Abstract
I close by arguing that although institutional and political struggles within French medicine played a part Charcot’s posthumous decline, Charcot’s inability to manage the contradictory aesthetic values and distinctions upon which his work depended meant that his model of medical theatre did not outlive him. This, combined with the rise of new visual technologies such as cinema and X-rays, meant that a specifically theatrical approach to diagnosis did not survive. Charcot’s career provides a cautionary tale against assuming that the neurocognitive approaches to art of our own time might offer a universal key to aesthetic appreciation. Charcot’s true heirs, in terms of his dramaturgical concepts, lie not within medicine nor even neurocognitive aesthetics, but the arts.
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Notes
- 1.
Mark Micale, “Charcot and les névroses traumatiques,” Revue neurologique, 150.8–9 (1994): 498–505; Charcot, Charcot, 116–7.
- 2.
Vicente Iragui, “The Charcot-Bouchard Controversy,” Archives of Neurology, 43 (March 1986): 290–5; Goetz et al, 307–332; Bernard Brais, “Jean-Martin Charcot et le césarisme de Faculté,” 3–27, unpublished article communicated to the French Neurology Society, Paris (9–11 June 1993), collection of the Bibliothèque Charcot; Christopher Goetz, “The Salpêtrière in the Wake of Charcot’s Death,” Neurology, 37 (March 1987): 444–7; Daniela Barberis, “Changing Practices of Commemoration in Neurology,” Osiris, 14 (1999): 102–117.
- 3.
See, for example, Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (NY: Braziller, 1969). I have explored this topic in more detail in “Kleist’s Übermarionetten,” 261–281, “Archaeology of the Abstract Body,” 92–111, and “Priestesses,” 410–426.
- 4.
For a survey of this literature, see Alistair Fox, Speaking Pictures: Neuropsychoanalysis and Authorship in Film and Literature (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016).
- 5.
Vilayanur Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, “The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6.6–7 (1999): 15–51; Bruce McConachie, Theatre and Mind (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Significantly, Ramachandran and his supporters ignore the existence of communities who enjoy otherwise atypical aesthetic forms, such as noise music, feedback, drone music, or the contemporary avant-garde in general—although there is considerable psychoanalytic work on this topic, such as Scott Wilson, Stop Making Sense (London: Karnac, 2015) and Jonathan W. Marshall, “Sonic Pleasure, Absence and the History of the Self: An Alternative Approach to the Criticism of Sound Art,” Sound Scripts, 3 (2011): 6–25.
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Marshall, J.W. (2016). Conclusion. In: Performing Neurology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51762-3_10
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