I have come to a point where I feel a need to understand more about my own work methods and my motivations. Departing from a process diary written during my master studies, I take a closer look at my own artistic process — the questions which inform my work, the questions that arise in it, and how my work is an attempt to understand those questions. Wherein lies the urgency for me to work with art in the way that I do?  This is an essay about a search, about trying to make sense of something, about not knowing. It is also an exploration of how my work in the non-verbal domain transforms my not knowing, how working with art is a tool for thinking and understanding.

This study employs psychoanalytical theories to explore how the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious workings of the mind, combined with a search for identity, are presented and dealt with in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987). It is done through a close reading and in-depth textual analysis of thematic concerns raised in the work. Previous research has primarily relied on some specific aspects of psychoanalytic theory and applied it to Beloved. The theoretical framework provides a rationale for this paper to research two events in particular that highlight the mother-daughter relationships between Sethe and her Ma’am and between Sethe and her daughter Beloved. These relationships are consequently analyzed by employing psychoanalytical concepts offered by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. By utilizing psychoanalytical criticism, the characters’ conscious and unconscious motives and feelings are revealed and explained, as well as the meanings and the undercurrents that lie underneath the text’s consciousness. The results suggest that Sethe murdered her daughter Beloved to keep her from becoming a slave and enduring the dreadful and traumatic consequences of slavery, which was similar to what Sethe went through when she was abandoned by her Ma'am. Sethe’s childhood psychological principles and trauma shaped her identity as a mother as she witnessed her mother abandoning her at a young age by being tortured and killed. The events around Sethe’s mother’s death and the fact that Sethe never identifies her mother’s dead body, scar Sethe for life and instill in Sethe a sense of “lack” and an abnormal feeling of maternal love where she is ready to kill her children to save them from the horror of slavery.

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My dissertation, In the Beginning was the Sign, examines the entangled histories of literary modernism and mathematical modernity and revisits their claim to a radical rupture with the past. Informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, media theory, and deconstruction, I trace how the interplay of literary and mathematical form transformed classical imaginations of the human. Authors like Carl Einstein, Robert Musil or Ernst Cassirer challenge the organic concept of subject formation as Bildung with a new and purely symbolic kind of mathematical abstraction that informs their writing on both thematic and formal levels. In the tradition of Plato’s Meno, they adduce these new forms of mathematical knowledge to find genuinely modern answers to the classical question of the good life. Paradoxically, in striving to portray their own time as a radical novelty that was able to break with its cultural heritage, these authors summon the canon at its most canonical. The mathematician Hilbert, for instance, rewrites the opening of the Gospel of John, translating logos as ‘sign’ rather than ‘word.’ Analyzing literary, philosophical, and mathematical texts in German, English, and French, I show that the questioning of the logical foundations of thought in the so-called foundational crisis in mathematics was re-mediated through a new genealogical exploration of the foundations of European rationality in the texts of classical antiquity.

In his celebrated 2007 novel El mundo, Juan José Millás tells the story of the development of Juanjo, a simulacrum of himself, and describes a series of negative developments that the protagonist faces in his childhood. While much has been written about Millás and the “testimonial realism” of his literary generation, little has been written about the psychological factors that influence his characters. In this paper I analyze Juanjo's development as understood from the gradation of guilt to shame, depression, and later suicidal thoughts. Because Juanjo is not able to find an appropriate mechanism of release for his guilt, he spirals into an ever-increasing psychological distress. Thus, his actions do not become an escape per se from the oppressive forces in Spain; but rather, they are mechanisms of delay caused by the subconscious effects of living under Franco's Spain during the 1950s. Mike Wilson-Reginato's first novel El púgil, published in 2007, mixes intertextual references to music, film, and literature to craft a space for the posthuman identity. The two protagonists of El púgil—Art and his olive-green refrigerator, Hal—combine in a new cyborg-like formation. Unlike the cyborg envisioned by Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” the mechanical-biological union never takes place at the corporeal level, but their union occurs in a psychological dimension within Art's hallucination. To describe the union of Art and Hal, I use Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage to explain Art's adoption of a perceived superior identity and Jean Baudrillard's study of simulacra to show how this adopted identity is an imagined simulacrum. Thus, the combined image of the two characters creates a cyborg identity that erases the distance between man and machine.

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