Sylvere Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs"

Excerpt:

These causes are always going to be some sort of childhood event for Freud. At least in part, and we're going to talk about the two-legged model of causes in Freud's work in a moment, part of which, of course, is the "current events", and then there's the other leg of that being, the "childhood" elements. But Lotringer is trying to frame Freud's interpretations as, yet he's not trying to go for neutrality, he knows that he's bringing his own interpretive schema, he just thinks it's a good interpretive schema. But Lotringer is trying to, at the very least, point out that it is "reactive". It is reacting to the dream, to the manifest or nihilic content instead of using that as an active element which will lead to some new creation. Lotringer has kind of a classic schizoanalytic, in a sense, phrase: "I will learn to resist The Melody of Causal Relations in the torper of narrative accumulations in order to reinvent the intensity of risks ceaselessly menacing and forever being reborn." And this is, of course, one of the main gripes with what schizo analysis is, that it is risky. It's going to take one to the limits of, you know, these... different flows are going to be accentuated in all their raw, potentially destructive power, kind of operating on the edge. I mean he constantly talks about the rough edges of reterritorialization and deterritorialization. And Deleuze & Guattari call this a sort of homemade atom bomb of an activity. So there's something dangerous in going to these limits of, you know, the dissolution of the ego, like John Cage talked about, and in a sense what Deleuze & Guattari talk about. And we are forever rebirthing our analysis. But of course, always making it reborn anew, in the sense of Nietzsche's eternal return. The eternal return of difference itself in, you know, this is the' whole point in "Difference and Repetition" basically, is that one must repeat the difference that always comes back as different.

Salvador Dalí, “Maison pour érotomane” (ca 1932)

The second painting, “Maison pour érotomane” (ca 1932) shows a Catalan landscape, with rocks morphing into a horse, cello, and car. (Erotomania is the delusional disorder in which a person believes someone else to be madly in love with them, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.) According to Sotheby’s Aleksandra Todorovic, the transmogrified figures are a direct allusion to the couple in Jean-François Millet “L’Angélus” (1857–59), a painting Dalí used as a reference for many of his own works: “By transforming the Catalan rocks into anthropomorphic and sexually charged images, the artist eroticizes the landscape that witnessed his first delirious encounters with Gala.”