Chaos and the speaking body: spitting on Hegel with Lygia Clark and the limits of language in psychoanalysis

Abstract

The Hegelian dialectics, inherited by Lacan, assume a division between the Subject and historical time, or, assuming a Symbolic system that is mediated by the phallic law, that only re-produces subjugated subjectivities, without a chance to create something new or be in touch with any chaos outside this phallogocentric system. So, echoing the 1977 essay by Italian feminist Carla Lonzi: “let’s spit on Hegel” – maybe with Lygia Clark’s Anthropophagic Slobber. [...] Guided by Clark’s chaotic vibration, we can think through what happens to the body in/of the world and to the world with/of bodies through the potency of a subjective full/void that vibrates independently from any Other. In chaos we avoid the total reign of language and identity as well as materialist biological reductionism of experience. We meet chaos in the frontier of the vibrating ‘full-void’ of bodies.