voi Cesparanoiac-critical method was described in dalí’s essay ‘l’Âne pourri’ (‘The Rotten
donkey’) (dalí 1930). The method was founded on the idea that any given visual
image was open to a ‘delirium of interpretation’. dalí proposed to systematize these
multiple possible accounts within an analysis of social reality:
i think the moment is near when, by a process of paranoid and active thought,
it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to
systematise confusion and to contribute to the total discrediting of the world
of reality ... it suffices that the delirium of interpretation binds together the
meaning of heterogeneous pictures that cover a surface, to ensure that no- one
could deny the real existence of this bond. paranoia uses the exterior world
to make the obsessional idea valid, with the disconcerting idea of making this
idea valid for others. The reality of the exterior world serves as illustration and
evidence and is placed in the service of the reality of our psyche.^4
(dalí 1930: 276, my translation)dalí’s paintings such as Apparition of Face and a Fruit Dish on a Beach (1928) and The
Slave Market With a Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) function as illustrations of this
principle of a reality that is both utterly certain and collectively verifiable (a face and
a fruit dish) but also completely arbitrary (one minute a face, the next minute a fruit
dish). Rather than a paranoid interpretation of reality, dalí was advocating a ‘paranoid
reality’, or reality as a vehicle for paranoid certainty. a constantly shuffled pack of
visual simulations opposes a single and coherent appearance. The young psychiatrist
Jacques lacan visited dalí in 1930 to discuss ‘The Rotten donkey’. subsequently, the
psychoanalyst and the painter carried on a dialogue of sorts through articles published
in the surrealist press on the subject of paranoia, culminating in the 1932 publication
of lacan’s doctoral thesis, De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personalité.
dalí later approvingly cited lacan’s thesis in the surrealist journal Minotaure, and lacan
published work in the Minotaure in may 1933. according to elizabeth Roudinesco,
‘The Rotten donkey’ essay
made it possible for lacan to break with the theory of constitutionalism and
move on to a new understanding of language as it related to psychosis ...
at the time when lacan was reading Freud, dalí’s point of view provided
him with just the element he needed to turn his own clinical experience on
paranoia into a theory.
(Roudinesco 1999: 31)dalí’s notion of the image integrated within the logical chain of simulations, bears
a relation to lacan’s elucidation of the external constitution of self- identity, as set out
in his canonical essay on ‘The mirror stage’ of 1936, in which the subject appears
within an already constituted ‘symbolic order’ of language. in his later text on The
Psychoses, lacan (1993 [1956]) re- visits his dalían inspiration in his claim that while
the neurotic subject ‘speaks to himself with his ego’ or in other words carries on a
dialogue with an external self- image that is somewhat ambiguous and revocable, the
paranoiac is exposed to the full force of self- externalization, because for the paranoiac