Reframing the Real: Duchamp’s Readymade as a Lacanian Object

Abstract

Over 100 years since Freud attempted to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and art history by examining the libidinal dynamics of Leonardo da Vinci’s work, the encounter between the two disciplines remains penetrated by antagonism. To all appearances, the relationship between analyst and art historian is rooted in an irreducible tension: in the other, each discipline encounters a troubling excess which calls attention to an inherent limitation in its own respective field. On one side of the encounter, the opening of the aesthetic field onto the clinical setting exposes an insurmountable gap in the art historian’s approach, an obstacle to interpretation that reduces his/her perspective to a particularized, partial reading. Although art history provides the methodological tools for a formal-historical analysis of the aesthetic object, it lacks the specific theoretical horizon that would shed light on the object’s deeper complexities. Unable to account for its theoretical presuppositions, art history remains trapped in formal analysis and is ultimately reduced to a blind ideological exercise.