It’s all a plot”: paranoid characters and mad readers in Gide and Kafka’

Abstract

The subject matter for this paper arose in response to a thesis I recently examined. A Lacanian reading of certain art objects, it argued that a work of art cannot be a fetish object. ‘A work of art does not ward off anxiety, rather it provokes it’. An unpublished paper by Professor Naomi Segal given to a conference on Culture and the Unconscious: Psychoanalysts, artists, academics