76

What about a Freudian aesthetic? Taking the texts in which Freud openly discusses art as a reference, it would be an aesthetic whose conservative taste in art drastically contrasts with the subversive nature of his discovery of the subconscious. With Freud being divided between a Victorian and a subversive character, we propose that another Freudian aesthetic is possible if we disregard the texts that focus on art and concentrate on those that deal with jokes. We will discuss how the issue of sense within nonsense is as much present in his texts about art as in his Witz (joke) analysis. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that Freud’s stance on art seems more inclined toward meaning, whereas his Witz analysis finds a way to go beyond meaning. This is thanks to a notion as much present in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” as in “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious”: playing.