<p>When an artist creates a piece of work, she inadvertently engages in an interrelational embodied experience. In the case of composing a song, lyrical meditation on a particular content is transposed into vocal articulation. Narrative imagery assumes form through language and the movement of the piece’s structure. The content of experience that is reflected upon to create this imaginal likeness therefore involves mediating multiple planes of experience. The artistic object must refer both to what is and is not present. But this is not merely a sensory exercise. This is also an act of mediation, according to Emmanuel Levinas. Art invokes a movement towards the other. But rather than directly experiencing the other, the aesthetic process mediates the relation. This is what Levinas refers to as the subject’s relation to the third. This article engages Levinas’s concept of the third to explore the transcendent interaction between bodied subjects, to extend beyond Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic reduction of revelation. To explore this, I will draw on a piece of music written to reflect on trauma experiences in human trafficking. This article assesses how aesthetic creation might function to mediate a revelatory relation to an unseen other, extending the psychoanalytic encounter into the realm of ethics.</p>

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The Musical Image of Trauma: Mediating Transcendence through the Political

  • Anna Westin

摘要

When an artist creates a piece of work, she inadvertently engages in an interrelational embodied experience. In the case of composing a song, lyrical meditation on a particular content is transposed into vocal articulation. Narrative imagery assumes form through language and the movement of the piece’s structure. The content of experience that is reflected upon to create this imaginal likeness therefore involves mediating multiple planes of experience. The artistic object must refer both to what is and is not present. But this is not merely a sensory exercise. This is also an act of mediation, according to Emmanuel Levinas. Art invokes a movement towards the other. But rather than directly experiencing the other, the aesthetic process mediates the relation. This is what Levinas refers to as the subject’s relation to the third. This article engages Levinas’s concept of the third to explore the transcendent interaction between bodied subjects, to extend beyond Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic reduction of revelation. To explore this, I will draw on a piece of music written to reflect on trauma experiences in human trafficking. This article assesses how aesthetic creation might function to mediate a revelatory relation to an unseen other, extending the psychoanalytic encounter into the realm of ethics.