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L’Ora della nascita. Psicoanalisi del sublime e arte contemporanea by Giuseppe Civitarese offers an original revision of the concept of sublimation. Starting with the uncanny of Freud and passing through the abjection of Julia Kristeva, the author invites us to devise and forge a new conceptual tool, not only illustrating it, but also taking the reader into the direct, living experience of it in the art of the sublime. The author does not “explain” the manifest content of the relationship between the art of the sublime and psychoanalysis; he is
* The Hour of Birth: Psychoanalysis of the Sublime and Contemporary Art. Translation by Adam Elgar.
more interested in the latent content, the process of thought formation, putting the reader in a position to experience the development of sensations, affects, and contrasting, sometimes divergent, ideas capable of giving tangible and representable form to the struggle for life embodied by the sublime and to its transposition into theory.
As we read this book we should not expect a traditional psychoanalytic essay but a journey, imagined, narrated and reflected in works of art that evoke the interior of bodies, watery environments and visceral cavities, and lead gradually to the elaboration and definition of what the author means by psychic birth. The hypothesis which the author presents is that “the aesthetic of the sublime ‘recounts’ psychic birth; that in essence it is merely an allegory of the process whereby a space for thought is established through the progressive differentiation of the subject from the object” (19). In this way, Civitarese brings sublimation to life as an intersubjective function that sheds light on the process of the birth of the mind.
A note on the title. The book takes its name from a work by Alfred Kubin: the drawing The Hour of Birth from 1903, which strikingly adorns the cover. At first glance the picture shows a disgusting insect-crab clutching at the inert body of a newborn baby while another bab