Finding Fantasia: Leonardo Da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and the Aesthetic Subject

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abstract

Leo Bersani's contribution to the fields of psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and queer theory has recently received renewed attention. Relying upon Bersani's theory of the "aesthetic subject," my study reexamines Freud's infamous "psychoanalytic novel," Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood. After situating Freudian aesthetics in the context of current discussions art critics are having about art and its reception, I contend that Freud's text needs to be reevaluated as a distinctly modernist invention harboring the potential for new mappings of self and other. It is finally Melanie Klein's rereading of Freud's text that offers us a methodology premised upon a …