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RESEARCH PRODUCT

: Russell Banks, Raymond Carver, David Cronenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, David Lynch

subject

description

The use of the French adjective “malsain” (usually translated in English as “unhealthy,” “unwholesome” or “sick”) to judge a work of art has led me to question the relevance of this metaphor, the way this value is determined, the reasons which lead the subject to consume shocking material and the possibility to distinguish art from mere symptom. I consider the unhealthy, on the one hand, as a relation of transmission which produces an aesthetic based on metaphor and metonymy, and on the other, as a subjective value delivered by a self or a law, and I argue that, as it is entirely discursive, the unhealthy is in effect an uncanny metonymy. I show that the works under study represent and condition the reader/spectator's response by introducing an ambiguous dialogue between the diegetic and the aesthetic. In this manner, they set up a heuristic function and, as such, constitute not only what Paul Ricoeur calls “laboratories of moral judgement,” but also playful fictions which incite the reader/spectator to pay closer attention to—and beware of—all signs. L'Imagination malsaine focuses on the works of writers Russell Banks, Raymond Carver and Bret Eastons Ellis and film-makers David Cronenberg and David Lynch. The argument makes use of the writings of Judith Butler and Foucault, Freud and Lacan, Paul Ricœur and Charles Taylor, Clément Rosset, Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Wolfgang Iser.