We do not know how to renounce anything, Freud has once observed. This type of relation to the object indicates an inability to mourn.

The addict is a non-renouncer par excellence (one think of the way Goethe mastered renunciation) ; yet, however haunted or hounded, the addict nonetheless establishes a partial separation from an invading presence.

***

Discipline and addiction. Practice your scales. Repetitions. Bach on coffee. Berlioz on hallucinogen (but also on coffee and cigars): The Witches’ Sabbath, a concoction of Faust and the opium dreams Berlioz read in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Mussorgky’s wine, Stravinsky’s cigarettes.

***

Crisis in immanence. Drugs, it turn out, are not so much about seeking an exterior, transcendental dimension – a fourth or fifth dimension – rather, they explore fractal interiorities. This was already hinted at by Burrough’s algebra of need.

Avital Ronell

(Crack War. Literature Addiction Mania. University of Illinois Press, 2004)

UNDRESS YOUR MIND

(Alfred Kinsey interviewing a woman)

The Institute of Sexology is an unique exhibition in the UK of the “most discussed of the private acts”. It is a tribute to Magnus Hirschfeid’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlim. Hirschfield, a Jewish doctor and sexologist, founded his Institute in 1919, a place that provided a huge number of archives and library on sexuality to the public and provided educational services and medical consultations, and also housed the Museum of Sex. Magnus Hirschfield, a Jewish doctor and sexologist, was an outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, a feminist, and is considered the father of transgenderism. The Institute was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.

The exhibition features over 200 objects spanning art, rare archival material, erotica, film and photography, and focus on a scientific comprehension of sexuality, from Freud and Marie Stopes to Alfred Kinsey’s questionnaires, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, analyzing how information can changes attitudes towards sex.

Please note that ‘The Institute of Sexology’ includes exhibits and live events of a sexual nature.

Wellcome Collection. 183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE. Until 20th September 2015.

NIGHTMARES OF REASON

An amazing restoration work on a series of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes’ private drawings is been exhibited at Courtauld Gallery in London until 25 May.

Album D, the Witches and Old Women Album, (circa 1819), have been brought together for the first time to the public in 150 years. Visions and nightmares, superstitions and the problem of old age (represented by witches) are the themes of these drawings, executed only in brush and grey ink and in small scales – you can see quite a few people using magnifying glasses to appreciate in full their details. Although a metaphor of the historical period in Spain and the long Inquisition, they represent mainly neural glimpses of Goya’s mind: his obsession with madness, the unconscious and the human animal.

These darker visions in Goya’s work appear after a mental breakdown and catastrophic illness that left him progressively deaf and socially isolated – presumably the cause was a lead intoxication from the pigments of his paints. After Goya’s death in 1828 these drawings passed to his only son, Javier (five of his six children died as infants – infants and witches are recurrent images in the album) and his grandson and later were bought by Francisco de Madrazo, who became director of the Museo do Prado.

He wakes up kicking.

Nightmare – detail (1816-1820)

Wicked woman

TAKE A FREUDIAN SIP

design: The Unemployed Philosophers Guild