We are living in a state of chaos. The pandemic is still killing thousands of people and there is a war between Russia and Ukraine that could turn into a nuclear war.
This issue of Critica is titled “Uncertainty/Creativity” to reflect on these issues. Uncertainty describes the state of ambiguity, insecurity, and the improbable in our minds and in our communities. To counteract and oppose these uncertainties we resort to creativity, which has been a part of psychoanalysis from the beginning.
The literature on the arts and psychoanalysis is in full bloom. Concepts of music, the sublime, aesthetics, and the visual arts are currently the most discussed. As an alternative, I would like to submit a new conception of creativity from the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. He is one of the most important philosophers today, a scholar who is interested in aesthetics, law, and politics. Because of the complexity of his work, I have added works that can facilitate his reading in the endnotes at the end of this article.
My comment is based on a book published in 2019 Creation and Anarchy: The work of art and the religion of capitalism. I will attempt to discuss the second chapter “What is the act of Creation? While this chapter is dense, obscure, and extremely difficult to understand, his writing is elegant, creative, and innovative. In my analysis, I am drawing on Short’s (2010) reviews which are superb. I also draw on Leland de la Durantaye, who writes, in The Idea of Prose, “Agamben abjures conventional modes of an academic presentation in favor of indirect approaches to his subject matter, pursuing a fragmentary and elliptical style of writing. This style we are told is inspired by W. Benjamin’s attempt to write in fragments that conserve a potentiality to align with other fragments, presenting an image that ‘flashes up’ at an appropriate moment when its capacity to be read emerges” (p.1). Agamben believes that theories are always in a state of creation, in a state of flux, and the work or text is never finished, leaving space for ongoing development.
Using Aristotle’s ideas on no potentiality, the author believes that creativity is a force, an action, and a state of opposition from no potentiality to potentiality. From this process, something new is created. To clarify this very complex idea, let us hear the words of Agamben. He says: “…we then need to look at the act of creation as a field of forces stretched between potential and (im)potential, being – able–to and being able –not – to, acting and resisting. Human beings are capable of having mastery of their potential and having access to it only through their (im)potential: but precisely for this reason, there is in the end no mastery over potential, and being a poet means being at the mercy of one’s own (im)potential (p.19).”
I have read this paragraph many times. Sometimes I was in the dark, at other times I found some illumination for how this mysterious no-potentiality enters the psychoanalytic field. My conjectures linked Agamben’s work with Bion’s articles Negative Capacity and Notes on Memory and Desire. For Bion, the mind of the analyst must wait, should we say, between a state of no potential and a state of potential. The analyst has to resist, not intervene; stay in a state of suspense. Bion’s creative work was to wait and ponder on the psychic material, creating a state of mind able “to move beyond” (my emphasis) the concrete and linear. We could expand on the idea of the negative using Andre Green’s The Work of the Negative, an innovative book explaining his views on works by Bion and Winnicott. That negativity has a special force of creative resistance. Winnicott’s work becomes very interesting when he writes that potential space “is the hypothetical area that exists (but cannot exist)”.
To summarize some of the complexity of this idea of potentiality I will quote Saranthis: “Psychoanalysis occurs in a similar way: it allows those who make good use of it, a suspension of linearity, of the concreteness of acting, it creates an experiential space of our own original way of being, of our own actions, a space not enclosed in factual behaviors” (Translation by Dr Luisa Marino).
I urge the reader to read this issue of Critica. The reader will be immersed in beautiful articles, photos, poetry, and more. The articles published are full of potential, containing the capacity to be developed, “something that remains—or has willingly been left— unspoken and that needs to be found and seized” (Adam Kotsko, translator of “Creation and Anarchy”). It is from the unspoken and what cannot be written that a new vision of psychoanalysis could start.
I would like to thank Critica’s editorial team, for their magnificent work and especially Carolina Bacchi, co – editor, for her innovative leadership and creativity.
References:
Durantaye L. ( 2009 ) Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mills, C. (2005). The Philosophy of Agamben. Montreal and Kingston.
Short, J. ( 2010) Books Reviews of Durantaye,L ( 2009 ) Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction.
Mills, C. (2005). The Philosophy of Agamben. Published in Symposium 14: p. 2.
Thanopulos, S. ( 2019) “L’arte come inoperosità dell’azione” – Psychiatry OnLine.p. 1
