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In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past…. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
This paper emerges from a long-standing sense of disquiet regarding the status of the notion of “creativity” in psychoanalytic theory. Within the cultural sector of which psychoanalysis is an integral and sometimes influential part, there are few more celebrated attributes than “creativity” and the “creative.” Psychoanalytic thinking has steadfastly participated in this sector-wide celebratory attitude. Though seemingly straightforward and unambivalent, this celebratory attitude, when put to even moderate scrutiny, reveals itself to be complex and polyvalent.
By “attitude,” I mean an involuntary posture or position, many of whose multiple determinants are unconscious. When one consciously speaks or thinks the word “creative” or “creativity” one is assuming such an overdetermined attitude in relation to the object in question—usually a cultural product or its producer.
What concerns me is the primarily involuntary dimension of the relation established between audience and “creative” object: the cluster of mood, meaning, and force which is put into place by the words in question—creative and creativity. I proceed with the assumption that when these words are thought and spoken, a formal set of relations is affirmed. The subject(s) using them is (are), in the use, affiliated with, and even bound to, the object(s) described. This affiliation and binding is of a particular, and often unremarked, sort.