Man has dreamed of mastering his psychic, ecological and virtual environment, through a frantic race against any form of limit, whether of time, of space, of resources or of the body. The current situation undermines the narrative of man as center of the universe, as he is forced to acknowledge that he is peripheral in relation to what he presumed to dominate. Would the parental generation thus be paying tribute to adolescents for saving them from humiliation? How, then, can one inhabit one’s body and psyche, if the promised future is the end screen?
Orlan, carnal art, film of Stephan Oriach, depicts transformations in the artists own body. It is a discourse on art in place of that of science. The goal is to use technology to reduce the gap between what one is and what one has. The body is a tool for saying what one wants. It is a matter of subverting, in a dimension of transgrassion of criteria and social stereotypes, the notion of appearance in order to bring it down. The violence of this exhibition questions the place of the spectators who are invited to a live performance of this act.
In the context of neo-liberalism and the collapse of social meta-frameworks, the disavowal of generational difference provokes a crisis in cultural transmission at school by avoiding the conflictual nature of Oedipal conflicts and attacking psychical and cultural organizers. Adolescent suffering, violence and transgression should be understood as symptoms and consequences of the political idealization of perversion and of regression to the infantile in the socio-historical situation.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°2, pp. 431-445.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7