"...to their slippages, to their irrationalism, to their sometimes viscous ambivalence..."

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“You could say that all my work is about the repressed fantasies of our field and about the desires produced and pursued through those fantasies. I do think that you have to understand the structure of that field and its fantasies in order to get at those desires – which I’ve also considered in more political and sociological terms as interests. And I do think that such understanding takes a certain amount of research, and that certain reading lists can be of help. But you can’t get at those fantasies and those desires through intellectualizations. Psychoanalysis would consider that just another mechanism of repression. In the end you can only get at them by subjecting yourself to their excesses, to their slippages, to their irrationalism, to their sometimes viscous ambivalence, to their contradictions. And in those contradictions there is violence and there is also absurdity and there is also pleasure. And there may also be a kind of beauty.”

- Andrea Fraser



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