The subtleties of failure:

when Freud meets Duchamp

Abstract

The preoccupation with the way the unconscious breaks into the scene of daily life was a constant in Sigmund Freud's work. Thus, one of the most essential themes for the creator of psychoanalysis was the question of what became known as Freudian slip. With regard to this concept, we shall refer to some texts in which it appears centrally, as in "The Faulty Acts", lectures given between 1915, 1916 and 1917 and in the text "The subtleties of a faulty act", written in 1935. Therefore, I try to understand how, although the faulty act carries an apparent negative connotation, from the semantic field in which the notion of failure is inscribed, it is instead a positive element insofar as it gives news of the psychic life of the individual. In the field of aesthetics, I will take as starting point in this investigation thereadymadeTrap(Trébuchet,1917),fromMarcelDuchamp.I conceivecontemporaryart as a mean that assumes the possibility of defeat or failure, inscribing them at the heart of processes,reflecting on how failure is structural to define our status as subjects.