In the cartography of desire, Lyotard's adventures in the libidinal economy appear as a daring attempt to chart some of the more inaccessible regions of the territory. Before venturing onto this continent, a short trip only, we may recall that the concept of the libidinal economy was forged in Lyotard's work on psychoanalysis and painting. In "Psychanalyse et peinture", Lyotard sought to refute some commonplaces of Freud's aesthetic theory. Freud had privileged the subject of a work of art over its plastic support which, in the case of a painting, is rendered transparent to the inaccessible scene represented. Additionally, at this level, one discovers a latent content dis-simulated in the subject represented: the trace or silhouette of a form which is determinant in the painter's unconscious. Apart from a scepticism that such methods contributed much to a psychoanalysis of the subject (painter), Lyotard discovered that Freud's technique was perfectly intractable when applied to modern works of art in which the function of representation, so crucial to Freud's theory, is rendered insignificant, and in which the "traditions and space of the QuattroCento tumbled into ruins". Surprising as well, since it is not as though Freud would have been unaware of the radical mutations of the forms of contemporary art.
To address the lacuna in Freud, Lyotard decides to read Freud against himself, by availing himself of the theory of drives and the libidinal economy found in the later "Metapsychological Papers".
In the new analytic arrangement the object is freed from a dubious quest of a psychoanalysis without a subject, and is itself considered as a psychic apparatus in terms of Freud's theory of a dynamic (economic) unconscious functioning. Lyotard expresses great... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline