Surrealism and Schizoanalysis

chapter 14
Surrealism and Schizoanalysis

Gregory Minissale
In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), Gilles Deleuze and

Félix Guattari observe that Freudian psychoanalysis takes the traditional
family and heterosexuality as the norm. It pathologizes other sexualities,
and seeks to control desire and the imagination. Deleuze and Guattari
attempt to undermine psychoanalysis by embracing aspects of what it
rejects, in particular, schizophrenia. They write that “we must not delude
ourselves: Freud doesn’t like schizophrenics. He doesn’t like their resist-
ance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals.
They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut
off from reality.”1 But Deleuze and Guattari admire how schizophrenics
“escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions . . . [they are]
orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no
habits, no territories).”2
It is important to note the difference between clinical schizophrenia and
schizoanalysis so that we do not appear to trivialize a serious condition, but
it is also important not to dismiss schizoanalysis as simply psychotic.
Deleuze and Guattari believe that those who desire radical change in art,
culture, and politics should “learn from the psychotic how to shake off the
Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics
of desire freed from all beliefs.”3 Deleuze and Guattari’s elevation of the
schizophrenic in the 1970s had been preceded by psychologists such as
William Bion. In the 1950s, Bion was already providing positive evalu-
ations of schizophrenics and their ability to defend themselves through
highly ingenuous word play and “schizoid linguistics.” Anton Ehrenzweig
notes that, for Bion, “the schizoid splintering of the language function does
not prevent a creative use of language if unconscious linkages are preserved.
1
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 22.
2 3
Ibid. Ibid., xxi.
259
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 24 Aug 2021 at 22:34:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862639.015
260 gregory minissale
James Joyce’s splinter language is of this kind.”4 This is one of the reasons
why Deleuze and Guattari hold Joyce in such high esteem, as he experi-
mented with what they describe as a “schizoanalytic technique” and free
association.5
In producing radical forms of art, “schizoanalysis” disobeys rules, breaks
with convention, and courts unreason. We see this not only in James
Joyce’s “splintering” of language, but also in the art of Max Ernst, Hans
Bellmer, and others, where images of bodies are torn apart and reassembled
into bizarre mythopoetic mélanges of heads and limbs, fusing the genitalia
of both sexes. These assemblages suggest machine-like orgies of polysexual
and androgynous bodies. In this chapter, I argue that this Surrealist
technique of disassembling and reassembling is driven by desire and the
imagination, and complements aspects of queer theory aimed at decon-
structing traditional notions of desire.6 The chapter sketches what a queer
schizoanalysis of Surrealism might look like.7
For Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizophrenic,” “everything is a machine.
Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines – all of
them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines.”8
Machines with interlocking gears link the celestial, capitalist, libidinal, and
subconscious worlds. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Salvador Dalí’s use of
ambiguous images that “assures the explosion of a desiring-machine.”9
Deleuze and Guattari’s tendency to link macrocosmic social phenomena
with microcosmic neural and psychological events is indebted to ideas
4
Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), 118.
5
This “schizoid vision” became an artistic strategy in Henri Moore, Geoffrey Clarke and Reg Butler’s
work in the 1950s; see David Hulks, “The Dark Chaos of Subjectivisms: Splitting and the Geometry
of Fear,” in Brandon Taylor, ed., Sculpture and Psychoanalysis (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 109.
6
For important analyses of Surrealism aligned to queer theory, see Natalya Lusty, Surrealism,
Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), and Peter Dube, “Queer Surrealism:
Desire As Praxis” (PhD dissertation, Concordia University, 2018). Chrysanthi Nigianni, ed.,
Deleuze and Queer Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005) features many kinds of
queer schizoanalysis for different kinds of art but does not deal with Surrealism.
7
While there have been numerous studies of art using schizoanalysis, none of these make the obvious
comparison between Surrealist techniques of pulling apart figures and the fragmentation of identity
lauded by schizoanalysis. For an overview, see Ian Buchanan and Lorna Collins, eds., Deleuze and the
Schizoanalysis of Visual Art (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), and Stephen Zepke, Art As Abstract
Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 2001). An exception is
Kevin K. Thomas, “André Breton’s Theory and Politics of Desire: The Reconciliation of Marxism
and Freudianism in Mad Love” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2013). This explores
schizoanalysis as a way to understand how Deleuze and Guattari attempted to synthesize Marx and
Freud with reference to Breton’s ideas. The study does not examine Surrealist visual art, homosexu-
ality, or queer theory.
8
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 31. 9 Ibid.
14 Surrealism and Schizoanalysis 261
found in Jacques Lacan’s 1964 seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, where an analogy is made between the Surrealist montage
technique of splitting and joining images to the workings of the subcon-
scious drives, and their power to destroy objects of desire and reassemble
them unconstrained by realism. Deleuze and Guattari pursue this analogy
further in their analysis of the schizophrenic artist Adolf Wölfli, whose
“drawings reveal the workings of all sorts of clocks, turbines, dynamos,
celestial machines, house-machines, and so on.”10
In 1922, the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn
published The Artistry of the Mentally Ill, reproducing drawings made by
schizophrenic patients. For Prinzhorn, the “characteristic quality lies in the
organic form resulting from the partial drawings of organs, which however
are not centred anywhere. The fake organisms are neatly drawn to comple-
tion and closed on all sides, but once again with the pointless logic which
leads a rational man into an endless maze.”11 In the same year, Max Ernst
brought Prinzhorn’s book to Paris where he was feted by the Surrealists.12
In the drawings in the book, arms transform into snakes, goose bumps into
a multitude of penises, and breasts into flowers. Autoerotic forms sprout
inside each other to create complex machines whose parts interlock and
interpenetrate. This general disarticulation of bodies and the scattering of
flora and fauna are shown rupturing bodies and displacing organs; heads
appear as attics stuffed with animals and toys. There appears to be no
bounded introspective space that would provide a core identity or place of
refuge from the continual intrusion of external objects and fragments.
Another aspect of these agglomerations is the complete disregard for the
binary forms of gendered bodies; there are many kinds of hybrid forms that
can be read as androgynous.
All these descriptions of fragmented bodies find fertile ground in the
visual imagination of artists such as Max Ernst. Of This Men Shall Know
Nothing (1924) is a painting that references Daniel Paul Schreber, one of
Freud’s patients, who had fantasies of becoming a woman. Freud describes
this as a “castration complex” – the fear of, or desire for, the relinquishment
10
Ibid., 28.
11
Thomas Röske, “Inspiration and Unreachable Paradigm. L’art des fous and Surrealism,” in
Thomas Röske and Ingrid von Beyme, eds., Surrealism and Madness (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn,
2009), 27.
12
In addition to Röske, see a short but informative treatment of Prinzhorn’s influence on art in
Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2016), 186–190. Here, paintings by Klee and Ernst are described in terms which intimate an
implicit understanding of artistic fragmentation as homologous with schizophrenia, where there is
a “disruption of subjectivity marked by a disruption of image-making,” 186.
of the phallus. It is interesting that the two pairs of legs joined together in
the painting can easily be read as sex between men. A hand, cut off at the
wrist, floats in the air to direct the falling semen into a piston; the earth
below sprouts penises and breasts. Wires and levers, sprockets and pistons
suggest machines straddling celestial and sublunary worlds, fueled by the
energy of desire.
This polymorphic dream imagery can be seen in Ernst’s La toilette de la
mariée (Attirement of the Bride, 1939). The female figures are dressed for
a masked ball, wearing sensuous and luxurious bird cloaks that caress the
skin. The cloaks seem to have a life of their own: Rather than being worn,
they can also be read as swallowing up their wearers or giving birth to them.
Squirming in the bottom right-hand corner is a green creature with
multiple breasts and a penis, much in keeping with the drawings published
by Prinzhorn. The “decalomania” technique consists of applying thick
paint to a card, which is then smeared onto the canvas to produce random
colour blends, suggesting the iridescent and velvet textures of a lucid
dream. Art historian David Hopkins decodes this painting using
Freudian psychoanalysis. He refers to Ernst’s childhood dreams about
a stork delivering children, and the connection with his childhood pet,
a cockatoo, that died at the same time as his sister was born.13 The Loplop
figure (half-man, half-bird) is identified as Ernst’s alter ego, and with the
Jungian “Trickster” archetype. Hopkins asserts that these two figures
emerge from Ernst’s repressed homosexual desire toward his father. The
Loplop is tricky and dissimulating while the alter ego is threatening.
Such psychoanalytical readings of art as childhood regression, or
a faulty Oedipal mechanism, tend to ignore the sensuous ambiguity,
fantasy, and play that is often involved in these paintings. Ernst’s Loplop
(1932) is a powerfully dream-like blend of human and animal parts:
A transsexual human–toucan hybrid with an erection exposed under its
flowing robes. Held aloft by the breast just above it, the assemblage of
body parts hovers like an ecstatic apparition in the sky. In the lower part
of the painting, fish that resemble menstruating vaginas are staked out in
the sun to dry. Another source for the Loplop may be found in
a sculptural work by the schizophrenic Karl Genzel, published by
Prinzhorn. It is a figure with human legs, a penis, and a bird’s head
with a beak tucked under its wing. Throughout this period, Ernst
produced several doll-like sculptures in this style, some with phalluses
13
David Hopkins, “Max Ernst’s La toilette de la mariée,” The Burlington Magazine, 133.1057 (1991),
237–244.
and mouths, many with birds’ heads. These fragmented sculptures invite
the hands to wander over surfaces, as an infant would, struggling to
achieve an overall sense of unity in the mind’s eye. Splitting body parts
and reassembling them into strange bird-like androgynous hybrids can be
read in Ernst’s oeuvre as pathological and regressive from the point of
view of conservative psychoanalysis, or powerfully creative, exploratory,
and poetic when understood through schizoanalysis.
This is also true of Hans Bellmer’s artistic practice of reassembling dolls
cannibalized from several sources. It is well known that his practice was
influenced by Offenbach’s opera, The Tales of Hoffman (1881), based on
E. T. A Hoffman’s novella, The Sandman (1817). The plot is worth
analyzing in some detail, because it demonstrates how the uncanny,
homosexuality, and the doll come together as a subtext in art. In the
middle of the night, the protagonist Nathanael wanders downstairs, and
spies on his father standing in front of the fireplace arguing with
Coppelius, a mysterious guest. Coppelius threatens to gouge out
Nathanael’s eyes when he is discovered in the closet, but his father pleads
with Coppelius to spare him.
In his adult life, Nathanael falls in love with Olympia, an extremely
lifelike mechanical doll. Intending to seek permission to marry her, he
visits Olympia’s father, Professor Spallanzani. On arrival he witnesses an
argument between Professor Spallanzani and another guest, a man called
Coppola. In the violent tussle that ensues, Olympia – the doll – is
dismembered. Coppola snatches away the doll’s torso leaving its eyes on
the floor. This is all too much for Nathanael, especially when Coppola is
revealed as the original Coppelius. Driven insane, Nathanael runs away
and commits suicide.
Ernst Jentsch was the first psychoanalyst to write about the story, in
“The Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906). He suggests the strange feeling
that the doll produces is the uncanny: a feeling of disorientation caused by
intellectual uncertainty, an unsettling tension between Heimlich (homely
and familiar) with Unheimlich (unfamiliar). In his essay “The Uncanny”
(1919), Freud provides more nuances to The Sandman and the concept of
the uncanny. Freud concentrates on the continual theme of eyes being
blinded and reads this as fear of castration, and by extension a fear of
becoming a girl or a homosexual. He observes that “dismembered limbs,
a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist . . . all these have something
peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance,
they prove capable of independent activity in addition. As we already
know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration
complex.”14 This is also perhaps related to the idea that the pregenital child
may believe that part objects have agency in themselves. In this view, the
novella and its illogical bifurcations and twists, and Nathanael’s own
experience, revert back to the illogical part objects in the child’s world of
pleasure and fear. This world is sent into further schisms by the primal
scene – or even further back to where the sensual world is a continuous,
indeterminate oceanic feeling. It is this regression that the dismembered
doll and its parts trigger: This is the cause of the affective queasiness of the
uncanny. It is this kind of nausea that Bellmer captures with his dolls,
inspired by Offenbach’s opera where the doll is torn apart by Spallanzani
and Coppola.15
Hélène Cixous’s essay, “Fiction and Its Phantoms” (1976), exposes
Freud’s queasiness about homosexuality. This is revealed in a footnote in
his essay, “The Uncanny.” Here, Freud suggests that, for Nathanael, the
figures of his father and Coppelius are two opposites of the “father-imago,”
split into bad and good father, one threatening to castrate him, the other to
save his eyes. Freud insists that this “pair of fathers” recurs with the figures
of Professor Spalanzani and Coppola: “Just as they used before to work
together over the secret brazier, so now they have jointly created the doll
Olympia; the Professor is even called the father of Olympia.” As Cixous
indicates, the idea of the “two fathers,” not to mention stoking the fire to
create the doll, implies homosexuality – or is a literary device to instigate
the fear of homosexuality. Coppola may also trigger associations with the
verb “to copulate.” For Freud, the doll “can be nothing else than
a materialisation of Nathanael’s feminine attitude towards his father in
his infancy . . . The psychological truth of the situation in which the young
man, fixated upon his father by his castration complex, becomes incapable
of loving a woman.”16 Cixous suggests that the Heimlich/Unheimlich
paradox hinges not so much on the animate/inanimate, but on the hetero-
sexual/homosexual ambiguities of the Hoffman tale. In sum, what we have
here is the uncanny represented as feeling strange about a possible homo-
sexual tendency in the story, which Freud seems to be reluctant to make
explicit.
14
Quoted by Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The
Uncanny),” New Literary History 7.3 (1976), 636.
15
For a summary and other interpretations of The Sandman and Freud’s concept of the uncanny, see
Marquard Smith, The Erotic Doll. A Modern Fetish (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010),
79–85.
16
All quotes from Freud in this paragraph are taken from his essay, “The Uncanny” (footnote 9, 643),
published as an appendix in Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms,” 619–645.
What seems controversial is the view that Bellmer’s interest in dolls is
another form of the castration complex, in which he enacts his negative
feelings for his Nazi-sympathizing, disciplinarian father, whom he once
embarrassed by dressing in women’s clothes. Sue Taylor sees Nathanael
and Bellmer’s attitude to the doll as repressed homosexual tendencies.17 In
such cases, psychoanalysis tends to fix sexual identity with terms such as
heterosexual/homosexual or normal/abnormal, which, again, does violence
to visual art’s ambiguities. It seems particularly difficult, however, to read
Bellmer’s early work as sexually ambiguous, since most of the dolls clearly
represent battered dolls-as-girls. Yet there are some artworks by Bellmer
that appear sexually ambiguous; for example, La Poupée photographed in
1936, and Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace, 1937. Both of these
embody a scrambled and nonsensical organization of syntax or biological
law.18 Thomas Röske compares Bellmer’s dolls to Prinzhorn’s collection of
schizophrenic drawings. In Bellmer’s later works these parallels emerge as
figure amalgamations, which Marquard Smith suggests are “sometimes
readable as growing or sprouting out of each other . . . Like an anagram,
eroticized body parts are freely fused and multiplied.”19 For him, this
“anagrammatical anatomy is the basis of anagrammatical desire.”20
For the schizophrenic, this anagrammatical anatomy arises from diffi-
culties with the perceptual and conceptual binding of parts that is required
for thinking about “whole” gestalt entities, such as “body,” “self’,” and
object representations.21 Psychoanalysis describes early infant development
in comparable terms. In the beginning, the infant’s needs are satisfied by
and associated with only fragmentary impressions of objects: a breast;
a hand; its own fingers and genitals, anus, and mouth. At this stage there
is no distinct sense of physical unity of self, or other. For Freud, the ego is
passively split. He writes that “a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in
17
Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 2002), 13.
18
Later in his life Bellmer had a longstanding relationship with Unica Zürn, whom he met in 1953. She
was an artist and anagram poet, and was diagnosed as schizophrenic by doctors at the Karl-
Bonhoeffer-Heilstätten. Zürn’s drawings share many morphological features with Prinzhorn’s
drawings of schizophrenic works, featuring multiple, morphing bodies, animated by erotic, and
even hypnagogic, rhythms. Many of Bellmer’s drawings and paintings from this period are similarly
androgynous, moving away from the gender essentialism seen in his early poupées.
19
Röske, “Inspiration and Unreachable Paradigm,” 16.
20
Smith, The Erotic Doll, 316. Smith discusses Bellmer’s poupées in regard to anagrammatic jumbling,
volubility, reversibility, interchangeability, and fission, 289–316. He offers a picture of the rather
more configural creativity of Bellmer’s work, rather than reducing it to a mimetic reflection of
a singular pathology.
21
Peter J. Uhlhaas and Aaron L. Mishara, “Perceptual Anomalies in Schizophrenia: Integrating
Phenomenology and Cognitive Neuroscience,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 33. 1 (January, 2007),
142–156. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbl047.
the individual from the start,” and observes that “sexual impulse-
excitations are exceptionally plastic.” The adult is still haunted by anxieties
of fragmentation of self through “images of castration, emasculation,
mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, the
bursting open of the body.” The id in particular is an indeterminate field
of instinctual energy, given direction by the pleasure principle, and Freud
compared it to a “cauldron of seething excitations” that has no real
organization.22 Elaborating on this, Lacan wrote about the “image of the
body in bits and pieces” (imago du corps morcelé): “Such typical images
appear in dreams, as well as in fantasies. They may show, for example, the
body of the mother as having a mosaic structure like that of a stained-glass
window. More often, the resemblance is to a jig-saw puzzle, with the
separate parts of the body of a man or an animal in disorderly array.”23
According to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, part objects – breasts,
fingers, organs – are disassociated from the whole body to which they are
normally attached. For the infant, part objects become entities that either
accept or deny the pleasure principle: the “good” breast and the “bad”
breast. Infants pass through a “schizoid” stage that entails “splitting their
perceptual and emotional worlds into ‘multiple shards’ . . . it was the
purpose of the human organism to repair and cohere the ego . . . into
a coherent pattern, stabilising the self and allowing socialisation to
commence.”24 In this view schizoanalysis offers an alternative to socializa-
tion, which aims for a standardized body schema and body image. These
images are then meant to integrate normative, heterosexual role models
and behaviors.25 Ernst’s paintings and Bellmer’s dolls similarly reject this
cohesion. According to traditional psychoanalysis, to embrace fragmenta-
tion is “to regress to a primitive, infantile, quasi schizophrenic state.”26 The
playwright Henry-René Lenormand similarly suggested that Surrealism
was an infantile regression with links to hysteria and schizophrenia, and the
22
The quotes in this paragraph are from Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,”
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 16, trans. James
Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press/The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1963), 71–73.
23
Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34
(1953), 13.
24
Hulks, “The Dark Chaos,” 103. Deriving from the Greek, skhizein (“split”) and phrēn (“mind”),
schizophrenia means a splitting of mental functions.
25
The body schema is our prereflective awareness of our body. See Shaun Gallagher and
Jonathan Cole, “Body Schema and Body Image in a Deafferented Subject,” Journal of Mind and
Behavior 16 (1995), 369–390.
26
Hulks, “The Dark Chaos,” 103.
psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio also described Surrealism as regression to an
“undifferentiated pregenital sexuality.”27
Deleuze and Guattari reject both Freud and Klein’s use of psychoanaly-
sis as a technique to achieve an ideal, familial, and psychic unity. For
schizoanalysis, partial objects are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle meant to be
joined together in order to regain Oedipal normalization.28 Schizoanalysis
revels in the play of partial objects and their efficacy in banishing fear and
guilt:
whether organs or fragments of organs, the partial objects do not refer in the
least to an organism that would function phantasmatically as a lost unity or
a totality to come. Their dispersion has nothing to do with a lack, and
constitutes their mode of presence in the multiplicity they form without
unification or totalization. With every structure dislodged, every memory
abolished, every organism set aside, every link undone, they function as raw
partial objects, dispersed working parts of a machine that is itself dispersed.
In short, partial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious.29
While psychoanalytical approaches to art propose an optical mastery of
decoding or pathologizing irrational juxtapositions, Surrealist art and
schizoanalysis revel in bizarre couplings as ways to explore the “optical
unconscious.” As Stephen Zepke observes, artists “deal with direct material
interventions rather than . . . the psychoanalytic interpretation of symbols
meant to return us to the normal.”30 Deleuze and Guattari’s description of
how partial objects operate can almost be read as a set of artistic techniques,
or a description of Bellmer’s dolls. Such partial objects are:
pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusive-
ness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the connections
are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indif-
ferent to their underlying support . . . and [they] do not answer to the rules
of a linguistic game of chess, but instead to the lottery drawings that
27
Emilio Servadio, “Il Surrealismo: Storia, Dottrina, Valutazione Psicoanalitica,” Psicoanalisi 2.2
(1946), 77; Henri-René Lenormand, Les Confessions d’un auteur dramatique (Paris: Albin Michel,
1949), 318–319. Yet, as an explanation of Bellmer’s poupées, this regression should not be given more
importance than Bellmer’s well-known resistance to the body-cult of the National Socialists; his
dolls can thus be seen, from the point of view of the schizoanalytical project, as a scathing
deassemblage/reassemblage of the fascists’ binding processes. It is interesting that one of the
powerful images of fascism is the fasces, a tied, phallic, bundle of wooden rods, symbolizing the
collective will.
28
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 324. The contradiction that a part object is actually not a part is
explained by Deleuze and Guattari as a shift from Melanie Klein’s “part-objects” to “partial objects,”
understood as “partial towards ” – an impulsive attraction. The play on words attempts to avoid the
negative understanding of part objects as incomplete or lacking something.
29
Ibid. 30 Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine, 125.
sometimes cause a word to be chosen, sometimes a design, sometimes
a thing or a piece of a thing, depending on one another only by the order
of the random drawings.31
However, Surrealist irrational splitting and grafting techniques have also
been critiqued as examples of male artists sublimating their violence
toward women’s bodies through the dismemberment of the largely female
doll. Laura Mulvey, for example, identified how the male artist objectifies,
fragments, and fetishizes parts of the woman’s body for his own pleasure.
In the early twentieth century, Surrealism presented new ways in which
male jouissance was exercised over the passive medium of the female
body.32 Yet, in the novel The Lesbian Body (1973), Monique Wittig also
splits the body into different parts and pieces them back together. Her aim
was to create the new lesbian body defined in her own terms rather than
being forced to fit into a heterosexual blueprint defined for her at birth. It
seems important that the symbolic and aesthetic technique of splitting of
the body can be seen as liberating, because it is an experimental rearrange-
ment of the heteronormative grammar of desire and body image. It is most
often seen as brutal and violent if a literal or realist understanding of the
fragmented doll is insisted upon, or if the psychoanalyst’s suspicion of
repressed desire is supported. In the 1930s, lesbian artist Claude Cahun’s
collages also celebrate the plasticity of the body image. Cahun cobbled
together bits of dolls and mannequins and assembled them, as if “pre-
served,” in bell jars. The assemblages suggest the constructed nature of
identity, as if they were scientific specimens insulated against time, par-
odying the science that produces specimens in an eternal typology of
bodies.
In more recent art, Louise Bourgeois’s Fillette (1968) is a rubber penis
that hangs from the ceiling like a slab of meat on a butcher’s hook,
mocking castration theory. Many of her sculptures appear as pulsative
dream images – frothy milk and semen, breasts become phalluses,
stuffed toys are bandaged together in orgies – as we see in Seven in
a Bed (2001). The dolls, stuffed with kapok, are a multiplication of
orifices and wriggling members without identities. This was also
a technique adopted by Sarah Lucas in her Cycladic nudes (2010). In
31
Ibid., 309.
32
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Laura Mulvey, ed., Visual and Other
Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 21–23. Lusty observes that Bellmer’s dolls are uncanny because
they serve “as a reminder of the male subject’s own fragmentation and the threat to his own bodily
boundaries”; nevertheless, she cautions that such dolls may also “reinforce stereotypes of women as
masochistic, as infantilised objects of desire.” Lusty, Surrealism, 93.
these works, limbs and torsos are plugged into each other to create
complex mechanical relations, an allover topology of desire, compar-
able with the schizophrenic drawings in Prinzhorn’s reproductions.
And in a related artistic practice, in the late 1990s the Chapman
Brothers crafted many dolls fused together. Here, body parts are
detached and jammed together again in the shape of swastikas. Dicks
sprout from noses and vaginas from armpits, multiple bodies are
amassed and grafted on to each other to produce mutant orgies.
Against the notion of an ideal unified human body these works propel
gender essentialism and the human genome into a posthuman
schizogenesis.
Bellmer’s dolls also seem to have influenced Cindy Sherman. Much like
the poupées, Sherman’s “Sex Pictures” (1992) are photographs of manne-
quins and parts of dolls sourced from medical suppliers, sex toy emporia,
and Halloween shops. The doll is subjected to various processes of split-
ting, splicing, and dismemberment in order to scramble the codes of
pornography. The dolls mimic the subjection of the woman’s body to
ritual postures of availability and humiliation. Unlike Bellmer’s dolls,
Sherman’s assemblages are not reconstructions of children’s dolls, but
latex adult sex dolls (sold as split torsos with vaginas); found in joke
shops with dildos and rubber breasts, so many of the objects are intended
for use in actual sex. This adds new dimensions to the notion of the
uncanny, animate/inanimate paradox.
In gay artist Robert Gober’s work we see a similar set of doll-like
distortions indebted to the Surrealists. One of his best-known sculp-
tures, Untitled (1990), is a slab of fleshy beeswax and human hair, half
male and half female, usually displayed on the floor in the corner of
a gallery as if being punished or cornered. There are visions of abject
amputated body parts on floors, hammered into skirting boards;
a man’s torso is prostrate on tongue-and-groove flooring, with his
buttocks tattooed with sheet music, suggesting some kind of musical
passage. The Surrealist anagrammatic impulse is present. Legs or feet,
are thrust into orifices, sometimes suggesting anal sex. In the case of
Man Coming out of Woman (1993), a vagina gives birth to, or is
penetrated by, an adult leg with sock and shoe. In Gober’s sculpture,
Ear with Axe (2012), a huge ear is surrounded by a snaky, flaccid axe,
a tool for chopping up and truncating. This could be a crude joke,
referencing Van Gogh and his partly severed ear, or the castration
complex. The lower part of the sculpture features a series of pleats
and frills from old-fashioned underwear, an obvious motif taken from
Bellmer’s drawings of anatomies.
Conclusion
In Homosexual Desire (1993) Guy Hocquenghem objects to Freud treating
homosexuals as narcissists, loving themselves and their own sex, and
doomed to repression or sublimation. In sublimation, homosexuality
turns narcissism into acceptable social relations: the army, sport, hunting,
camaraderie, and other masculine pursuits, diverting any homosexual acts.
The homosexual regains his nonsexual, sublimated Oedipal normalization.
But Hocquenghem believes there is a choice:
In modem society we can become “neurotic,” that is, accept our oedipalisa-
tion (and use psychoanalysis); or we can reject it, by becoming what society
describes as “schizophrenic”; or we can adopt a third alternative, and
“schizophrenise” – that is, we can reject the false coherence of the “molar”
self, and this will lead us to an experience of the self at the “molecular” level
of our desiring machines.33
For Hocquenghem, desire can be seen as unbinding the imagination rather
than subordinating it to the authority of the mother/father/child triangle
and the Oedipal complex. Following Deleuze and Guattari, he posits desire
as an “acephalous libidinal force of the drive – impersonal or transpersonal,
anoedipal, satisfying, devoid of a proper or even qualifiable object.”34 And
it is this force of desire that drives the myriad and fantastically hybrid
bodies of Surrealist automatist drawings, photomontage, scattered dolls,
and machines. Deleuze and Guattari write that sexuality is the production
of a thousand tiny sexes, continually acting and reacting across the hetero-
sexuality/homosexuality dualism.35 Sexuality is not restricted to the clichéd
formula of the sex act – foreplay, orgasm, dissipation; it is a creative energy
that is channeled into many other patterns and speeds of expenditure and
exchange, socially, psychologically, and politically.
Desire exercises the fullness of the imagination, and it helps to create acts
of self-discovery; it is not simply a delusion that distracts a person from
yearning for something – the approach taken by psychoanalysis. It can be
transgressive, and can bring the unconscious into the real. Seen in this way,
33
Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 33.
34
James Penney, After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics (London: Pluto, 2014), 138.
35
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ed.,
Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 213.
schizoanalysis preserves the kernel of the Surrealist project of transforming
reality. Surrealism provides schizoanalysis with concrete, affective
examples of making and unmaking subjectivity. And, in the other direc-
tion, schizoanalysis reveals how Surrealist art liberates desire and the
imagination from the moralizing aspects of psychoanalysis.

Surrealism and Schizoanalysis - Gregory Minissale (2021)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Surrealism and Schizoanalysis - Gregory Minissale (2021)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

chapter 14

In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), Gilles Deleuze and

You might also like