegel—a discussion we will dive into together in several pit-stops along our way (Braidotti, 2006). In Structuring of the Self, the potency of such aesthetic experience of transformation mimicked the clinical dynamics of psychoanalysis, offering, however, more nuance into collectivity, co-construction and the commonality of the experience—or, co-poiesis.

Clark would see her ‘patients’ in her apartment in Copacabana, in Rio, for regular one-hour sessions. She would utilise her ‘Objetos Relacionais’ as tools for inferring sensations on the bodies of these participants. These were makeshift and cheap objects, including plastic bags, seashells, elastic bands, mattresses, etc., which were utilised to touch, cover and generate sensations on the body. Such sensations would generate affect: together they would untangle knots; they would open the unconscious through the body. The sensations facilitated by the objects and their textures and weight would open space for words that would be exchanged between Lygia Clark and her patients. The sessions were held with a frequency of up to three regular sessions a week, and the largest amount of time was dedicated to verbalising the associations stemming from the experienced sensations (Rivera, 2008). The whole session was a co-poiesis, or, an in-common, collective poetical construction between Clark and the patient. The aim was that after a session, the participant would then encounter reality differently and a transformation would then take place upon such encounters, as they went out into the world: the poetics of their full-void awake, activated.

The ‘full-void’ Can Vibrate

What is this vibrational ‘full-void’ Clark taps into in her practice, and what relations to the unconscious does this presuppose? What does it have to do with our field and efforts in psychoanalysis? Or even, is there a ‘full-void’ of anxiety we could try to map?

Clark defines the full-void as the in/out act of reaching out to the plural possibilities awaken by the affective ‘opening of the body’ (Gil, 1998), a ‘rite’ without a ‘myth’ (Rolnik, 2000). In ‘Nostalgia of the Body’, she writes:

What strikes me in the “inside and outside” sculpture is that it transforms my perception of myself, of my body. It changes me. I am elastic, formless, without definite physiognomy. Its lungs are mine. It’s the introjection of the cosmos. And at the same time, it’s my own ego crystallized as an object in space. “Inside and outside”: a living being open to all possible transformations. Its internal space is an affective space. In a dialogue with my “inside and outside” work, an active subject encounters his or her own precariousness. […] The subject discovers the ephemeral in opposition to all types of crystallization. Space is now a kind of time ceaselessly metamorphosed through action. Subject and object become essentially identified within the act. Fullness. I am overflowing with meaning. Each time I breathe, the rhythm is natural, fluid. It adheres to action. I have become aware of my “cosmic lungs.” I penetrate the world’s total rhythm. The world is my lung. Is this fusion death? Why does this fullness have the taste of death? I am so incredibly alive … How to connect these two poles always? Often in my life I have discovered the identity of life and death. A discovery which nonetheless has a new flavour each time. One night, I had the perception that the absolute was this “full-void,” this totality of the interior with the exterior I’ve spoken of so often. The “full-void” contains all potentialities. It’s the act which gives it meaning. (Clark, 1994, p. 104)

We may begin by considering this collective, affective unconscious that vibrates to be a ‘reverse’ of psychoanalysis; a model where the body is privileged over words to the point that words barely make a difference, or even, less generously, a materialist mysticism. Yet there are clear resonances with ideas within Lacanian psychoanalysis that have been in high circulation over the past few years. Any versed Lacanian could bring out the notion of the ‘speaking body’, which is Jacques-Alain Miller’s (2014) extrapolation of Lacan’s ‘parlêtre’ (speaking being) into a body that speaks as marking the twentieth-first century unconscious. Yet, the difference here is that Clark’s in-out dichotomy is not resolved in a version of the subject that is ‘transindividual’—which is Lacanese for being crossed by a common Symbolic that we all share and thus the subject is formed by being precisely anchored in language. Clark’s ‘in and out’—subject and world, flesh and unconscious—is really rather material, physical and tangible. The unconscious is bare, and accessed by sensations, not an island or a repository. The unconscious is collective, in co-production; the unconscious is affected.

Clinicians of many walks might think of Clark’s technique as being just part of an artistic endeavour and not a guide for therapeutic practice. I agree and perhaps we could even assume Clark would agree too, considering she did not become an analyst herself. Yet, her work illustrates a problem in the anchoring concept of the body of the drive and the function of language in analysis as relying on foundational myths that, in one way or another, naturalise binary sexual difference and patriarchy. It is well known that Lacan’s later texts were precisely veering in the direction of the limits of language, specifically through the abandonment of the Oedipal metaphor and the ‘Law of the Father’ as the single most important mark of subjectivation that guarantees our life ‘in culture’. In psychoanalysis, such phallic Law acts as a regulator of the excess of enjoyment of the body, so a mediator of the drive and the effect of the word on the body—as such, this patriarchal universalist matrix is justified as a necessity in psychoanalysis over and over again as the guarantee ‘against psychosis’ (a contentious and unimaginative rulebook). In the 1970s, Lacan was leaving structuralism and its tenets and making use of topology in order to escape the limits of language in his teachings. Limits which clinical practice pushed through all the way to the fore. Until the enigmatic later teachings of Lacan in which a Real that has ‘nothing to do’ with the Symbolic appears, subjects are necessarily bound to the signifier and thus the ‘Name-of-the-Father’. What are we left with, in our clinical practice and in theory, to think about anxiety, this point of subjective rupture, this encounter with the Real, beyond an Oedipal-Plane?

The matter of the Real of the body, as this excess in being that becomes abundant in certain symptomatic repetitions and also invoked in ideological forms of enjoyment can be encountered in several clinical and philosophical debates. To me, most attempts to grasp the ‘speaking body’ via this enigmatic Real that stains flesh are unsatisfactory, clinically and politically. Even bold attempts by (more) feminist (inclined) philosophers—such as what we find in Alenka Zupančič’s work on sex (2017)—privilege binary sexual difference, mediated by the phallus, as the ‘generative’ gap of negativity in subjects (from all genders and sexes, for that matter) that leaves ‘desire’, or what moves us, as a negativity. My problem with that, as I will elaborate further in this book, is that we are still working within a Hegelian dialectics and therefore the possibilities for (an ecological and feminist thought of) ‘becoming’ are rather limited—we are stuck in a relation to a transcendental Other and a circular lack, unable to think of creative emancipation and remaining at the level of critique, as Braidotti (2013) puts it and insists on across her life’s work. In Lygia Clark’s terms it is rather simple: We are still stuck to the Plane.

The Hegelian dialectics inherited by Lacan assumes a division between the ‘Subject’ and historical time, or, assuming a Symbolic system that is mediated by the phallic law, that only re-produces subjugated subjectivities, without a chance to create something new or be in touch with any rupturing chaos outside this ‘phallogocentric’ system. Poststructuralist feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, for example, and Suely Rolni too, reject this ‘phallogocentric’ subjection of subjectivity assumed as necessary mediator of desire and universalising the colonial, capitalist and patriarchal order. They propose, across decades of theoretical praxis, instead, ethical possibilities for subject formation that go beyond this beaten track. So, echoing the 1977 essay by Italian feminist Carla Lonzi (2013): ‘let’s spit on Hegel’—maybe with Lygia Clark’s ‘Anthropophagic Slobber’.

What I am trying to flesh out, with Clark’s works of art as our philosophical ‘relational objects’, are possibilities to think of the speaking and vibrating body—the one that walks in to our clinics complaining of anxiety—outside of this Hegelian negativity and invoking a differential affirmative excess but still within psychoanalytic terms. By which I mean, still keeping psychoanalysis as primarily a practice that is radical in the context of the psy-field and mental health care but opening up to an ethical—epistemological and ontological—revision beyond the ‘Plane’.

Rosi Braidotti, in her much debated book, Transpositions, argues for a move beyond the humanist-scented ‘unitary’ notion of subjectivities, and not only to a poststructuralist account at the level of Lacanian psychoanalysis—which, as she sees, still relies on ‘universal values’ such as the master signifier, the phallus, the Law, lack, etc.—proposing a form of ‘nomadic subjectivity’ instead. She is, here and across her work, inspired by ecological, feminist, post-human and post/decolonial theories that speak to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical approach. In Transpositions, she spells out the necessity for taking Life as a subject, moving beyond identification and post-Hegelian dialectical models of subjectivity and negativity and towards an ethics of multiplicity and affirmation, an ethics of the ‘not-one’. As she summarises:

The focus in this line of thought is on the politics of life itself as a relentlessly generative force. The key terms in this affirmative politics are relations, endurance and radical immanence; the result is the notion of ethical sustainability. References to the non-human, inhuman or post-human play a very central role in this new ethical equation that rests on a fundamental dislocation of anthropocentric premises about agency. (Braidotti, 2010, p. 142)

Braidotti, therefore, expands accounts of a ‘stranger within us’ that are much indebted to psychoanalysis, and proposes an ethical encounter of affects in flux (the horizon-beyond), so not only an excess ‘of me’ ‘in me’ (or the abyss-within). She moves, like Lygia Clark, beyond the Plane. In my reading, this entails accounting not only for a Real that pertains to an excess of jouissance of the drive, not captured by the signifier or sublimated, that feeds symptoms, sexuality and also anxiety—as we will see in detail in Freud’s early accounts of anxiety as an excess of libido. Nor is this about that Real Žižek (2010) (and his mostly male followers) so energetically defends as an inherent impossibility within the Symbolic, fitting thus within a Hegelian dialectics that situates the subject in this gap of negativity. Rather, it is about a Real that vibrates such generative encounters of the forms of Life, human and non-human, and conditions for Life, material and immaterial, situating subjectivity as a constant makeshift knotting of what extends beyond oneself. This is what Braidotti (2011, 2019) calls for in an ethics of interdependence that sits beyond identification.

Interdependence is a theme that has gained much traction among feminist scholars recently, including Silvia Federici (2019), Judith Butler (2020) and Lynne Segal (2020), to name just a few, crossing discussions that go from the climate emergency, political mobilisation and politics of care. Is there room for interdependent ethics, for multiplicity, in psychoanalysis? Or are stuck to classic Oedipal readings that will frame anxious ruptures within this particular, and problematic, view of the world?

This is where I find so much value in holding on to Lygia Clark’s methods of co-poiesis, explicit across her later works as we have seen in this preliminary contour of our journey. It is in this nuanced and creative contribution of her practice, where multiplicity and a construction of something new realised in togetherness are proposed, that I open our suitcase. Here we are already veering away from a classic psychoanalytic method of interpreting materials brought into a session under a structured frame of references that lock all possibilities within it. Can we think, therefore, with this in mind, of an ethics of togetherness based not on the mirage of the subject but on the flux of encounters and affects? And can we think of such ethics within psychoanalysis? And more, does this inform our understanding of anxiety as an affect of rupture and eruption of the Real? Let’s stay with this trouble.