The Body in/of Art: the Experience of Extimacy

Abstract

the goal of this paper is to set the constitutive alteration impinged by the body in the experience of art, which according to Nancy thereby turns improper, in the light of a lacanian category that by means of the body makes evident the order of the real as excluded from the imaginary and the symbolic, and which therefore breaks representation down. this is the category of Extimacy, which lacan raises in Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), when referring to the displacement undergone by the core of articulated meaning outside the symbolic-imaginary order, which opens up for the experience of a constitutive hiatus in/of identity that no process of identification, i.e. representation, might close down.