Convulsive Identity

Author(s): Hal Foster

Source: October, Vol. 57 (Summer, 1991), pp. 18-54
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778871
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 Convulsive Identity

HAL FOSTER

To posit an origin in order to ground a self, to found a style: this is a very

familiar trope of modernism. Attended by a baptismal name, manifesto, or
demonstration, it may also involve an origin myth. Often these myths stake a
vanguard advance on a partial return-to an imaginary moment located in a
devalued period within the culture or to an exoticist site projected outside it.
Of course the modernist search for a new beginning is not restricted to such
archaisms and primitivisms; as a primary ambition is to liberate vision from
convention, it operates in more strictly formal styles too. Frequently the two
goals, a primitivism of origin and a purification of means, are connected, even
conflated. Indeed, such purification through the putatively primal is a basic
ideological machine of practices from Courbet to Kiefer; it unites thinkers as
diverse as Ruskin and Breton, and artists as different as Cezanne and Dubuffet.
This quest for an innocent eye or a zero degree of art would be quaint
now if it were not still so problematic. Under the pressure of events political
and theoretical, the last decade saw an intensive inquiry into such conceits, most
often through a critique of the imperialist unconscious at work in modernism,
especially its primitivist projections of origin and/or a deconstruction of the
metaphysical assumptions of the avant-garde, especially its antihistorical asser-
tions of originality. Recently, however, these critiques have become confused
with contempt: hence the emergent doxa that reduces modernism to mastery,
indeed to imperialism, or dismisses the avant-garde, in its pursuit of presence,
as just another philosophical error. Partly permitted by postmodernist polemi-
cism, this reduction deprives these formations not only of historical complexity
but also of present criticality. It misses the resonances, say, between surrealist
ethnological speculations and counterprimitivist practices today.1 And it forgets
that the deconstruction of avant-garde originality was concerned not to expose

1. I have in mind the practices of Renee Green, Fred Wilson, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds,
Jimmie Durham, James Luna, many others.
Max Ernst. Oedipus. 1931.

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20 OCTOBER

this myth from a privileged position of postmodernist truth so much as to

demonstrate that the values of the original and the unique were governed by
the very terms that the avant-garde sought to suppress as secondary or supple-
mentary: the copy and the multiple, the seriality structural to modern produc-
tion and the repetition operative in psychic life.
I rehearse this particular point because its general lesson seems obscured:
that rather than foreclose modernism in a restrictive definition it is more pro-
ductive to open it up to its contradictions, indeed to its critiques of its own
principles, not the least of which is its resisted recognition of "an always already
self-divided origin."2 In this spirit the following text treats a few origin myths
that suggest the risks of such a quest-in particular that the avant-garde logic
of a progressive advance through a radical return may involve a psychic regres-
sion difficult to control. In these surrealistic stories the origin becomes a fantasy
that problematizes the very concept of origin, as the search for foundations
leads to subversively nonfoundational scenes.

Freud distinguished three primal fantasies (Urphantasien):that of seduc-

tion, the primal scene proper (where the child witnesses parental sex), and that
of castration. First called scenes, they were later termed fantasies when it became
clear that they need not be actual events to be psychically effective-that they
are often constructed, in whole or part, after the fact, frequently with the
collaboration of the analyst. Yet, though often contrived, these fantasies also
tended to be uniform; in fact the narratives appeared so fundamental that
Freud deemed them phylogenetic: given schema that we all elaborate upon.
They are fundamental, he speculated, because it is through these fantasies that
the child teases out the basic riddles of origins: in the fantasy of seduction the
origin of sexuality, in the primal scene the origin of the individual, in the fantasy
of castration the origin of sexual difference. Freud added another primal fan-
tasy, that of intrauterine existence, which may be seen as a salve to the other
traumatic fantasies, especially that of castration, to which it is technically ante-
rior.3 Here, however, I will focus on the first three types, specifically on the

2. Rosalind Krauss, "Originality as Repetition," October37 (Summer 1986), p. 40. This recog-
nition, which is a modernist legacy (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, but also Duchamp, Bataille, etc.), was
developed in relation to postmodernist art in this magazine-but mostly in critical and deconstruc-
tive terms, less so from a psychoanalytical perspective.
3. This at least is how it functions in surrealism where it is pervasive-fundamental to its sense
of space as uncanny. "'Love is a homesickness,'" Freud writes famously in "The Uncanny" (1919),
"and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, still in the dream, 'this
place is familiar to me, I have been here before,' we may interpret the place as being his mother's
genitals or her body. In this case, too, the unheimlichis what was once heimisch,homelike, familiar;
the prefix 'un' is the token of repression" (in Studies in Parapsychology,ed. Philip Rieff [New York:
Collier Books, 1963], p. 51).
Convulsive Identity 21

ways that they govern the (proto)surrealist work of Giorgio de Chirico, Max
Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti, each of whom narrates the origin of his art in
terms of such a fantasy.
The return of such traumas in art is uncanny in its own right, but so is
the very structure of the original scenes, formed as they are through a recon-
structive repetition or "deferred action" (Nachtrdglichkeit).In his early work on
hysteria Freud referred each case to an actual event: for every hysteric there
was a perverse seducer. Although he abandoned the seduction theory as early
as 1897, he retained the essential idea of a trauma that is psychically originary
though frequently fantasmatic. This initial event, whether sexual or simply
enigmatic, is one which the child cannot comprehend (Freud described this
state as one of fright [Schreck]).The memory of this event becomes pathogenic
only if it is revived by a second event that the now sexual subject associates with
the first, which is then recoded as sexual and so repressed.4 This is why trauma
seems to come from within and without, and why it is the memory, not the
event, that is traumatic. Not strictly real for the child nor merely contrived by
the adult, these primal scenes, Freud finally proposed, may be fantasies, pledged
in part "to cover up the autoerotic activity of the first years of childhood, to
gloss it over and raise it to a higher level."5 And yet they have all the effectivity
of real events-even more so, Freud argued, for the subject often reworks

4. Freud: "Here we have an instance of a memory exciting an affect which it had not excited
as an experience, because in the meantime the changes produced by puberty had made possible a
new understanding of what was remembered. Now this case is typical of repression in hysteria. We
invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma after the event. The
reason for this state of things is the retardation of puberty as compared with the remainder of the
individual's development" ("Project for a Scientific Psychology" [1895], in The Origins of Psychoanal-
ysis, trans. James Strachey [New York: Basic Books, 1954], p. 413). Also see Laplanche and Pontalis,
The Language of Psychoanalysis,trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973),
pp. 111-14.
Dominick LaCapra and Peter Brooks have discussed the ramifications of this concept for
historical and literary studies; it is time art historians did the same. Among other things "deferred
action" may allow one to complicate readings of influence, to think the effectivity of the present on
the past, and to mitigate the teleological determination of dominant narratives of Western (especially
modern) art. See LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 30-
66, and Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books,
1984), passim. Also see David Carroll, "Freud and the Myth of the Origin," New LiteraryHistory 6
(Spring 1975), pp. 513-28, and Michael Fried, "Painting Memories: On the Containment of the
Past in Baudelaire and Manet," Critical Inquiry 10 (March 1984), pp. 510-42.
5. Freud, On the History of the PsychoanalyticalMovement(1914), trans. Joan Riviere (New York:
Collier Books, 1963), p. 52. This revision led to his recognition first of infantile sexuality and then
of the Oedipus complex. These fantasies bear on the origins of sublimation as well as of sexuality;
as such they are especially pertinent to artistic origins too. See Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis,
"Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality" (1964), in Formationsof Fantasy, ed. V. Burgin, J. Donald
and C. Kaplan (London, 1986), p. 25. I am indebted to this text throughout my essay. Also helpful
are Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), and Elizabeth Cowie,
"Fantasia," m/f 9 (1984), reprinted in The Woman in Question: m/f, ed. P. Adams and E. Cowie
(Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1990).
22 OCTOBER

actual experience according to the given scenarios of seduction, parental sex,

and castration.6
Fantasy cannot be reduced to these three types, nor do they appear in
pure form. As we will see, the seduction fantasy of de Chirico has a castrative
aspect; the primal scene of Ernst betrays a seductive side; and the castration
fantasy of Giacometti begins as an intrauterine wish. These fantasies are also
inflected by screen memory and conscious design; they are thus not temporally
primary so much as structurally originary. Yet it is precisely in this way that
primal fantasy may illuminate surrealist art. More fundamental than the dream
since it involves the very advent of sexuality and representation, primal fantasy
provides a way to think entire oeuvres "obsessionally" rather than to decode
individual works iconographically. Moreover, as expressly visual scenarios in
which the psychic, the sexual, and the perceptual are bound together, primal
fantasy does much to explain the peculiar pictorial structures and object rela-
tions of surrealism-specifically why subject positions and spatial constructions
are rarely fixed in this art. The scene of a daydream, for example, is relatively
stable because the ego is relatively centered. This is not the case in primal
fantasy where the subject not only is in the scene but may also identify with any
of its elements. Such participation renders the scene as elastic as the subject is
mobile, and this is so because the fantasy is "not the object of desire, but its
setting," its mise-en-scene.7 Such fantasmatic subjectivity and spatiality are put
into play in surrealist art, where the first is often passive and the second often
perspectivally skewed or anamorphically distorted.8
Breton struggled to articulate this basis of surrealist art in two well-known
metaphors. In the "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924) he points to the fantasmatic
position of the surrealist subject with the automatist image of "a man cut in two
by a window."9 This image suggests neither a descriptive mirror nor a narrative
window, the familiar paradigms of postmedieval art, but a fantasmatic window,

6. For many this recourse to hereditary narratives remains the most problematic aspect of the
theory. In "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1914) Freud argues that under the pressure
of the inherited schema the Wolfman came to imagine his father as castrative despite his "negative
Oedipus complex," i.e., despite his love for him (see note 25). The cases of de Chirico and Ernst
offer parallels in this regard.
7. Laplanche and Pontalis, "Fantasy," p. 26. On mobile identifications see especially "A Child is
Being Beaten" (1919; French trans. 1933).
8. Ernst wrote of the artist as a passive "spectator" in Beyond Painting (New York: George
Wittenborn, 1948) and Breton as an "agonized witness" in Nadja (Paris, 1928; trans. Richard Howard
[New York: Grove Press, 1960], p. 20). Before them de Chirico wrote of the artist as a "surprised"
viewer in "Meditations of a Painter" (1912; trans. in James Thrall Soby, Giorgio de Chirico [New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955]). The helpless child in fright before a traumatic event may
be the prototype of the "ill-prepared" surrealist "taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols."See
Breton, L'Amourfou (1937), trans. Mary Ann Caws as Mad Love (Lincoln: University of Nebraska,
1987), p. 15; AF hereafter in the text.
9. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan, 1972), p. 21. Breton considers this the ur-image of his automatist writing.
Convulsive Identity 23

a "purely interior model"10 in which the subject is somehow split both

positionally-at once inside and outside the scene-and psychically-"cut in
two." Later in L'Amourfou (1937) Breton complements this image of the subject
in fantasy with an image that suggests its projective aspect: surrealist art as a
grid inscribed with "letters of desire" (AF 87). Implicitly in both accounts the
artist does not invent new forms so much as he retraces fantasmatic scenes."
Two points should be stressed here. All three fantasies touch upon the
castration complex, to which the surrealists typically respond with scenarios
fetishistic, voyeuristic, and/or sadistic in import. Adorno, no friend of surreal-
ism, once argued that its images are "object-fetishes on which the subjective,
the libido, was once fixated. They bring back childhood by fetishism and not
by self-submersion."'2 This is indeed the rule of these images, but the presence
of the primal fantasies points to exceptions: they suggest a self-submersion that
might complicate sexuality, identity, and difference, a surrealism that might
defetishize these terms. In short, the surrealist subject is more various than its
heterosexist types otherwise imply (again such mobility is characteristic of fan-
tasy). After all, the primal fantasies are riddlesabout origins: they question rather
than fix these terms.
Second, the source of surrealist fantasies is uncertain, as is registered by
the paradoxical language used to describe them. Breton says that he "looks out"
into a pure interior (SP 4), Ernst that he limns "what is visible inside him" (BP
20). This uncertainty may be related to that of the source of the trauma narrated
in the primal fantasy. As Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis gloss the theory of
seduction,
the whole of the trauma comes both from within and without: from
without, since sexuality reaches the subject from the other; from
within, since it springs from this internalized exteriority, this "remi-
niscence suffered by hysterics" (according to the Freudian formula),

10. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper and Row,
1972), p. 4; SP hereafter in the text.
11. Of the "Manifesto" image Breton writes: "Here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply
of tracing." The image seems to point to a trauma, perhaps a residual fantasy of castration, which
Breton cannot "incorporate ... into ... poetic construction" (Manifestoes,pp. 21-22). The L'Amour
fou metaphor also suggests a "tracing" of trauma, which Breton typically projects from the past to
the future: "This grid exists. Every life contains those homogenous patterns of facts, whose surface
is cracked or cloudy. Each person has only to stare at them fixedly in order to read his own future.
Let him enter the whirlwind; let him retrace the events which have seemed to him fleeting and
obscure among all others, which have torn him apart" (AF 87).
12. Theodor W. Adorno, "Looking Back on Surrealism" (1954) in Irving Howe, ed., The Idea of
the Modern in Literature and the Arts (New York, 1967), p. 223. Between the lines this reads as an
objection, long after the fact, to the surrealist influence on Benjamin. See Susan Buck-Morss, The
Origin of Negative Dialectics: TheodorW. Adorno, WalterBenjamin and the FrankfurtInstitute (New York:
Macmillan Free Press, 1977), pp. 124-29.
24 OCTOBER

reminiscence in which we already discern what will be later named

fantasy.13

Hardly limited to hysteria, this uncertainy of inside and outside, psychic and
perceptual, is fundamental to the talismanic concepts of surrealism: the mar-
velous, convulsive beauty, amourfou. Indeed, the distinctive character of sur-
realist art may reside in the different ways that it works through psychic trauma
in scenes that register as both internal and external, endogenous and exogenous,
fantasmatic and real-in a word, surreal.
Primal fantasy structures other surrealist oeuvres, and informs the contra-
dictory and simulacral aspects of surrealist images more generally too.14 I focus
on de Chirico, Ernst, and Giacometti because each not only evokes a different
primal fantasy but also accounts for a different aesthetic method or medium:
the development of "metaphysical" painting by de Chirico, of surrealist collage,
frottage, and grattage by Ernst, of "symbolic" objects by Giacometti. These
origin myths are the manifest content of the elaborated fantasies, but again they
are grounded in more basic questions concerning the origins of sexuality, iden-
tity, and difference. Here degrees of awareness become difficult to determine.'5
The Ernst text seems consciously to exploit a screen memory of a primal scene
in order to upset given ideas of identity (which, he writes after Breton, "will be
convulsive or will not exist" [BP 19]). The Giacometti text also involves a screen
memory-of a castration fantasy that encompasses both an Oedipal threat and
a pubertal dream of sadistic revenge-but it is never fully worked through.
Finally, the de Chirico text is somewhere between the other two. Set in an adult
moment, his fantasy of seduction is traumatic, and yet he deploys its sublimated
signs too; they are basic to his aesthetic of "enigma."
In a recent text Laplanche uses this de Chirican term to rethink all the

13. Laplanche and Pontalis, "Fantasy," p. 10.

14. Dali and Bellmer are also likely candidates for analysis in terms of primal fantasy. In the
text that attracted the young Lacan to the surrealists, Dali wrote of the "traumatic nature of images
[simulacres]"evocative of both "desire" and "terror" ("L'Ane pourri," Le Surrealismeau service de la
revolution,July 1930). On Bellmer see my "Armor Fou," October56 (Spring 1991). I take up surrealist
contradiction and simulation below.
15. The primal scene was mentioned as early as The Interpretationof Dreams(1900; French trans.
1926). The idea of primal fantasies was sketched in "The Sexual Enlightenment of Children" (1907)
and "Family Romances" (1908), and the fantasy of seduction was elaborated in Leonardoda Vinci
and a Memoryof His Childhood(1910; French trans. 1927). But the typology of the fantasies was not
fully developed until "A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the
Disease" (1915; French trans. 1935) and "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1914/18;
French trans. 1935).
The de Chirico texts which I cite below date from 1912-13, '19, and '24, and the relevant
works begin in 1910. The Ernst texts date from 1927, '33, and '42, and the relevant works from
1919. Both Giacometti texts and works are from the early 1930s. Ernst had begun to read Freud
as early as 1911, and he would have known some of the relevant Freud texts, certainly Leonardo.
(On this point see Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Loplop: The Artist in the Person [New York: George
Braziller, 1983], pp. 101-9). It is unlikely that the others were directly aware of the relevant concepts.
primal fantasies as forms of seduction: not as sexual assaults but as "enigmatic
signifiers" received by the child from the other (parent, sibling, etc.).'6 It is this
enigmatic, even seductive nature of primal fantasy that moves the artists not
simply to simulate it but to elaborate the very origins of art in its terms. They
cannot, however, escape the trauma of such fantasy, and it is finally this trauma
that, never tamed, compels them to reenact such scenes-an uncanny reenact-
ment of which they often appear more victim than master.

In several short texts from 1911 to 1919 de Chirico speaks of "revelation"

and "surprise," "enigma" and "fatality."17During the period that Freud drafts
"The Uncanny" de Chirico works to depict the world as "an immense museum

16. See Laplanche, New Foundationsfor Psychoanalysis,trans. David Macey (London: Blackwell,
1989). "The enigma is in itself a seductionand its mechanisms are unconscious. It was not for nothing
that the Sphinx appeared outside the gates of Thebes before Oedipus's drama began" (p. 127).
17. As will soon be clear, in "surprise" I want to hear "shock," and in "enigma" "seduction." The
texts from 1911-15, written in Paris, remained in the collection of Jean Paulhan and Paul Eluard;
the texts from 1919 were published in Valori Plastici. Translated extracts can be found in Soby,
Giorgio de Chirico; in Marcel Jean, ed., The Autobiographyof Surrealism (New York: Viking Press,
1980), pp. 3-10; and in Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theoriesof Modern Art (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968), pp. 397-402, 446-53.

Giorgio de Chirico. The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon. 1910.

26 OCTOBER

of strangeness," to reveal the "mystery" in insignificant things.'8 Clearly his

topos is the estrangement that comes of repression and returns as enigma, an
enigma which he once refers to "the great questions one has always asked
oneself-why was the world created, why we are born, live and die...."19 His
"metaphysical" terms are thus so many riddles about origins-but to what origin
do "surprise" and "enigma" speak? What origin estranges even as it founds?
"Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments," de Chirico tells us,
and these moments are not dreams.20 What are they then?
In his early texts de Chirico dwells on a memory that is elaborated in his
early paintings, especially The Enigma of an AutumnAfternoon(1910), to which it
is directly referred, and The Enigma of a Day (1914).21 In some sense it is
elaborated in all his work. The first version comes from the 1912 text "Medi-
tations of a Painter":
One clear autumnal morning I was sitting on a bench in the middle
of the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. It was of course not the first
time I had seen this square. I had just come out of a long and painful
intestinal illness, and I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The
whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains,
seemed to me to be convalescent. In the middle of the square rises a
statue of Dante draped in a long cloak, holding his works.... Then
I had the strange impression that I was looking at all these things for
the first time, and the composition of my picture came to my mind's
eye. Now each time I look at this painting I again see that moment.
Nevertheless, that moment is an enigma to me, for it is inexplicable.
And I like also to call the work which sprang from it an enigma.22

However enigmatic, this scene has its own sense. The space of the piazza is
transformed by two temporalities that coexist within it: an event of "not the
first time" that triggers a memory of "the first time," a structure characteristic
of deferred action in primal fantasy. So too the scene is traumatic in the
aforementioned sense that the enigma comes to de Chirico both from within
and without, in the symptom of the intestinal illness and in the guise of the
Dante statue. The illness alone is not enough to render the scene an originary

18. De Chirico in Jean, p. 6. De Chirico did not rehearse the Freudian uncanny, yet his art is
populated by its avatars-mannequins, doubles, spectral father figures, most of which he introduced
into the surrealist repertoire. In "Metafisica et unheimlichkeit" (LesRealismes1919-39 [Paris: Centre
Pompidou, 1981]) Jean Clair notes the contemporaneity of "On Metaphysical Art" and "The
Uncanny."
19. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
20. De Chirico, "On Metaphysical Art" (1919), in Chipp, Theoriesof Modern Art, p. 448.
21. The latter, once owned by Breton, was a talisman of the surrealists, some of whom speculated
about its sexual implications in Le Surrealismeau servicede la revolution6 (May 15, 1933).
22. De Chirico, "Meditations of a Painter" (1912), in Chipp, Theoriesof Modern Art, pp. 397-98.
Convulsive Identity 27

"revelation"; it has this effect because it evokes a primal fantasy through a

resisted, retrospective association-perhaps of sick with sexual, of intestinal with
genital. Thus the scene reads as a displaced version of a fantasmatic seduction,
a hypothesis that figures the statue as the father, the other who initiates the
subject into sexuality (another section of this text is titled "The Statue's De-
sire").23 Here de Chirico sublimates a traumatic initiation into sexuality into an
origin myth of art.
Yet why is the scene partly seductive, or at least not entirely traumatic?
Consider how it is treated in the two most relevant paintings. The "atmosphere"
of the 1910 Enigma is "warm,"24and the space welcomes artist and viewer. Yet
a few ambiguous signs disturb this relative calm: two obscured portals; an
acephalic, almost androgynous statue; and two tiny figures in antique dress
posed like Adam and Eve in an expulsion. This tension constitutes the "enigma"
of the painting, sexual in nature, to be referred to a precocious initiation. For
Freud a related seduction was crucial to the formation of Leonardo: an initiation
by the mother that produced a sexual ambivalence, as worked over, never
openly, in the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa and the androgynous features
of other figures. A similar trauma informs de Chirico, but here the fantasmatic
seducer is paternal, and the seduction produces an especially ambivalent Oed-
ipal subject. In the first Enigma this ambivalence is worked over in terms more
"negative" than "positive," i.e., by a subject more amorous than jealous of the
father.25
The treatment of this ambivalence is dramatically different in the 1914
Enigma. The space now threatens artist and viewer with its extreme perspective,
and the mysterious portals are replaced by a steep arcade, "symbol of the
intransigent will."26This arcade submits our look to the patriarchal statue that
dominates the scene; meanwhile, the Adam and Eve figures are all but banished
by this modern god. In the two Enigmas, then, a primal fantasy of seduction
seems replayed first in its seductive (negative-Oedipal) aspect and then in its
traumatic (positive-Oedipal) form.
In his 1913 text "Mystery and Creation" de Chirico restages this fantasy

23. This identification is supported by the further association with Dante, "father" of Italian
culture. (In the 1933 questionnaire devoted to the 1914 Enigma, Eluard identifies the statue as the
father.)
24. De Chirico, "Meditations," p. 398. Stimmung (atmosphere) is another privileged de Chirican
term, borrowed from Nietzsche.
25. "The more complete Oedipus complex ... is twofold, positive and negative, and is due to
the bisexuality originally present in children: that is to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent
attitude towards his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same
time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a
corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother" (The Ego and the Id [1923], trans. James
Strachey and Joan Riviere [New York: W. W. Norton, 1962], p. 23).
26. De Chirico, "Meditations," p. 400.
 in the anxious terms that become standard in his paintings after the second
Enigma:
I remember one vivid winter's day at Versailles ... Everything
gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then I realized
that every corner of the place, every column, every window possessed
a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes,
motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun
which pours down on us without love. ... At that moment I grew
aware of the mystery which urges men to create certain forms. And
the creation appeared more extraordinary than the creators....

Giorgio de Chirico. The Enigma of a Day. 1914.

Convulsive Identity 29

Perhaps the most amazing sensation passed on to us by prehis-

torical man is that of presentiment. It will always continue. We might
consider it as an eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe.
Original man must have wandered through a world full of uncanny
signs. He must have trembled at each step.27
Again a later scene seems to trigger a memory of a prior event, which returns
here less as a seductive enigma than as a traumatic threat. However sublimated,
the agent of this provocation remains the father. No doubt this hypothesis now
seems fully absurd, for where is the father in this fantasy? In the first version
he appears in proxy (the statue), and so he does here. In this scene the look of
de Chirico is returned as a gaze back at him (in the guise of the "marble heroes"),
and it is this gaze, castrative in import, that stands in for the father. Endowed
with a gaze, objects appear more alive than de Chirico, and they query his lack.
His active seeing has reversed into a passive being-seen.28
In this form of the gaze as threat, de Chirico works over his enigma,
especially in his still lifes of spectral objects and his cityscapes of paranoid
perspectives. In these paintings perspective works less to ground any depicted
figure than to unsettle the expected viewer; so forward is it thrown that things
often appear to see us. Thus if de Chirico revives perspective he does so in a
way that disturbs it from within.29 Both points of coherence, viewing and van-
ishing, are decentered, sometimes to the extent that the "seer" appears within
the scene as a sightless, degendered mannequin, a "Medusa with eyes that do
not see."30 As rational perspective is deranged, the visual array as such becomes
uncanny: a forest less of iconographic symbols than of enigmatic signifiers
concerning sexuality, identity, and difference. In the second version of the
fantasy as in the first, de Chirico almost grasps its significance. Once more he
senses that origins are at stake, but again he displaces them-here not to art
but to creation as such. As in the primal fantasy according to Freud, he "fills in

27. De Chirico, "Mystery and Creation" (1913), in Chipp, Theoriesof Modern Art, p. 402.
28. This structure is similar to that of the famous dream in "From the History of an Infantile
Neurosis," the locus classicusof the primal scene, where the look of the young Wolfman is returned
as the staring of wolves.
29. It is as if de Chirico pictorializes what Lacan theorizes about "the scopic field": "Everything
is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way-on the side of things, there is the
gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them" (The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], p. 109). In so doing, he
exposed its paranoid aspect long before Lacan (or Dali) in a "rehabilitation" of perspective that, as
with Duchamp, debilitated it all the more. On de Chirico and Renaissance perspective see William
Rubin, "De Chirico and Modernism," in De Chirico,ed. Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1982), pp. 58-61.
30. De Chirico, "Meditations," p. 400. In The Seer (1916) it is as if the "seer" that constructs the
pictorial space within the picture also represents it in its Medusan effect-both blind and blinding,
fragmented and fragmenting.
 Giorgio de Chirico. The Return. 1917.

the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth."31 That is, he refers his
fantasy, his confusion about origins that upset as well as ground the subject, to
"prehistorical man," as if his primal fantasy, its uncanny signs, were always
already there to seduce and threaten.
But why see this enigma as a primal fantasy, and, more outrageously, why
claim it to be a fantasy of seduction, especially when the de Chirico texts, though
clearly concerned with origins, are scarcely sexual? One might invoke subli-
mation, but the de Chirico of this period evinces seduction in two ways at least:
in a thematic register of a welcomed seduction in which paternal figures actually
appear, and in an enigmatic register of a traumatic seduction whose sublimated
signs are everywhere-in the gaze of objects, the corruption of space, the

31. Freud, IntroductoryLectures on Psycho-Analysis(1916-17), trans. James Stachey (New York:

W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 371. This is Freud in his phylogenetic mode: "It seems to me quite possible
that all the things that are told to us today in analysis as phantasy-the seduction of children, the
inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse, the threat of castration (or rather
castration itself )-were once real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human family, and that
children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth."
Convulsive Identity 31

uncanniness of repeated symbols and shapes. The first register is most apparent
in a theme that de Chirico repeats in different ways: the Return of the Prodigal.
Here the fantasmatic seduction is perfectly disguised: in this traditional subject
the father can be represented as fully ambiguous, a desired persecutor. In one
drawing of 1917, for example, the mustachioed figure is partially robed in
petrified drag, while in another drawing of 1917 he is a statue come down from
its plinth. In both images the son is a sightless, armless mannequin, submissive
in the first, struggling in the second. This encounter recurs throughout his
work, as do these identities of the statue and the mannequin.
The more important enigmatic register of seduction is more difficult to
locate. Breton once suggested that the de Chirican "revelation" concerning "our
instinctual life" is effected through a revision of time and space,32 and it is
indeed here that his fantasy of seduction is folded into his art: according to de
Chirico, in the "inhabited depth" that disturbs like a "symptom" the array of
his metaphysical painting,33 or, in our terms, in the psychic time (the deferred
action of primal fantasy) that corrupts his pictorial space. De Chirico tends to
think this strange revision of time and space in symbolic, even iconographic
terms. Influenced by Geschlechtund Charackter(Sex and Character), the notorious
1903 text by the Austrian Otto Weininger that touches on the psychological
effects of geometric forms, de Chirico advocates "a new metaphysical psychology
of things" that might capture "the terror of lines and angles . . . [the] joys and
sorrows . . . hidden within a portico, the angle of a street or even a room, on
the surface of a table between the sides of a box."34 Clearly this psychology
involves a traumatic vision, one of uncanny signs, and these signs are associated
with the engineer father whose traces (tools, easels, drawings) are indeed every-
where.
The subject doubled by strange figures, surveyed by ambivalent objects,
threatened by anxious perspectives, decentered by claustrophobic interiors:
these enigmatic signifiers point to a sexual trauma, a fantasy of seduction. This
reading is supported by the more manifest complexes that govern the oeuvre,
paranoia and melancholy, the first associated with de Chirico by the surrealists,
the second evoked by the artist in various titles.35 Both underscore the fantas-
matic basis of his art.
The fantasy of seduction stirs a sexuality which the subject defends against.
According to Freud, paranoia may also be a defense against sexuality-

32. Breton, "Giorgio de Chirico," Litterature11 (January 1920), and Les Pas perdus (Paris, 1924),
p. 145.
33. De Chirico, "On Metaphysical Art," p. 451.
34. Ibid., p. 452. Weininger, a Jewish anti-Semite, misogynist, and suicide, proposed a funda-
mental bisexuality, as did Fleiss and Freud, though very differently. See Frank J. Sulloway, Freud,
Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 223-29.
35. Like the texts concerning primal fantasies, the Freud texts on these subjects are roughly
contemporaneous with the de Chirico oeuvre, not prior to it.
32 OCTOBER

homosexuality-whereby the subject transforms the loved parent of the same

sex into a persecutor.36 This projection may account, at least in part, for the
ambiguity of the surrealist father, split as bad object and good, philistine cas-
trator and benevolent protector, as well as for the ambivalence of the surrealist
son, contemptuous of the father yet obsessed by him (as Ernst, Dali, and Bellmer,
to name a few others, all were). Though more manifest elsewhere, this surrealist
topos of paranoia begins with de Chirico, and it is he who develops its basic
pictorial formulas.37 Suggestive in this regard is the mannequin, doll, or dummy
as a disguised self-portrait, the paranoid significance of which is intimated in
"The Uncanny" where Freud discusses the E. T. A. Hoffmann story "The
Sandman." In this story the father is split as if by the Oedipal ambivalence of
the son Nathaniel into two sets of figures, the one kind and protective, the other
castrative and pledged to blind him-a familiar association between castration
and blindness central to surrealism. Important here is the desire of the son for
the good father, a "feminine attitude" figured by the doll Olympia: "Olympia
is, as it were, a dissociated complex of Nathaniel's which confronts him as a
person, and Nathaniel's enslavement to this complex is expressed in his senseless
obsessive love for Olympia."38 This is the psychological import of this surrealist
self-representation. Sexually ambiguous in the de Chirican oeuvre, it suggests
that the fantasmatic persecution of the father may be a reversed form of the
desired seduction by him. And in de Chirico as in Ernst (who follows him closely
here) the two terms are in fact mixed: in some works the paranoid term is
dominant (e.g., most famously, in the de Chirico The Mysteryand Melancholyof
a Street [1914] and the Ernst Two Childrenare Threatenedbya Nightingale [1924]),
while in other works the seductive term is paramount (e.g., The Child's Brain

36. This contested theory runs roughly as follows. For Freud libido passes from autoerotism
through narcissism to object-love. A first love object of the male infant is a narcissistic one, his own
body; a first outer love object is a homosexual one, a body with the same genitals, his father. When
the child intuits the stake of this love object-that he must be castrated in order to receive it-he
sublimates his homosexual desire. Later, if frustrated, he may regress to this point in his passage
-the paranoiac past sublimated homosexuality to narcissism. For Freud this point of fixation
suggests the motive of the paranoiac: he regresses to narcissism as a defense against homosexual
desire. And this defense often takes the form of projection-of an excessive reconstruction of the
world. Such reconstruction is necessary to the paranoiac because he regards his withdrawal from
the world as its end. Thus "the delusion-formation, which we take to be a pathological product, is
in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction" ("Psychoanalytic Notes on an Auto-
biographical Account of a Case of Paranoia" [1911], in Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff [New
York, 1963], p. 174).
37. It is marked in Ernst, and it becomes programmatic with Dali, who was also influenced by
two 1933 texts on the subject by Lacan, "Le Probleme du style et la conception psychiatrique des
formes paranoiaques de l'experience" and "Motifs du crime parano'iaque: le crime des soeurs Papin,"
published in Minotaure 1 and 3-4.
38. Freud, "The Uncanny," pp. 38-39. The association in Freud of "passive" with "feminine" is
obviously problematic, as it is in surrealism. However, it is disturbed in Ernst and, to a lesser extent,
in Giacometti.
Convulsive Identity 33

[1914] and Pietd, or Revolution by Night [1923]).39 Though opposite representa-

tions of the father, both terms may elaborate upon a disguised love for him.
This reading is supported by the third psychic trope that governs the de
Chirico oeuvre: melancholy. In certain ways the melancholic incorporation of
the dead father overcodes the other two scenarios of welcomed seduction and
paranoid projection. From "surprise" and "enigma" de Chirico passes to "nos-
talgia" and "melancholy": from scenarios of seduction and persecution he moves
to compulsively repeated homages to the dead seducer. Evariste de Chirico died
in 1905 when Giorgio was seventeen. The son was devoted to the father, but
de Chirico never refers the melancholy in his oeuvre to this loss. He assigns it
to other terms (which the critical literature mostly reiterates): a nostalgia for
Italy, neoclassical styles, old master techniques, and so on. Certainly these lost
objects pervade his work in the form of ruined references and failed recoveries.
Psychically, however, they are charged as representatives of the dead father.40
For the melancholic the lost love object is partly unconscious. Unable to
give up, he clings to it "through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis"
it
in which deeply cathected memories are obsessively repeated.41 Along with the
sublimation of seduction, this process effects the uncanny nature of de Chirican
scenes, hallucinatory and reiterative as they are; it also compounds the ambiv-
alence which they register. For just as the subject of the fantasmatic seduction
is ambivalent vis-a-vis the seducer, so too is the melancholic vis-a-vis the lost
object. As the melancholic de Chirico internalizes his lost object; he also inter-
nalizes his ambivalence for it, which is then turned round on the subject.42 This
ambivalence for both subject and object is most apparent in de Chirico, and for
a time he sustains it. However, its destructive aspect soon becomes dominant,
as he comes to identify with images of the dead (dead father, traditional motifs,
old master methods), as is evident in Self-Portrait(1922). Here melancholy passes
over into masochism.
The working over of seduction, the paranoid projection of persecution,
the melancholic repetition of loss: all these processes fascinate. Certainly they
fascinated the surrealists-that is, until they could no longer ignore his necro-
philic turn. In 1926 Breton wrote: "It took me, it took us, five years to despair

39. The most famous incarnation of this "dissociated complex" of the son may be in Revolution
by Night, where the figure of the mustachioed father is also derived from de Chirico.
40. This paternal loss was compounded by cultural dislocations, and de Chirico may have asso-
ciated the two. In this way compulsive repetitions of certain emblems (e.g., the train) may also
involve attempts to work through paternal loss.
41. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), in General PsychologicalTheory,ed. Philip Rieff
(New York: Collier Books, 1957), p. 166.
42. Ibid., p. 172. This is how Freud understands the "self-torment of melancholics": as "sadististic
tendencies" toward the object "turned around upon the self." "Thus the shadow of the object fell
upon the ego, so that the latter could henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty like an
object, like the forsaken object" (p. 170). Detached from naturalistic purpose, de Chirican shadows
seem to "fall" in a related way on his fragmented ego-surrogates.
34 OCTOBER

of de Chirico, to admit that he had lost all sense of what he was doing."43 But
did he really lose this sense, or was he finally overcome by it? That is, was his
deathly repetition (first of historical motifs, then of his own images) a willed
break in bad faith, or an involuntary development of an uncanny psychologic?
As Breton knew with Nadja, a disruptive subject may intrigue, but a truly
defusive one repels, and so it was with de Chirico and the surrealists. Compulsive
repetition was always the motor of his obsessional work. For a time he was able
to recoup it as a mode of art, to make a muse of uncanny returns, as he did in
The Disquieting Muses (1917). Eventually he could inflect it no further, and his
work petrified in melancholic repetition, as is evident in the many versions of
this painting.44 As petrification became its condition rather than its subject, his
art came to express, as Freud once said of melancholy, "a pure culture of the
death instinct."45

In 1924 in La Revolution surrealiste,de Chirico was asked to recount his

most impressive dream:
I struggle in vain with the man whose eyes are suspicious and
very gentle. Each time I grasp him, he frees himself by quietly spread-
ing his arms which have an unbelievable strength, an incalcuable
power.... It is my father who thus appears to me in my dreams....
The struggle ends with my surrender:I give up: then the images
become confused. . . 46

In effect, this dream conflates aspects of a fantasy of seduction with a primal

scene. No longer returned as a persecutory gaze from the scene, the look
becomes embodied within it, as the subject assumes a "feminine attitude" to the
father. Yet this relation is overcoded by the traumatic schema of seduction, so
that the father remains a menace as well. In this way images of seduction and

43. Breton, "Le Surrealisme et la peinture," La Revolutionsurrealiste7 (June 15, 1926). Breton
reproduced many de Chirico works in this journal, even though his classicist program was an-
nounced as early as 1919 (e.g., in "The Return to Craft").
44. Pursuit of profit alone did not drive these repetitions. If The DisquietingMuses represents the
first moment when de Chirico still inflects the uncanny return of the repressed (unheimlichis often
translated inquietant), its repetitions represent the second moment when he is overcome by its
compulsive mechanism. In this light the reprise of this image by Warhol (1982) is especially
appropriate: the contemporary master of deathly repetition repeats the image in the modernist
canon most emblematic of the compulsion to repeat.
45. Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 43.
46. De Chirico, La Revolutionsurrealiste1 (December 1, 1924). In Hebdomeros,his 1929 novel that
recaptured some surrealist favor, this glance returns-in the body of a woman: "All at once,
Hebomeros saw that this woman had his father's eyes; and he understood.... 'Oh Hebdomeros,' she
said, 'I am Immortality...."' (Hebdomeros,trans. Margaret Crosland [New York, 1988], p. 132).
struggle, desire and anguish are indeed "confused." In Ernst such confusion
regarding sexuality, identity, and difference is programmatic; he consciously
puts into play the trauma of the primal scene (in which a similar fantasmatic
relation to the father is suggested) in order "to hasten the general crisis of
consciousness due in our time" (BP 25).
In 1927 in La Revolution surrealiste, Ernst published "Visions de demi-
sommeil." This short text is the germ of his 1948 book BeyondPainting in which
Ernst deploys infantile scenarios, family romances, and screen memories (with
echoes of the Freud studies of Leonardo, the Wolfman, and Judge Schreber),

Giorgio de Chirico. The Disquieting Muses. 1917.

Max Ernst. The Failed Immaculate Conception. 1929.

many of which are also invoked in his art.47 The title text, "Au-dela de la
peinture" (1936), has three parts. The first, titled "History of a Natural History,"
opens with a "vision of half-sleep" dated "from five to seven years":
I see before me a panel, very rudely painted with wide black
lines on a red ground, representing false mahogany and calling forth
associations of organic forms (menacing eye, long nose, great head
of a bird with thick black hair, etc.).

47. Besides the title text, Beyond Painting includes a draft of this text ("Comment on force
l'inspiration," Le Surrealismeau service de la revolution 6, 1933) as well as a psycho-autobiography
("Some Data on the Youth of M.E. as told by himself," View,April 1942). "Visions de demi-sommeil"
appeared in the same issue (La Revolution surrealiste9/10, October 1, 1927) as an extract from The
Questionof Lay Analysis (1926).
Convulsive Identity 37

In front of the panel, a glossy black man is making gestures,

slow, comical and, according to my memories of a very obscure epoch,
joyously obscene. This rogue of a fellow wears the turned-up mous-
taches of my father. (BP 3)

Menacing eye, long nose, great head of a bird, obscene gestures, rogue father:
this is an obvious chain of signifiers-a first encounter with painting cast in
terms of a primal scene. In a near parody of deferred action this screen memory
layers three moments: 1. "the occasion of my own conception" (BP 4), the
fantasy of the primal scene which is the retrospective origin of the vision; 2.
the described encounter with the father-painter (in the period of latency), which
both evokes the primal scene as sexual and represses it as such; and 3. the act
of memory ("at the age of puberty" [BP 4]), in which the first two scenes are
recoded as an artistic initiation. Yet this origin is refused, as the father is made
to appear both ridiculous and oppressive (Philip Ernst was a Sunday painter of
academic art). It is, however, only as such that he is rejected; as his paranoid
preoccupations suggest, Ernst is ambivalent about the paternal.
However contrived, this primal scene remains traumatic for Ernst, for he
elaborates it many times over in his text-to master its charge, to transform its
affect, to rework its meaning.48 In "History of a Natural History" it is followed
by a reference to Leonardo, an artist also said to work over a traumatic fantasy.
Specifically, Ernst refers to his exemplum (cherished by the surrealists) that even
a stain on a wall might inspire pictorial invention. If Ernst rejected his paternal
artistic origin, he embraces this self-invented one:
On the tenth of August, 1925, an insupportable visual obsession
caused me to discover the technical means which have brought a clear
realization of this lesson of Leonardo. Beginning with a memory of
childhood (related above) in the course of which a panel of false
mahogany, situated in front of my bed, had played the role of optical
provocateur of a vision of half-sleep, I was struck by the obsession
that showed to my excited gaze the floor-boards upon which a thou-
sand scrubbings had deepened the grooves. I decided then to inves-
tigate the symbolism of this obsession. (BP 7)
This investigation takes the form of his first frottages or rubbings (published in
a 1926 portfolio Natural History), to which Ernst responds: "I was surprised by
the sudden intensification of my visionary capacities and by the hallucinatory
succession of contradictory images superimposed, one upon the other, with the
persistence and rapidity characteristic of armorous memories" (BP 7). Here
again the visionary develops out of the voyeuristic; once more artistic identity

48. Ernst: "Certainly little Max took pleasure in being afraid of these visions and later delivered
himself voluntarily to provoke hallucinations of the same kind" (BP 28).
 is framed in terms of a primal scene (hallucinatory, contradictory, amorous). In
this case, however, the primal scene is rewritten as an aesthetic invention, one
that redeems the original event even as it is rooted in it: in its scopophilic
look, in its autoerotic rubbing.49 According to Freud, the "rubbing" in the primal
scene is not that of the parents so much as that of the child whose fantasy is
designed to "cover up" his autoerotic activity, to "elevate" it in fact. The frottage
technique reprises this hypothetical moment: it is an artistic origin in which
fantasy, sexuality, and representation are all bound together, at once covered
up and elevated.

49. Ernst: "When someone would ask him: 'What is your favorite occupation?' he regularly
answered, 'Looking.' An analogous obsession conducted Max Ernst later to search for and discover
some technical possibilities of drawing and painting, directly connected with the processes of
inspiration and revelation (frottage, collage, decalcomania, etc.)" (BP 28). Interestingly, Philip Ernst
was a teacher of the deaf and dumb.

Max Ernst. Untitled (from Une semaine de bont6). 1934.

Convulsive Identity 39

But how covered up and elevated, i.e., how sublimated? Here Ernst di-
verges from the Freud account of Leonardo, which he otherwise parallels, even
follows. There Freud argues that the investigative powers of the artist derived
from a sexual curiosity never checked by his absent father. Ernst shares this
curiosity, which is finally about origins, and in "Some Data on the Youth of
M.E." he plays with this portrait (as in Freud he keys the curiosity to the birth
of a sibling rival). However, the crux of the Leonardo analysis concerns his
precocious initiation, a trauma which emerges as a sexual ambiguity in his art.
It is this that Ernst seeks to reproduce, but with a difference. He does not
sublimate it; in his techniques of collaging, rubbing, and scraping he resexualizes
it-in part to flaunt his father (who was far from absent), to shock his petit-
bourgeois society. For his part Freud thinks this sexual ambiguity through the
famous fantasy of the vulture wherein the infant Leonardo was brushed on his
lips by its tail: this story contains a memory of the nursing of his solitary mother,
a memory of love later reciprocated in his artistic devotion to the theme of the
Virgin and Child.50 However, Freud argues, this memory of a maternal nipple
also conceals a fantasy of a maternal penis, and it is finally this paradox-of a
seduction both pleasant and assaultive, of a parent both tender and terrible-
that Leonardo works over in his enigmatic figures. A related enigma, I have
claimed, is treated in different ways by de Chirico. So is it too by Ernst, most
consciously in his bird persona Loplop, who is indeed ambiguous, variously bird
and/or human, male and/or female.51 But he also works over this sexual ambi-
guity in formal, procedural ways. Indeed, his aesthetic privileges the "passive"
(homosexual) position that Leonardo assumes in his fantasy; more generally it
prizes "the continuously shifting positions of traumatic sexuality."52 It is this
sentient, sexual motility that Ernst seeks in his art.
In this way Ernst not only puts this traumatic sexuality into play but also
recoups it as a general theory of aesthetic practice. "It is," he writes, "as a
spectator that the author assists ... at the birth of his work.... [T]he role of
the painter is to . . . project that which sees itself in him" (BP 9). A complicated
formula, this nonetheless suggests why the primal scene is so important to Ernst,
for it allows him to think the artist as both active creator (of his aesthetic identity)
and passive receiver (of his automatist work), as both participant inside and
voyeur outside the scene of his art. Like the subject in the fantasy "A Child is

50. As is well known, Freud worked from a mistranslation of "vulture" for "kite," which renders
most of his mythological speculations spurious. See, among other texts, Meyer Schapiro, "Leonardo
and Freud: An Art Historical Study," Journal of the History of Ideas, XVII (1956), pp. 147-78.
51. In one image in his 1934 collage-novel Une Semainede bonte,Ernst seems to quote the Leonardo
fantasy directly.
52. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysisand Art (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), p. 43. His provocative discussion of Leonardois pertinent to Ernst, as is that of Laplanche in
"To Situate Sublimation," October28 (Spring 1984), pp. 7-26.
40 OCTOBER

Being Beaten," he is not fixed in any one position: hypothetically at least, the
usual oppositions of subject and object, active and passive, masculine and fem-
inine, heterosexual and homosexual, are suspended. But how exactly is this
done? What is the psychic mechanism at work?
Ernst focused his first memory of the primal scene on an active, even
sadistic object: the father-painter (the child often interprets parental sex as
paternal aggression). In his second scene, however, there is a turning round
from the object to the subject and a reversal from active to passive: a move
from an active seeing almost to a passive being-seen (as occurs in de Chirico).
For Freud sexuality first emerges in this turn to the autoerotic, to the fantasmatic
hallucination of the lost object, and it is this originary turn that Ernst wants to
recapitulate in his art. It is a moment that, recovered, suspends the aforemen-
tioned oppositions that constrain identity. In Instinctsand Their Vicissitudes(1917)
Freud defines this in-between state thus: "The active voice is changed, not into
the passive, but into the reflexive middle voice."53Though understood here as
a linguistic position, this state is eminently visual and tactile, and it is in these
terms that Ernst poses it as the basis of his art: in the reflexive moment of
looking, in the autoerotic sense of touching. If de Chirico swings between seeing
and being seen, Ernst privileges the state in between-when one is caught up
in the sequence of fantasmatic images, "surprised and enamored of what I saw
wishing to identify with it all" (BP 9). For Ernst this is the ideal condition of
art-to be "engrossed in this activity (passivity)" (BP 8), to be suspended in a
sentience disruptive of identity, a convulsive identity in which axes of desire
and identification cross. It is a "hysterical" condition that the surrealists prized
above all others: in its benign form they called it disponibilite,in its anxious form
"critical paranoia" (BP 8).
In the second section of "Au-dela de la peinture," Ernst continues this art-
treatise-cum-auto-analysis in relation to collage (its title, "The Placing Under
Whiskey-Marine," was that of his 1921 Paris show of dadaist collages). "One
rainy day in 1919 ... I was struck by the obsession which held under my gaze
... an illusive succession of contradictory images ... peculiar to love memories
and vision of half-sleep" (BP 14). Obsession, gaze, contradictory images, visions
of half-sleep: once again Ernst frames an aesthetic discovery in terms of an
infantile one, the visual fascinations and (pre)sexual confusions of the primal
scene. This association determines not only his definition of collage: "the coupling
of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently
does not suit them" (BP 13); but also his understanding of its purpose: collage

53. Freud, Instinctsand Their Vicissitudes,in GeneralPsychologicalTheory,p. 96. The best discussion
of these processes is Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis(1970), trans. Jeffrey Mehlman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 85-102.
 Max Ernst. The Master's Bedroom. c. 1920.

disturbs "the principle of identity" (BP 19), even "abolishes" the concept of
"author" (BP 20).54
Not just another rehearsal of Lautreamont, this definition is fundamental
to surrealism, for it implicitly characterizes the surrealist image as a transval-
uation of dadaist collage. In surrealism collage is less a transgressive montage
of constructed social materials (i.e., of high art and mass-cultural forms) located
in the world, as it is in dada, and more a disruptive montage of conductive
psychic signifiers (i.e., of fantasmatic scenarios and enigmatic events) referred
to the unconscious. To the social reference of dadaist collage the surrealist
image adds the unconscious dimension: the image becomes a psychic montage
that is temporal as well as spatial (in its deferred action), endogenous as well as
exogenous (in its sources), subjective as well as collective (in its significations).
In some sense the image in surrealism is patterned upon the structure of the
symptom as an enigmatic signifier of a psychosexual trauma.

54. My italics. The dadaist Ernst sought to decenter the authorial subject in several ways:
anonymous collaborations, the use of found materials and mechanistic techniques, etc. Here Ernst
borrows the term "principle of identity" from Breton, who used it in his catalogue essay to the 1921
Ernst show in Paris (reprinted in BeyondPainting). For Breton too these collages "disturb us within
our memory" (BP 177).
42 OCTOBER

Again, for Ernst the primary trauma is the primal scene; it is this coupling
that his collage aesthetic works over. As with de Chirico, this working over is not
only thematic; it occurs at the level of process and form-if only to disperse
the first and to undo the second. In his early work Ernst did not simply reject
painting as paternal and traditional; rather, he moved "beyond" it to collage
modes as more effective ways to transform the principle of identity. One early
example of such coupling must suffice here. The Master'sBedroom(1919) alludes
to the primal scene thematically, but it is in the construction of the scene that
the trauma is treated, the charge released in the subject, the punctum inscribed
in the viewer: in its contradictory scale, anxious perspective, and mad juxta-
position (table, bed, cabinet, whale, sheep, bear). Together these procedural
elements produce the de Chirican effect of a returned gaze that positions the
spectator both in and out of the picture, that makes him (like the eponymous
child) both master and victim of the scene.55
Such couplings are repeated in his collages, frottages, grattages, and de-
calcomanias, all of which, driven by trauma and structured in repetition, are
pledged, consciously or not, to transform the principle of identity. In "Instan-
taneous Identity," the last section of "Au-dela de la peinture," Ernst speaks of
this subjectivity in the very language of the primal scene: "he displays [note the
characteristic split in personal reference] two attitudes (contradictory in ap-
pearance but in reality simply in a state of conflict) that . . . are convulsively
fused into one" (BP 19). Here a "hysterical" trauma is recouped as a convulsive
identity, and it is precisely in the shock of the collaged image-in the "exchange
of energy" (BP 19) between its psychic signifiers-that this is achieved. In the
coupling of two scenes, in the deferred action of fantasy, subjectivity is indeed
convulsed.
Such a convulsive identity is difficult to sustain; and rather than a reflexive,
middle voice Ernst often swings between active and passive modes, sadistic and
masochistic scenes. Paranoid fantasies (scenarios of domination or submission,
delusions of grandeur or persecution, hallucinations of the end or of the be-
ginning of the world) come to govern the work. Especially evident in the collage
novels, such ambivalent visions also pervade "Some Data on the Youth of M.
E.," where Ernst writes that "he came out of the egg which his mother had laid
in an eagle's nest" and that "he was sure he was little Jesus Christ" (BP 27).
Both these fantasies are related family romances, i.e., stories that reconfigure
the family in ideal terms. The first fantasy of the egg displaces the father, but
the second reveals this to be less a psychotic disavowal than an incestuous

55. These couplings need not be collages per se; as Ernst once remarked, "Ce n'est pas la colle
qui fait le collage." Some (e.g., The Master'sBedroom)are overpaintings on found illustrations, a
concealing-that-reveals that suggests a further connection between psychic and technical operations.
For a related analysis of this work see Rosalind Krauss, "The Master's Bedroom," Representations28
(Fall 1989), pp. 55-76.
Convulsive Identity 43

apotheosis: little Max as Christ positions the father as God.56 Gradually, however,
this attachment is broken, partly through the intervention of Loplop. At first a
paranoid figure of the father, this "menacing bird" later represents his law (the
appellation "Bird Superior," the vocation "my private phantom" [BP 29], even
the castrative onomatopoeia all suggest superego status). In other words, Loplop
images the "positive" Oedipal passage of Ernst whereby he assumes a normative
heterosexual position, i.e., to be "perturbed" about castration and to identify
"voluntarily" with the father (BP 29). And yet this is to become fixed in a way
that his aesthetic credo argues against. Finally Ernst is no more mobile in his
positions than the usual post-Oedipal subject; and after the early collages his
work illustrates more than enacts a convulsive identity.57

If in de Chirico the origin of metaphysical painting is refracted through

an enigmatic seduction and in Ernst that of surrealist collage through a primal
scene, then in Giacometti the origin of symbolic objects is refracted through a
fantasy of castration. For Freud artistic inventions may stem from sexual in-
quiries made as children, two of which he stresses: where do I come from? And
what distinguishes the sexes, i.e., which one am I? While Ernst elaborates on
both questions, Giacometti focuses on the second. Like Ernst, he poses this
riddle in a way that troubles sexual difference, that places conventional subject
positions in doubt; however, unlike Ernst, this riddle truly troubles him. Some
of his surrealist objects attempt to suspend the putative castration that subtends
sexual difference, or at least to render sexual reference ambiguous. Others

56. Freud: "In fact, the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him" ("Family Romances,"
in The Sexual Enlightenmentof Children, ed. Philip Rieff [New York: Collier Books, 1963], p. 45). In
"Some Data" Ernst writes that he ran away as a child, only to be taken by "pilgrims" as Christ; his
father then painted him in this guise. Such godly fantasies are classically paranoid (as Ernst may
have known through the Schreber case). They are reworked (suggestively in relation to Leonardo)
in The Virgin Spanking the Child Jesus in front of Witnesses:Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Max Ernst
(1926). In Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1990), Susan Suleiman reads this painting through "A Child is Being Beaten" in a way
commensurate with my own account.
57. This is hardly without interest. Particularly in his collage novels, La Femme 100 tetes (1929),
Reve d'une petitefille qui voulut entrerau carmel(1930), and Une Semainede bonte(1934), Ernst contrives
primal scenes, castration fantasies, paranoid projections, and other such fantasmatic scenarios.
"These archaic moments of disturbed visual representation," Jacqueline Rose writes, "these troubled
scenes, which expressed and unsettled our groping knowledge in the past, can now be used as
theoretical prototypes to unsettle our certainties again" (Sexuality in the Field of Vision [London:
Verso, 1987], p. 227). This is what Ernst attempts, fifty years before the feminist art which concerns
Rose, in the best of these collages. "They are reminiscences of my first books," Ernst told Siegfried
Giedion, "a resurgence of childhood memories." This is true materially as well, for many of his
collages were made from late-nineteenth-century school primers (especially, in the early collages,
the Kolner Lehrmittel-Anstalt), illustrated novels, catalogues, and popular magazines. See Giedion,
Mechanization Takes Command(New York: W. W. Norton, 1948), p. 363.
44 OCTOBER

disavow this castration fetishistically, while still others punish its female repre-
sentative sadistically. Although the surrealist fetish quickly became a cruel cliche,
Giacometti was able to sustain his psychic ambivalence and to recoup it as a
symbolic ambiguity-at least for a few years.58
Three texts will guide our reading. The first is the last in date, the famous
statement regarding The Palace at 4 a.m. published in Minotaure in December
1933. Here Giacometti writes that his objects come to him "entirely completed"
like so many psychic readymades that, if modified at all, are totally lost.59
Automatist in bias, this remark also suggests the fantasmatic basis of his work,
which Giacometti elsewhere describes in terms of "projection."60And in fact his

58. Freud thinks fetishism in relation to the castration and Oedipus complexes in the 1920s, the
classic period of surrealism, in such texts as "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical
Distinction Between the Sexes" (1925) and "Fetishism" (1927). In an early text on Giacometti,
Michel Leiris reads his objects in terms of a curative fetishism, one which treats "that affective
ambivalence, that tender sphinx we nourish, more or less secretly, at our core," in a way that
questions not only sexual identities but also cultural conventions, "our moral, logical and social
imperatives." Leiris nonetheless sees this ambivalence in traumatic terms as "when abruptly the
outside seems to respond to a call we send it from within...." See "Alberto Giacometti," Documents
1, 4 (1929), pp. 209-10, trans. James Clifford in Sulphur 15 (1986), pp. 38-40.
59. Alberto Giacometti, "Le Palais de quatre heures," Minotaure 3-4 (December 1933), p. 46.
60. These objects were produced by others "so I could see them all done, like a projection"
("Entretien avec Alberto Giacometti," in Charles Charbonnier, Le Monologuedu peintre [Paris, 1959],
p. 156).

Alberto Giacometti. The Palace at

4 a.m. 1933.
Convulsive Identity 45

favored formats of the cage, the gameboard, and the fetish do project a fan-
tasmatic space between the actual and the virtual. That the fantasies are trau-
matic is implied in the Minotaure text: "Once the object is constructed, I tend
to find in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions and facts that have
moved me profoundly (often unknown to me), and forms that I feel to be very
close to me, although I am often incapable of identifying them, which make
them all the more disturbing to me."61
His test case is the The Palace at 4 a.m., which seems to reprise a dream or
screen memory that, prompted by a love affair, concerns a traumatic memory.
Besides a skeletal bird and a spinal column, both of which Giacometti relates to
his lover, the stage contains three primary figures: a scaffold of a tower; an
abstracted woman in front of three "curtains" associated with his mother; and
a pod form on a "red" plank with which Giacometti identifies (again the subject
is in the fantasmatic scene). Within the Oedipal triangle these figures are indeed
"displaced," for here the paternal term, the tower, is "unfinished" or "broken,"
while the mother appears dominant in her long "black"dress. Yet this displace-
ment reveals more than conceals the fetishistic scenario of the piece: a vision
"in my earliest memories" of his mother, a glance diverted to her dress which
"seemed to me like part of her body." A site of a fetishistic displacement, the
dress still provokes "fear and confusion." This implies that the castrative charge
of the vision cannot be blunted; indeed, its stake is figured in the spinal column
that hangs, like some phallus dentatus, at once cut and whole, from a wire.
That this fantasy is not simply scripted is suggested by its genuinely disarticu-
lative aspect, which is not only obscure in meaning but apparently layered in
time.62 That is to say, the scenario of Palace seems constructed out of the
deferred action of traumatic fantasy.
Giacometti almost intuits this process in an earlier text published in Le
Surrealismeau service de la revolution in December 1931, which presents sketches
of works such as Cage, SuspendedBall, two DisagreeableObjects,and Projectfor a
Square (all c. 1931) under the rubric "objets mobiles et muets."63 Below the
drawings is an automatist caption that runs together different memories in a
delirious cadence: "All things . . . near, far, all those that passed and the others,
in front, moving; and my lady friends-they change (we pass, very near, they
are far away); others approach, ascend, descend....,"64 In this verbal dislocation

61. Giacometti, "Le Palais," p. 46. The quotations in the next paragraph are from this text.
62. Giacometti was sometimes suspected of such scripting, in this work in particular. See Reinhold
Hohl, AlbertoGiacometti(London: Thames and Hudson, 1972).
63. In the same issue Dali credits "the object of symbolic function" to Giacometti (specifically his
SuspendedBall), which he relates to "clearly characterized erotic fantasies and desires." See "Objets
surrealistes," Le Surrealismeau service de la revolution 3 (December 1931).
64. Giacometti, "Objets mobiles et muets," pp. 18-19. In a later text, "Le Reve, le Sphinx et la
Mort de T." (Labyrinthe22-23 [December 15, 1946], pp. 12-13), Giacometti again alludes to the
action of memories related in content but distant in time.
AlbertoGiacometti.
Objets mobiles et muets, Le Surrealismeau service de la revolution,
no. 3, 1931.

spatial juxtaposition comes to represent temporal spacing, and it is out of this

layering of scenes that Giacometti constructs his objects. At this point, however,
there is no indication of what the ur-scene or primal fantasy might be; this
comes only a year and a half later, after most of the relevant objects are made.
Between these two brief texts Giacometti published a recollection, "Hier,
sables mouvants" (Yesterday, Quicksand), in Le Surrealismeau service de la revo-
lution in May 1933, which does not deal directly with any work. Instead it
presents several memories dated, as was the case with the Ernst "visions of half-
sleep," from latency to puberty. The first one begins:
As a child (between four and seven), I only saw the things of
the world that delighted me.... [D]uring two summers at least I had
eyes only for one big stone. It was a golden monolith, its base opening
on a cave; the entire bottom was hollowed out by the action of water.
... I considered this stone a friend at once ... like someone whom
we knew and loved a long time ago and whom we met again with
Convulsive Identity 47

infinite joy and surprise.... I was overjoyed when I could crouch in

the little cave at the bottom; it could hardly hold me; all my wishes
were fulfilled. ....65
The story points to a primal fantasy of intrauterine existence, the cave as womb.
However, the mother in Giacometti is as ambiguous as the father in de Chirico
or Ernst: both desired lost object and feared agent of this loss. Conventionally,
these Oedipal roles are divided between maternal and paternal terms. And
indeed the fantasy of intrauterine existence, of reunion with the mother, seems
a response to a prior fantasy of castration, of interdiction by the father-for it
is only this interdiction that causes the desire for the mother to be repressed,
and only this repression that renders any return of the maternal, such as the
memory of the cave, uncanny.66 In short, the castration fantasy may determine
the intrauterine fantasy; however, in this screen memory, the first follows the
second:
Once (I don't remember by what chance) I walked further than usual
and found myself on a hill. Just below in a bunch of bushes rose a
huge black rock in the shape of a sharp narrow pyramid. I can't tell
you how bewildered and resentful I felt at that moment. The rock
struck me as a living thing, hostile, menacing. It threatened every-
thing: us, our games, our cave. Its existence was intolerable and I
knew right away that, being unable to make it go away, I would have
to ignore it, forget it, tell no one about it. I approached it nonetheless,
but with a feeling of surrendering myself to something secret, sus-
picious, reprehensible. Fearful and disgusted, I scarcely touched it. I
walked around it, trembling to find an opening. No trace of a cave,
which made the rock all the more intolerable. But then I felt a certain
satisfaction: an opening in this rock would have complicated every-
thing, and already I felt the loneliness of our cave. ... I fled this
rock, I never spoke about it to the other children, I ignored it and
never returned to look at it.67

65. Giacometti, "Hiers, sables mouvants," Le Surrealismeau servicede la revolution5 (May 15, 1933),
p. 44.
66. Here the passage in "The Uncanny" concerning the maternal body might be recalled (see
note 3). Giacometti was close to his mother, Annetta, throughout his life, and in his memory it is
his father who shows him the cave.
67. Giacometti, "Hier, sables mouvants," p. 44. As experienced in this memory, the uncanny has
an auratic aspect, which figures the desire of the mother, as here with the cave, and an anxious
aspect, which signals the risk if this desire is acted upon, as here with the rock. A related connection
between the uncanny and the auratic, crucial to surrealism, is noted in Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin,
Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology'," New German Critique 40
(Winter 1987).
48 OCTOBER

Here the castration fantasy comes through the screen memory as trans-
parently as did the intrauterine fantasy, but two things are not so clear: how do
the two fantasies function together, and how does Giacometti deploy them? For
Freud the paternal threat alone does not convince the little boy of castration;
this requires the sighting of the maternal genitals as well.68 In this light the cave
may figure the fantasm not only of the intrauterine mother but also of the
castrated one. This is more in keeping with the split significance of the maternal
in the Giacometti oeuvre (e.g., the regenerative spoon woman versus the cas-
trative praying mantis) as well as with its volatile ambiguity regarding sexual
difference. In the heterosexist account of Freud, the threat of castration typically
dissolves the Oedipus complex for the little boy, who surrenders the mother as
love object, introjects the father as superego, and accepts a heterosexual struc-
ture of desire and identification. Here, however, Giacometti retains an ambiv-
alence. Like Ernst, he refers his work to a fantasmatic memory, to the critical
moment when the child foregoes infantile sexuality and responds to cultural
renunciation. He returns to this critical moment to disturb the subject positions
first fragilely posed there: to render them ambivalent again. This ambivalence
is as difficult to sustain as is the reflexivity prized by Ernst; and just as that
reflexivity was often the point between active and passive modes, so is this
ambivalence often the movement between sadistic and masochistic impulses.
Nevertheless, when sustained it produces a disruptive "oscillation of meaning."69
For Freud, of course, the fetish is a substitute for an absent (maternal)
penis, a substitute which parries the threat of castration that such absence
signifies for the little boy (the more ambiguous case of the little girl is mostly
scanted).70 Fetishism is thus a practice of ambivalence in which the subject
simultaneously recognizes and disavows castration: "Yes . . . but. This
ambivalence may split the ego, which, if disavowal becomes total, leads to
psychosis; it may also split the object, which becomes ambivalent (as it were)
too. After all, the fetish is as much a "memorial" to castration as a "protection"
against it. That is, both recognition and disavowal are often evident in the
object, as are both contempt and reverence in its treatment (fig leafs and bound

68. See "Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process" (1938), in Sexualityand the Psychologyof
Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 221. In other texts Freud alters the
sequence of these "events" but insists on the necessity of both.
69. I borrow this term from Rosalind Krauss, who addresses a similar question through the
Bataillean concept of alteration. See her "Giacometti," in William Rubin, ed., "Primitivism"in 20th
CenturyArt, vol. 2 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), pp. 503-33. For a formal analysis
of the objects discussed here, see Michael Brenson, The Early Workof AlbertoGiacometti:1925-1935
(Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. dissertation, 1974).
70. Many feminists have focused on this blind spot, Naomi Schor, Mary Kelly, and Emily Apter
prominent among them. The formulation is even more problematic for gay men and lesbians:
according to Freud, fetishism is one way to "fend off" homosexuality, and lesbians outstrip fetishists
in their disavowal of castration ("Fetishism," On Sexuality,p. 352; "Some Psychical Consequences,"
pp. 336-37).
Convulsive Identity 49

feet are the suggestive examples offered by Freud). This ambivalence is fun-
damental to the Giacometti objects, as indeed he recognizes: "all this alternated,
contradicted itself, and continued by contrast."71
Giacometti designates seven objects "mobile and mute"; at least five were
executed, while the other two evoke scenarios of sex and/or sacrifice somewhere
between Cage and Point to the Eye, i.e., scenarios in which sexuality and death
are bound up with one another in a conundrum crucial to surrealism. Cage
images two abstracted praying mantises, a familiar surrealist favorite for the
way in which, as here, the female devours the male during or after copulation.
As discussed by Roger Caillois, these figures dedefine the order both of life and
death and of reality and representation.72 They also disturb the usual opposition
of passive female and active male in a manner that symbolically deconstructs
any strict binarism of the drives-erotic and destructive, sadistic and masochis-
tic.
SuspendedBall figures a related ambivalence regarding sexual object rather
than drive. If the mantises in Cage image desire preemptively consumed, the
sphere in Suspended Ball that scarcely touches its wedge counterpart images
desire forever frustrated.73 At the same time the piece renders sexual reference
indeterminate: neither form is simply active or passive, masculine or feminine;
such terms become unfixed.74 It is in sexual evocation, then, that both objects
are "mobile and mute." The same holds true for the subject who, as in fantasy,
can identify with either term or both; identification may come to rest, if at all,
only with the implied motion of the piece. The forms not only cross each other
in sexual reference but also suggest two series of signifiers (e.g., for the ball:
testicles, buttocks, eye . . . ) that have no fixed beginning or end; they are
opened to the play of difference in language.75 Yet the "round phallicism" of
SuspendedBall is equally pledged to the Bataillean project of a collapseof differ-
ence in form. It is in this paradox-in difference both opened in language and

71. Giacometti, "Letter to Pierre Matisse" (1947), in AlbertoGiacometti,ed. Peter Selz (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1961), p. 22.
72. Among other things it is able, when dead, to "imitate" death. See Caillois, "Le mante
religieuse," Minotaure 5 (February 1934), and Krauss, "Giacometti," pp. 517-18; also see William
Pressley, "The Praying Mantis in Surrealist Art," Art Bulletin (December 1973), pp. 600-15. Freud:
"These creatures die in the act of reproduction because, after Eros has been eliminated through
the process of satisfaction, the death instinct has a free hand for accomplishing its purposes" (The
Ego and the Id, p. 37).
73. This was recognized by Dali and recounted by Maurice Nadeau: "This emotion has nothing
to do with satisfaction, rather with irritation, the kind provoked by the disturbing perception of a
lack" (The History of Surrealism[1944], trans. Richard Howard [New York: Macmillan, 1965], p. 188).
Together the objects are hellish in an almost Dantean way, as if the medieval image of damnation
and the psychoanalytical conception of desire were here one.
74. See Krauss, "Giacometti," pp. 512-14.
75. Ibid. Krauss likens this to the series of ocular forms in Histoire de l'oeil (1928), or rather to
the Roland Barthes reading of Bataille. See his "La Metaphore de l'oeil," Critique 196 (1963); the
term "round phallicism" is his.
50 OCTOBER

blurred in form-that the symbolic ambiguity of the piece lies. As for its psychic
ambivalence, this affect stems as well from its implicit oscillation between the
erotic and the autoerotic, the sadistic and the masochistic, an oscillation which,
if posed in language, is as conundrumical as this question: who or what strokes
or strikes whom or what? Here the paradox concerns not only a "round phal-
licism" but also a suspended motion or a mobile suspension-a convulsive
beauty that seems to point to the sadomasochistic basis of sexuality, a basis which
surrealism both embraces and defends against.76
Again, this ambivalence is difficult to sustain. In the two DisagreeableObjects
it is treated in a strictly fetishistic way; indeed, both objects are structural
simulacra of the sexual fetish. Here the two elements that signify the two
genders are not disconnected but rather combined, and the effect is less an
indeterminacy of sexual reference and an oscillation of subject position than an
immobile contradiction of both terms. No longer suspended, desire is fixed in
fetishistic substitutes that are "disagreeable" because each evokes castration-
or the hostility produced by its threat-even as it wards it away. In the first
DisagreeableObjectthe wedge from SuspendedBall is now clearly phallic, but in
its penetration of the convex board it is also cut. The second DisagreeableObject
is more complicated: here the phallic wedge has become an embryonic body
replete with eyes, a body which, like the suspended ball, suggests its own chain
of signifiers (penis, feces, baby. . . ), a chain analyzed by Freud in terms of both
separation or loss and its fetishistic defense (relevant here to a feminine subject).
Recognition of castration is literally inscribed on this phallic substitute in the
form of several spikes: in this way "hostility" for the fetish is mixed with
"affection," the narcissistically disagreeable (the castrative) with the perversely
desirable (the fetishistic).77
If fetishistic ambivalence is recouped as symbolic ambiguity in the "objets
mobiles et muets," it is soon disarticulated, pulled apart. (Already in Projectfor
a Square Giacometti appears to oppose genders in a more normative icono-

76. See my CompulsiveBeauty, forthcoming.

77. These little spikes also allude to "tribal fetishes," and in fact both DisagreeableObjectsare
associated with Oceanic objects (see Krauss, "Giacometti", p. 522): the first with a Marquesan ear
ornament, another sort of fetish; the second with an Easter Island club in the shape of a fish,
which, though utilitarian, might be "totemic" in the Freudian sense (however discredited this sense
now is). Moreover, the subtitle of the first, "to be disposed of," suggests not only the ambivalence
but also the transience of the tribal ritual object. And the drawing of the second in "Objets mobiles
et muets" includes a hand that barely touches it-as in the prohibitionagainst touching that Freud
regarded as essential to the totem, a taboo that belies a desire to touch . . . the penis. In fact, all
these objects both attract and repel a tactile impulse. See Totemand Taboo (1913; translated into
French 1924), trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950).
Giacometti termed some pieces "objets sans base," i.e., objects without a base and/or without
value (see Brenson, The Early Work, p. 168). For Krauss these works perform a rotation to the
horizontal crucial to postwar object-making. Could this turn to the ground, this double tropism to
bassesseand baselessness, be partly permitted by a turn to the materiality, to the structure, of the
"tribal fetish"?
 ConvulsiveIdentity 51

graphic way-negative, hollowed volumes versus positive, phallic forms.) It is

as if the fetishistic structure of his work breaks down into its constituent parts,
the sexual drive into sadistic and masochistic impulses. Some objects, such as
Hand Caught and Point to the Eye (both 1932), figure castration threat alone;
others, such as Womanwith Her ThroatCut (also 1932), appear as symbolic acts of
sadistic vengeance exacted on the figure of woman as representative of castra-
tion. Indeed, this splayed scorpion woman is the psychic complement of the
devouring mantis of Cage: here the threat of castration is returned as a "horror
of the mutilated creature or triumphant contempt for her."78
It is with such a fantasy that "Hier, Sables mouvants," the text that places
fetishistic ambivalence at the center of the work, concludes:
I remember that for months while a schoolboy I couldn't get to sleep
unless I imagined first that I had gone through a thick forest at
nightfall and reached a great castle rising in a most secluded and
unknown place. There I killed two defenseless men ... [and] raped
two women, first the one who was thirty-two . . . and then her
daughter. I killed them too, but very slowly.... Then I burned the
castle and, satisfied, went to sleep.
This contempt for the feminine knows no bounds (mother, daughter .. . ), but

78. Freud, "SomePsychicalConsequences,"p. 336.

Woman with
AlbertoGiacometti.
Her Throat Cut. 1932.
52 OCTOBER

as the fantasy suggests, the contempt begins at home. That is, it concerns a lack
in the masculine subject that the feminine subject only represents (it is Giacom-
etti who was thirty-two in 1933): the self-contempt of a castratable subject
violently resentful of a female other who, far from castrated, is uncastratable.79
In any case, the sadism here appears as a turning round of a fundamental
masochism; and this is how the ambivalence in Giacometti breaks down. With
the difficulty of desire compounded by the volatility of sexuality, he finally
rejects the psychic as the source of his art. From the fantasmatic he turns back
to the mimetic-obsessively: "I worked with the model all day from 1935 to
1940."80

In these ways, then, primal fantasy informs the symptomatic depth of de

Chirico paintings, the psychic coupling of Ernst images, and the affective am-
bivalence of Giacometti objects. If the surrealist object may be related to the
metonymic order of desire, the surrealist image may be related to the meta-
phoric order of the symptom.81 Of course, the surrealist image is not a direct
trace of a psychosexual trauma, any more than the surrealist found object is a
simple refinding of a lost one. Unconscious as they are, these terms cannot be
intentional referents or literal origins of this art; rather, they help us to under-
stand its structure. In this light we might grasp the contradictory nature of the
surrealist image as an effect of a repetitive working over of fantasmatic scenes
by a mobile subject, a working over that is never purely involuntary and symp-
tomatic or controlled and curative.
However, we have not fully accounted for the other crucial aspect of the
surrealist image: its simulacral quality, its paradoxical status as a representation
without a referent, a copy without an original. Despite its call to disorder, staple
surrealism is implicated in the partial restoration of mimesis in the rappel a
l'ordreof the 1920s.82 In subversive surrealism, however, representation becomes

79. This might be read into Womanwith Her ThroatCut, partly inspired as it was by a memory of
Michel Leiris, "the most painful of all my childhood memories," recounted in L'Age d'Homme(1939;
trans. by Richard Howard as Manhood [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984], pp. 64-65): "From
this moment on I can remember nothing except the sudden assault of the surgeon, who plunged
some kind of sharp instrument into my throat, the pain that I felt, and the scream-like that of a
slaughtered animal-that I uttered."
80. Giacometti, "Letter to Pierre Matisse." According to Marcel Jean, Giacometti repudiated his
surrealist work as so much "masturbation" (cited in Brenson, The Early Work,p. 190).
81. For Lacan on metaphor and symptom see "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or
Reason since Freud," lEcrits,trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 166. For his
revisionary relation to the surrealist definition of the image as juxtaposition, see pp. 156-57.
82. On this "tragic" restoration in the early 1920s and its "farcical" repetition in the late '70s,
see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression," October 16 (Spring
1981), pp. 39-68.
Convulsive Identity 53

other, fantasmatic-as if, repressed in high modernism, it returns here uncan-

nily, its distortion the mark of its repression.
Foucault points to this sea-change in his 1963 essay on Magritte.83 For
Foucault the privileged terms of traditional representation are affirmation and
resemblance (or similitude): in such art an affirmation of the reality of the
referent is made through the iconic resemblance of the image to it. In modern-
ism this paradigm is eroded in two fundamental ways, which Foucault associates
with Kandinsky and Magritte respectively. In his abstractions Kandinsky frees
affirmation of the real from resemblance to it: resemblance or similitude is
(mostly) abandoned. This account is accurate as far as it goes, but if the referent
is eclipsed in Kandinsky, reality, now located beyondresemblance (as spiritual or
Platonic), is still affirmed (as it is in Malevich, Mondrian . . . ). And this fact
renders such abstraction far less subversive to transcendental aesthetics than is
usually thought, even by Foucault. In his simulations Magritte does the more
radical converse: he frees resemblance from affirmation. Resemblance or sim-
ilitude is here maintained, but no reality is affirmed: the referent, its reality,
transcendental or otherwise, evaporates-significantly for us through devices
of calligrammatic doubling and rhetorical repetition. "Magritte allows the old
space of representation to prevail, but only on the surface . . . underneath,
there is nothing."84 In such surrealist art, representation only seems to reappear;
instead, it returns uncannily as simulation. And it is this simulation that sub-
verts the representational paradigm: in its cancellation of representation, ab-
straction preserves it, whereas simulation unfounds it, pulls the real out from
underneath it. Indeed, simulation confounds the entire opposition of represen-
tation and abstraction conventionally considered to control modern art.85
But what does simulation have to do with fantasy? Both can confound
origins, and both are repressed within modernism for doing so. In fact, it is in
the despised realm of fantasy that our aesthetic tradition has imprisoned
simulation-that is, until its partial release in surrealism. For Plato images were
divided between proper claimants and false claimants to the idea, between good
iconic copies that resemble the idea and bad fantasmatic simulacra that insinuate

83. Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (1963), trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of
California, 1984).
84. Ibid., p. 16. Also see Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (1963), trans.
Charles Ruas (New York: Doubleday, 1986). For Foucault, Roussel performs a transformation in
writing complementary to that of Magritte in painting. In his 1962 seminar Lacan used the "window
paintings" of Magritte to illustrate the structure of fantasy.
85. See my "The Crux of Minimalism," in Individuals (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary
Art, 1986). As Deleuze writes, "Between the destruction which conserves and perpetuates the
established order of representations, models, and copies, and the destruction of models and
copies
which sets up a creative chaos, there is a great difference...." ("Plato and the Simulacrum," trans.
Rosalind Krauss, October27 [Winter 1983], p. 56). This "chaos," however, may have its own function
in the social field of advanced capitalism-where the delirious and the disciplinary are no longer
mutually exclusive.
54 OCTOBER

it. As Deleuze has argued, the Platonic tradition repressed the simulacrum not
simply as a false claimant, a bad copy without an original, but because it chal-
lenged the order of original and copy, the hierarchy of idea and
representation-the principle of identity, we might say after Ernst. In repres-
sion the fantasmatic simulacrum assumed a daemonic quality as well, and De-
leuze describes it in terms similar to our "uncanny" definition of surrealist
fantasy:
The simulacrum implies great dimensions, depths, and distances
which the observer cannot dominate. It is because he cannot master
them that he has an impression of resemblance. The simulacrum
includes within itself the differential point of view, and the spectator
is made part of the simulacrum, which is transformed and deformed
according to his point of view. In short, folded within the simulacrum
there is a process of going mad, a process of limitlessness.....86

The subject is in the simulacrum, as it were, just as he is in the fantasy; but the
similarity does not end there. Like the fantasy, the simulacrum is comprised of
at least two different terms, series, or events ("it interiorizes a dissimilitude"),87
neither of which can be fixed as original or copy, first or second. In a sense the
simulacrum is also produced out of a deferred action, an internalized difference,
and it is this difference that troubles the Platonic order of representation. It is
also this difference that not only renders the fantasmatic art of surrealism
simulacral, but structures the surrealist image as a signifier of an involuntary
memory, a traumatic fantasy.88

86. Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum," p. 49.

87. Ibid.
88. As Deleuze writes of Proust, "The essential thing in involuntarymemoryis not resemblance,nor
even identity,which are merelyconditions,but the internalizeddifference,which becomesimmanent. It is in
this sense that reminiscence is the analogue of art, and involuntary memory the analogue of a
metaphor" (Proust and Signs [1964], trans. Richard Howard [New York: George Braziller, 1972], p.
59. It may be more accurate to think the surrealist image through this Proustian problematic than
through the usual references to Lautr6amont, Pierre Reverdy, etc.; certainly Benjamin seems to
have thought so. For more on the connections between Freud on trauma, Benjamin on the image,
and Deleuze on difference and repetition, see J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 1-21. Also see Cynthia Chase, "Oedipal Textuality: Reading
Freud's Reading of Oedipus,"Diacritics 9, 1 (Spring 1979), pp. 54-68.