Magazine Article

Jagath Weerasinghe: States of psychosis

Jyoti Dhar

2017

Overview

Anxiety is often characterized by its pathological effects: its paralysis of the mind, its interference in our daily lives, its potential \"to choke\" the body, as per its etymological meaning. In philosophical terms, anxiety-alongside its compatriots, guilt and shame-is a concept that has been described very differently, as the beginning of consciousness and subjectivity, or as an unexpected gift, and even as a possible form of freedom. As theorist and curator Suzana Milevska has written, \"In his seminal book 'Postcolonial Melancholia' [2005], Paul Gilroy made a distinction between 'paralyzing guilt' and 'productive shame,' thus entrusting shame with certain affirmative features, as potential for overcoming the collective affect of guilt ... however ... there is still very little written about the positive potentialities of shame as a movement of a certain epistemic agency that may prompt the overcoming of the initial traumatic experience of facing and looking at truth.\" As part of an attempt to redress this, a number of analytical texts in a volume edited by Milevska, entitled 'On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency' (2016), extrapolates from the idea that such psychological states can actually be generative, suggesting that they may help uncover wider social truths and alter our relationship to them. The author's critical writings-drawing upon a range of post-conflict situations from the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Bosnian war to Apartheid crimes and the Rwandan genocide-outline how artistic practices may be able to mobilize these residual traumatic states in empowering and enabling ways.

• Subject: Anxiety / Anxiety in art / Cultural property / Exhibitions / National Gallery of Art (U.S.) / Psychological aspects