The Reverse of Thanatos and the Art of Repetition

Abstract

This contribution investigates the link between aesthetics and therapy, starting from a notion that is central to psychoanalysis, philosophy and anthropology: that of repetition. The starting point is the metapsychological definition arrived at by Sigmund Freud – obviously passing through the clinical definition – with the elaboration of Todestrieb. But already in Freud, an ambivalence intrinsic to repetition emerges: it can be the negative compulsion to repeat, but also the positive source of childhood activity, particularly play. The article then explores the relationship between childhood play and repetition through an author who has devoted important pages to this problem, albeit never in a systematic way: Walter Benjamin. With Benjamin, starting from the fundamental polarity between ritual and play, and therefore between repetition of the same and repetition of the new, other authors are then called upon, such as Jean Piaget, Johan Huizinga, Émile Benveniste and Roger Caillois. Playful repetition emerges as a constructive and profane principle with respect to the sphere of the sacred, of myth, but also to that of biological-adaptive behaviour; as the primary source of human experimentation and creativity. Play and its repetition – the opposite of Thanatos – have to do with the perfective mimesis of Aristotelian memory. In conclusion, the article addresses the problem of the transformation of our perception from modernity and the advent of technical reproducibility to the present day, with the challenges posed by digital technologies. Contemporary alienations, the affirmation of a psychotic paradigm through widespread processes of hypersensorialisation and disconnection of sensory data, through mechanisms of decoupling between language and imagination – and recent studies in phenomenological psychiatry provide fundamental tools in this regard – once again call into question the repetition of Thanatos, of an unbridled Id. The essay then closes with a question addressed to aesthetics as a theory of perception: what is the revolution of sensibility that we need to think about today in order to reaffirm not only an aesthetic, but also a politics animated by Eros and not by Thanatos?