Film Essay Saying yes to dirt, desire and difference:Yes(2004)

Love’s Cosmopolitan Promise in Sally Potter’s Yes

“…The transformation of her body from idealized goddess to contemptible and dirty temptation aligns with the film's more general association of dirt and its disposal with psychic boundary-making: abject others are expelled to the margins to secure the "clean and proper body" of the symbolic subject. 24 As He speaks, dirt becomes a metaphor for political disavowal. It belongs to the Other and must be cleansed to establish the masculine subject's mastery of the woman's body: "What can I do to purify your mind?…”

Psychoanalysis and The Arts: the Slippery Ground of Applied Analysis

“…Some of the shared preoccupations these papers deal with are: memory, history, and reconstruction; experiences of loss, mental growth, and creativity; facts linked with the passage of time-childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, as well as the inevitability of death; perception, desire, pleasure, and love; intimacy, identity, individuality, and difference; dialectics between inside/outside, language/action, individual/society, and reality/ illusion; the experience of listening, reading, or beholding; the value of thinking, relating, and helping; the consequences of new technologies for our ways of thinking and relating; and the complexities of violence, destructiveness, fundamentalism, and trauma. (See Abella 2008Abella , 2010Anderson 2009;Ashur 2009;Baudry 2001;Blum 2001;Civitarese 2010;Diena 2009;Frosch 2009;Goldstein 1975;Golinelli 2003;Jones 1999;Mandelbaum 2011;Minerbo 2008;Paul 2011;Petrella 2008;Poland 2003;Sabbadini 2009Sabbadini , 2011Schaub 2008;Schiller 2008;Schwartz 2009;Szajnberg 2010;Tylim 2010;and West-Leuer 2009. ) The style adopted by these papers comes nearer to what we usually call a dialogue: listening to the way others tackle the same questions with which we ourselves are dealing; confronting models and exploring different answers; receiving/learning instead of only giving/teaching; trying not to demonstrate but to listen to the way that others use our suggestions and their echoes on our own thinking; putting to work our constructs and questioning our ideas; accepting that we may be destabilized in our certainties and being willing to deconstruct our truths in order to allow them to grow and be enriched.…”