By TALES AB'SÁBER*
Considerations on the books of Miriam Chnaiderman and Tania Rivera
Miriam Chnaiderman – A wandering psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysts set out into the city, without a specific address, desiring the proximity and experience that their social place, their sociological place in the world, prevents them from having on principle. They travel around São Paulo, to unknown outskirts, to the torn apart city center, to the occupations and their vital social movements, to listen, see and be seen. They seek to be present as an indeterminate sensitivity to themselves. And also to those who have never seen, never spoken to, never even come across the idea of this thing called a psychoanalyst.
Original politics of entirely “open” presence, there is no theoretical moralism, teleology of healing, fantasy of transcendence, in this presence of the psychoanalyst as something of the common street. The street, always unusual for those who live in their powerful devices of distance from it. A zero degree of authoritarianism, of the place in the world of the psychoanalyst, now a difference to be gestated, an other, at the first level of recognition of all the other, for all the hidden, denied, hurt and thrown into the streets and of time, the Brazilians of this Brazil.
With these transits, which make connections, a city is produced, with the very movement of bodies in the direction of the desired city. A journey, a stroll and an experience, “listening to the city”, a life available for the encounter with whoever is there, whoever needs it or is simply curious. The city is not the city of the political management of merchandise, but of the political agency of those who desire it. On the corner, in the distant neighborhood, in the unknown life of the city, often ruined, of a psychoanalysis that knows neither what it will find, nor what it itself is a priori, absolutely.
He knows that he can live, relive, his city. To forget himself profoundly, and to start anew, with the other, the forgotten of everyone, of the whole, although so evidently obvious and visible, with its worlds, is one of the foundations of contemporary psychoanalysis. That it takes place in the streets is a promise of life, minimal, in continuous times of great violence, and for that very reason it is so great.
A book about the political experience of the exception and, therefore, general. Thus, Miriam Schnaiderman can formulate: “I have been defending the street as a work space, and I propose the creation of itinerant work teams that can equip the ‘street population’ to live in a more dignified way. Many people living on the streets have already worked, they came from the countryside, they can sew, cook, transport. We have several reports from former cooks, former farmers, former teachers, former journalists, who find themselves on the streets. Couldn’t they use their previous experience to work on the streets? We need to respect their nomadism and allow them to choose the way to live in a more dignified way. If the street is more tempting, despite all the risks, it is because a fraternity of the same order has not yet been established. It is because in our world, what is being perforated is the identification with the human species. Remember the indigenous Galdino, the murder of a homosexual in Praça da República, the pitch boys attacking well-dressed young people. It seems that only the humiliated, those deprived of even the minimum conditions for survival, seem to have, and strongly so, the notion of belonging to a human species. Hence the solidarity, hence the fraternity, hence the community life that they build on the filthy sidewalks of São Paulo. // Until a broad campaign is carried out to transform the streets into workshops, where from there each person can invent their own way of being in life, while the concern is to 'clean' the streets and disrespect for the singularity in the ways of dealing with personal history prevails, violence will continue to prevail.”[I]
TaniaRivera – Places of delirium, art and expression, madness and politics
In fact, an entire people, in ironic confrontation with the generalized pasty bourgeois experience, lived their own modernity as a combination of art, active research of the imagination, on the edge of delirium, open investigation of madness, artistic or literary life, clinical practice and psychoanalysis.
This true cultural complex of modernity, of researchers and producers of artistic work with clinical work, of the permanent drift in which modern art opened itself to all types of world of experience, and of the invention of so-called contemporary art, attracted philosophers and psychoanalysts to its delirium, life lived in this way – in investigation from the matrices of time and space, flow and experience opened by artists, madmen, and mad artists.
This field of experiences generated a powerful community of producers who, even while leading their creative lives more or less among themselves, communicated one of the world's limiting possibilities: that of a type of shared aesthetic anarchism, to live in a social life that is more reified each day and each season.
In Brazil, this powerful principle, in which artists, madmen, critics and clinical philosophers met and created a community of destiny in what interested them, life, art, delirium and other types of power in the face of the industrial crushing of existences, or the ruin of poverty and exclusion, had a powerful history and culture of its own. In the country of enslaved popular origins, deprived of all rights to a symbolic territory organized as some tradition for life, deeply marked by violence and precariousness, such a movement of life with expression, a type of delirium and criticism, the structure of our “trance”, is by no means a coincidence.
Tania Rivera, psychoanalyst, critic and great researcher, gave us the open history – and the great history, one could say – of this cultural universe marked by lives in experimentation, in which art, madness and psychoanalysis go hand in hand, in a game of mutual recognition of differences in permanent approximation, special elective and affective inclinations.
Places of delirium, art and expression, madness and politics It is, in my opinion, the great book of this strong history of Brazilian art with Brazilian clinical thought constituting itself mutually, from the gesture of encounter of delirium art, madness as art, and of the psychoanalyst, clinician, as critic. The book reconstructs many of the moments and actors of this encounter, from the modernist European questions about the thing, and intuits our worlds of potentials in play, carried out with the greatest experimental courage that the open moment in time of national formation also allowed to the subjects of critical art delirium.
It is important to note that this is not a case of textbook surrealism or the implantation of a manifesto, nor of condescension towards the irrationality of immediate expression, formless because uninformed, but, on the contrary, the history of a powerful underground, social and investigative movement, of work that called upon so many – Nise da Silveira, Osório Cezar, Mário Yahn, Mario Pedrosa, Maria Leontina, Almir Mavignier, Abraham Palatnik, Lula Wanderley; and Albino Braz, Aurora Cursino dos Santos, Haydée de Carvalho, Antônio Bragança, Raphael Domingues, Carlos Pertuis, Fernando Diniz, Emygdio, Arthur Amora, Arthur Bispo do Rosário among many others – in which the art of the mad revealed itself as a way of producing life and knowledge and clinicians began to think/live their objects, subject, delirium, culture, based on the powerful influence of that art.
In the work, the places of delirium, provided by crazy artists or those from the Brazilian avant-garde, are this: places of experience, in which the openness of an unknown reality is proposed as culture and knowledge, life and art, experience from the limit thing, to those who are not crazy who can investigate from within the productive potential of delirium, this intense production of difference, also so characteristic of Brazilian social life.
Tania Rivera truly delves into the concrete potential of the works, into the theoretical history and into the biographical, anthropological and political enigma of some artists of delirium – as in the high-voltage essay on Arthur Bispo do Rosário –, to reach the psychoanalytic and life-related proposition of places of subjects in the world being converted through art into subject places. An exceptional book, on the relationship between psychoanalysis and an exceptional movement in culture from the 20th century to the present.
Through her engagement with the power of delirious art in the Brazilian experience, Tania Rivera managed to reposition the meaning of psychoanalysis, with her own conception of the critical character of this clinical and cultural experience: “Certainly, Divisor [Lygia Pape’s performance work of group and collective experience] is a plan that cuts the world – and divides us – into two fields. The one above is portrayed in most of the images that have come down to us from the recent executions of the proposition, while the one below appears rarely, in a few photographs, as an impersonal set of legs standing still or moving at a constant rhythm. In fact, I had not noticed this dimension of the work until I experienced it, in 2010, when it was made in the courtyard of MAM – Rio for filming that would be part of the 29th. São Paulo Biennial. Friends had sent me an open invitation by email to anyone who wanted to participate. When I arrived, the fabric was already floating in the air thanks to many upright bodies; I remember lamenting that not all the slits were occupied and that one of its ends fell to the ground. There was a diffuse enthusiasm, but I couldn't feel everyone's presence, perhaps because my visual contact was limited to a few people around me. The film crew's objectives were to keep us still for a long time and, at a signal, walk forward for a few dozen meters and then return, backwards, repeatedly. I now believe that I felt restricted in my movements, while I waited for a collective flight that never materialized. I don't remember exactly at what point in the scene, which was starting to become tiresome, something surprising happened. A sudden rustling sound began to come from the center of the fabric and I soon realized that some people were lifting the fabric with their arms, in a vigorous gesture with one of their fists, accompanied by a movement of the body by which the head slid down and removed itself from the gap it had occupied until then. I did the same. Underneath the cloth we looked at each other and smiled, and each of us moved automatically towards another slit into which we could fit. It was like a contagion: soon we were all coming out of our crevices and switching places with others, non-stop, in a beautiful and complex choreography. I remember the childlike joy and the knowing looks that accompanied these movements. We subverted the structure, the plan that assigned each person a given place, and we accomplished something behind the scenes, as the curious popular expression goes. We were together to the exact extent that we could trade places. // Interestingly, this experience resonated with my practice in psychoanalysis. As an analyst, as well as an analysand, I have learned over many years that, if psychoanalysis is a practice of discoveries and revelations of psychic contents – and would, in this sense, have to do with lifting covering veils –, it is not at all about unveiling the unconscious or 'the truth' as a unique and definitive narrative that would be accessed through the correct interpretation of its disguises. I believe that it is fundamentally about suspending hegemonic narratives so that each person can move, even if only minimally, outside of their usual place, of opening up the possibility of new gestures that are not made individually, but that intersect with the gestures of others, in order to eventually open up their spaces – and invent the field of desire as that which goes on under the covers, between us. [ii]
*Tales Ab´Sáber He is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Unifesp. He is the author of, among other books, The Anthropophagic Soldier (Hedra). [https://amzn.to/4ay2e2g]
References
Miriam Chnaiderman. A wandering psychoanalysis: Cinematic wanderings and psychoanalytic reflections. São Paulo, Blucher, 2024, 344 pages. [https://amzn.to/43JVw89]
Tania Rivera. Places of delirium, art and expression, madness and politics. São Paulo, Sesc Editions / n-1 editions, 2023, 406 pages. [https://amzn.to/3R6u5xN]
Notes
[I] Miriam Chnaiderman, A wandering psychoanalysis, P. 57.
[ii] Tania Rivera, Places of delirium, art and expression, madness and politics, P. 19 and 20.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
