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Eleonora Sparvoli: Il corpo senza organi dell'opera d'arte
Il corpo senza organi dell'opera d'arte
(p. 141 – 152)

Eleonora Sparvoli

Il corpo senza organi dell'opera d'arte
Creazione e schizofrenia in Antonin Artaud

PDF, 12 pages

After having briefly outlined – according to R. D. Laing’s reflections, pioneer of the anti-psychiatric movement – Antonin Artaud's schizophrenia characteristics, this essay focuses on one of his most peculiar traits: his rejection of the anatomical organization of the body, which requires the organs to obey to a hierarchically organized and productively aimed structure. Artaud aspired to re-establish his body as a »body without organs«, a concept that Gilles Deleuze picks up and explains as an immanent field of desire and intensity, which assembles heterogenous elements and allows for the emergence of creative processes. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the schizophrenic body without organs provides the chance for a rhizomatic pattern of creation, which is diametrically opposed to the western tree model of thought. This essay argues that the rhizomatic model of creation can be found in Van Gogh's paintings. They seem to be authentic bodies without organs, that is, rhizomatic combinations of art and life, graphic mark and matter, chemical colors and organic secretions, showing constant intrusion of the real into the symbolic. Referring to Antonin Artaud's 1947 study entitled Van Gogh le suicidé de la société, this essay further concludes that Artaud's study itself can be regarded as a body without organs: with respect to the promiscuity, always present, among experienced author and subject of study; the disordered and decentralized structure which juxtaposes different sections unable to come to a real conclusion, and the presence of glossolalias which dissolves the human voice pregnant with meaning.

  • artist
  • aesthetics of production
  • creativity
  • art history
  • art
  • Modernism
  • aesthetics
  • modeling

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Eleonora Sparvoli

teaches Contemporary French Literature and Culture at the Università degli Studi di Milano. She has mainly worked on the interrelations of 19th and 20th century French literature and the other beaux-arts as well as psychoanalysis and published several articles about it. She is a specialist for the works of Marcel Proust to whom she dedicated the monographs Contro il corpo. Proust e il romanzo immateriale (1997) and L’avventura mancata. Stile in Marcel Proust (2003).

Matthias Krüger (ed.), Christine Ott (ed.), ...: Die Biologie der Kreativität

Die Werke von Künstlern und Literaten entstehen aus einer unauflöslichen Spannung zwischen ›Kopf‹ und ›Bauch‹, zwischen Geistigem und Körperlichem. Im Spektrum der Metaphern und Modelle, mit denen künstlerisches Schaffen seit der Antike zu erfassen versucht wird, nimmt das Biologische – die fortwährende Engführung des Kreativen mit dem Kreatürlichen – eine Schlüsselrolle ein: Überall scheinen Werke gezeugt, ausgetragen oder geboren zu werden, sie wachsen, altern, erweisen sich als monströs oder ›degeneriert‹ oder gewinnen ihren ästhetischen Mehrwert erst als ›organisches Lebewesen‹.

Der Band untersucht, wie das Denkmodell einer Biologie der Kreativität unter den Bedingungen der Moderne in Texten und Bildern gedacht und instrumentalisiert werden konnte und welche Relevanz die wissenschaftlichen Veränderungen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts in den Naturwissenschaften, der Medizin und Psychologie für Vorstellungen, Beschreibungen und Theorien zu künstlerischer Kreativität hatten.

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