Creativity Between Anxiety and Aliveness

Creativity Between Anxiety and Aliveness

Mari Ruti

17 June 2023

Editors Note: This is a posthumously published paper by our friend and colleague Mari Ruti, who passed away this month. The paper was presented in April 2023 at LACK conference in Vermont. You can read more about Mari's remarkable career here.

I define creativity broadly, not merely as a matter of intellectual, aesthetic, or artistic accomplishments but also of self-fashioning in the Nietzschean sense of becoming the poets of our lives. Creativity as I understand it today encompasses the kinds of processes of self-transformation that take place in both analytic and aesthetic practice. On this view, breaking a repetition compulsion or being able to access something about the truth of our desire represents a creative act—a sublimatory endeavor that must engage our unconscious as well as our conscious interpretation of the purpose of our lives. This implies that whenever we are able to fashion a fresh narrative about the outlines of our destiny, we participate in a sublimatory undertaking. Creativity can therefore be a matter of writing, painting, or composing music—among many other possibilities. But it can also be a matter of self-reinvention, of “giving style to” our character, to borrow a line from Nietzsche.

Creativity in the Lacanian sense takes place at the intersection of the signifier and jouissance: it requires the creator’s ability to plunge into the drive energies of the real while simultaneously retaining her capacity to re-enter the symbolic order after the ego-shattering plunge into the real has taken place. Without the capacity to dive into the real, the creator is unable to transcend pre-existing symbolic structures, is unable to infuse her creations with vitality, which means that they remain anemic, devoid of life; her signifiers will run in their pre-established groove without deviation from the already established. At the same time, if the creator is unable to retain a foothold in the symbolic, she courts psychosis, unable to translate her encounter with the real into any kind of a communicable entity, be it a work of criticism, fiction, visual art, music, or a new self-understanding.

Jouissance is both an animating and destructive force. Perhaps more accurately, it animates inasmuch as it destroys: new forms of signification can only emerge through an annihilation of the status quo of meaning production. This is one of Lacan’s main points about the artistic practice of James Joyce in Seminar 23. Joyce reinvents language by mangling it, at times to the degree that it becomes incomprehensible. Joyce bites into bits of the real, dragging jouissance into the interstices of his signifiers, thereby nudging language into novel formations that erode established codes of meaning. In so doing, Joyce risks not merely the intelligibility of his text but also his own intelligibility as a symbolically viable subject. He is willing to sacrifice his symbolic and imaginary safety nets for the sake of his art. If avant-garde writing is Joyce’s sinthome, as Lacan claims, it is because it seems to be his destiny to confront the excesses of his jouissance repeatedly and seemingly without respite. This may not be a comfortable way to live, for a surplus of jouissance is derailing, dislocating, and disorienting. But its flipside, in the case of Joyce at least, is an enormous creative energy.

Plunging into the jouissance of the real is an intrinsically risky endeavor in the sense that the price of doing so is a radical self-dissolution. Usually, such self-dissolution is temporary in the sense that it comes to an end after the sublimatory impulse has been exhausted. Those who enjoy fallow periods when raw materials for their creative endeavors percolate in the background of their psychic lives get to rest between their creative spurts. However, there are those for whom the interludes granted by fallow periods are so short that it feels like there is no respite from the pressure of jouissance. In such cases, creativity can become almost agonizing in overanimating or overagitating their being.

If in moderate amounts jouissance is a pleasurable vitalizing force, when its intensity is very high or when it does not permit any space for rest, it can result in a tremendous amount of anxiety. We may feel that we no longer possess the capacity to hold ourselves together as subjects. Or we may feel that our jouissance is living our lives for us, without our being able to intervene in its momentum. That is, even though we usually seek jouissance in order to enhance our sense of aliveness, at times we end up with too much of it, overstimulated and enervated by our own drives. It is thus not surprising that in the western world, there exists an ancient link between creativity and madness, for when our aliveness spills over into overanimation or overagitation, it can feel like madness—or at least mania.

The overanimation or overagitation that can accompany our creative endeavors is perhaps best understood in terms of our relationship to what Lacan calls the Thing: the nonobject of desire that we fantasize having lost in the context of our coming-into-being as subjects of signification. Even though we have in reality lost nothing—even though the Thing is merely a retroactive fantasy of everything good, whole, and plentiful—its unconscious ramifications are enormous. For example, it is our quest to regain the lost Thing that causes us to pursue one object of desire after another in the world. The objet a as a little morsel of the Thing that has become detached from its fantasmatic host and guides this endeavor, dictating the specifics of our desire in the sense of determining its basic structure—a structure that frequently finds its parameters in the repetition compulsion. Indeed, the objet a is a necessary component of our desire for the simple reason that an unmediated encounter with the jouissance that the Thing promises would instantly obliterate us. As Lacan explains, we can never approach the Thing directly but merely through its “pleasurable associations”—that is, through the objet a.

The Thing is a potential site of exactly the kind of overanimation and overagitation that I have just referred to in the sense that when the buffer of pleasurable associations is lacking, the Thing can feel overly proximate: as Lacan explains in Seminar 10, when we feel like we have been drawn too tightly into the Thing’s meshes, we may feel like we are being suffocated. Like the praying mantis, the Thing threatens to devour us. This is why, as much as we covet the Thing’s sublimity, we need a means of mediating our encounter with it. We need the objet a.

It is, then, interesting that in Seminar 7 Lacan defines sublimation as a matter of raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing. In this context, he offers two examples that I have often used in my books and talks. The first relates to a decorative string of matchboxes that one of Lacan’s friends has hung around his mantlepiece. This mundane ornament fascinates Lacan because even though it consists of a collection of completely commonplace objects—objects that can be purchased at any corner stone—it appears to impart a sublime glow. Lacan specifies that even though the string of matchboxes cannot give those who scrutinize it any direct access to the Thing, it nevertheless offers them a little taste of the Thing: there is something about the Thing’s jouissance that has been captured in this entirely ordinary object. If one could never expect a sole matchbox to impart a shimmer of sublimity, there is something about the way in which Lacan’s friend has strung his array of matchboxes together that allows the Thing’s aura to shine through.

Referring to his friend’s string of matchboxes, Lacan claims that “in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing”. Instead of being merely an assemblage of matchboxes, the collection illuminates the trace of the Thing that “subsists” in the matchbox: it makes the sublime appear in the most humdrum of objects. In this sense, sublimation is a matter of cajoling the Thing to materialize within the mundane weave of everyday life. Lacan admits that the assemblage is “not, of course, the Thing”. The string of matchboxes elevated to the nobility of the Thing is still a substitute in the sense that it cannot give us the Thing-in-itself. Yet it comes closer to the Thing than other objects; it grants us a tiny portion of jouissance that connects us to the luster of the Thing (Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 2007, p. 112).

Lacan makes a similar argument about the way in which viewers respond to the manner in which Cézanne paints apples. Lacan claims that an apple painted by Cézanne is never just an ordinary apple but a masterpiece of art that manages to capture something about the Thing’s sublimity. Viewers may not be able to pinpoint what it is about Cézanne’s applies that makes them special, yet they are viscerally aware of this power. Again, Cézanne does not give us direct access to the Thing, but he grants us a little sliver of it, making it possible for us to experience a bit of the jouissance that is otherwise forbidden to us.

Regarding Cézanne’s apples, Lacan writes: “Everyone knows that there is a mystery in the way Cézanne paints apples, for the relationship to the real as it is renewed in art at that moment makes the object appear purified; it involves a renewal of its dignity by means of which these imaginary insertions are, one might say, repetitively restated”. That is, when Cézanne paints an apple, he “renews” its dignity. (Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 2007, p. 141). Inasmuch as his art forges a relationship to the real—to the dwelling place of the Thing—he taps into a clandestine power that reaches beyond his skill at imitating his object. For this reason, Cézanne’s genius resides in the fact that his art “makes the object appear purified”—that he manages to capture something about the enigma of the Thing in his representation of an utterly banal object (See Mari Ruti, Distillations, 2018, p. 112 for further discussion).

The same principle applies to many of the prosaic things that we, on a routine basis, insert into the void of the missing Thing. Although few of us attain Cézanne’s skill, the objects that we either discover or invent as stand-ins for the Thing can resonate on its frequency; they can house a more or less intense residue of the lost Thing. In the same way that Cézanne’s apples touch something of the real, sublimation can saturate an ordinary object with the radiance of the Thing. This is why the substitute satisfactions that we endow with special significance hold such value for us. They may fall short of the sublime object yet, insofar as they evoke it, they lend meaning to our lives. And if there are certain objects that move us more than others, it is because these objects communicate more of the Thing’s aura than others. As illusory as the sparkle of such objects may be, we experience it as real.

Lacan moreover argues that whenever we elevate mundane objects to the dignity of the Thing, we renew some of our own dignity as human beings in putting an end to the incessant sliding of the signifier from one object to the next that usually governs our relationship to objects, especially under the rubric of consumer capitalism. When we fixate on the aura of the Thing that we imagine discovering in a real-life object, we communicate the idea that there is something so precious about the object in question that we no longer have any need for other objects. We become more careful about curating the objects that bring us genuine satisfaction, with the result that the rest of the world’s objects remain inert to us. This is arguably also a matter of creativity: the simple act of selectivity about what we admit to our lives and what we exclude can be a creative act. This act tells us a great deal about the truth of our desire. This truth, in turn, I want to suggest, cannot be dissociated from the possibility of anxiety.

Creativity, whether we understand it in terms of Lacan’s definition of sublimation or in more colloquial terms as our capacity to generate new forms of meaning, takes place between the promise of aliveness and the terror of anxiety. In this sense, there may be no possibility of aliveness without a smidgeon of anxiety. We may turn to creativity as a means of temporarily binding anxiety. Yet, insofar as creativity draws on the reserves of the real, it is also by necessity an activity that awakens and mobilizes anxiety, so that the remedy for anxiety that many of us seek in creativity may easily end up heightening it. It is for this reason that the line between aliveness and anxiety can be so difficult to navigate, why so many of us slip into anxiety—sometimes to the point of staring at the blank page—when aliveness is what we are after.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the part of Lacanian theory that I have always found helpful in defusing anxiety is his suggestion that there is no cure for our ontological lack. The recognition that it is the human condition to feel dislocated and alienated brings solace in eliminating the hopeless—even cruelly optimistic—impulse to look for tranquility; the realization that serenity is intrinsically impossible makes it possible to focus on goals that are more obtainable, such as the always partial and fleeting satisfactions that we garner from our sublimatory endeavors. When we abandon the quest for a cure, we open space for activities that bring a degree of satisfaction without thereby falsely promising the end of anxiety; we, potentially at least, reach a place of aliveness that does not shy away from the more uncomfortable frequencies of psychic life but instead enfolds such frequencies into its idiosyncratic art of living, into its singular poetics of being.

Such a poetics of being, I want to argue, is by definition cultivated in the space between aliveness and anxiety. As to which component dominates depends on a variety of factors, including external sources of trauma. Our creativity is one of the few means that we possess to guide ourselves toward aliveness rather than anxiety even if it would be unrealistic to assume that we could ever carve out a life without trepidation. Trepidation—anxiety—as a component of our aliveness cannot be conjured away without conjuring away our aliveness. The best we can do, then, is to learn to live with the idea that trepidation, like ontological lack, will always be our constant companion without thereby allowing this trepidation to defeat our aliveness.