Compulsive Beauty (October Series) - Hardcover

Foster, Hal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262061600 ISBN 13: 9780262061605

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1993

Synopsis

Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, Andre Breton,wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death.

To this end Foster first restages the difficult encounter of surrealism with Freudian psychoanalysis, then redefines the crucial categories of surrealism - the marvelous, convulsive beauty, objective chance - in terms of the Freudian uncanny,or the return of familar things made strange by repression. Next, with the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti in mind, Foster develops a theory of the surrealist image as a working over of a primal fantasy. This leads him finally to propose as a summa of surrealism a body of work often shunted to its margins: the dolls of Hans Bellmer, so many traumatic tableaux that point to difficult connections not only between sadism and masochism butal so between surrealism and fascism.

At this point Compulsive Beauty turns to the social dimension of the surrealist uncanny. First Foster reads the surrealist repertoire of automatons and mannequins as a reflection on the uncanny processes of mechanization and commodification. Then he considers the surrealist use of outmoded images as an attempt to work through the historical repression effected by these same processes. In a brief conclusion he discusses the fate of surrealism today ina world become surrealistic.

Compulsive Beauty not only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism, long neglected by Anglo-American art history, it also participates in a postmodern reconsideration of modernism, the dominant accounts of which have obscured its involvements in desire and trauma, capitalist shock and technological development.

Hal Foster is Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is an editor of the journal OCTOBER.

About this title

About the Author

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (1996), and Prosthetic Gods (2004), all published by the MIT Press, and other books.

Review

Breaking away from a critical tradition where for far too long gossip has competed with asymbolic grasps of ecstasy, Hal Foster's Compulsive Beauty will stand out in the literature devoted to Surrealism as the first convincing exploration of what is at the core of the Surrealist project: the status of the work of art in the age of psychoanalysis. If Surrealism was the last avant-garde to have cared about taking the pulse of a feverish beauty, Foster has discovered that it was beating, beyond the pleasure principle, to the uncanny beat of the death instinct.

(Denis Hollier, Yale University)

In exhilarating, thoughtful and subtle arguments, Foster takes surrealist interpretations of psychoanalysis into a shocking encounter with the Freudian uncanny...[An] extremely important book.

(Jane Beckett Times Higher Education Supplement)

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262061600
• ISBN 13: 9780262061605
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 337