A Question of Taste : Psychoanalytic Explorations of Aesthetic Dislike and Bourdieu’s Distinction

Sammanfattning: This dissertation approaches the question of taste and aesthetic dislike from a combined sociological and psychoanalytic perspective. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art (most notably La distinction from 1979), I attempt to reconcile a view of aesthetic judgments as acts of distinction with a legitimate subjective dimension of aesthetic enjoyment. I make a parallel between taste and the psychoanalytic conception of the symptom and analyse the way they both transform the repressed content of the unconscious drives into a manifest one with the use of Freud’s theory of the dream. I relate the question of pleasure and displeasure in art with the dichotomy Eros/Death Drive (Freud) and argue that both aesthetic like and dislike arrive from a combination of these two drives, as in Lacan’s jouissance. I argue that the love of art can, as any love, be understood as a transference, the repetition of unconscious desires projected onto an other. In the conclusion, I refer to Sándor Ferenczi’s work and argue that one should relate to one’s aesthetic judgments with the same elasticity (Elastizität) that the analyst should show towards the resistance of the analysand in order to understand her symptom. Finally, I reject a mystifying view of art and the sublime and argue that the very nature of art should instead be conceived as the objet a (Lacan) of our desires, i.e. that which cannot ever be fully obtained from the other but which at the same time structures our desires.