The master thesis launches with thorough “reading” and subsequent analysis of selected texts, ranging from aesthetics, psychoanalysis, semiology and politics, in which questions and problems of representation can be traced and monitored. The purpose of the paper is, compared to its starting point, much more modest. It sets out to outline the minimal features of the disposition of the representation, or in other words, features of the relationship between representative and represented. In doing so, we will try to avoid adopting merely one of the traditional approaches when confronted with the problem of representation, and will strive to pass between texts and their immanent epistemology in a "nomadic" manner.
By interpreting the selected writings from Freud’s Mass Psychology and Analysis of the Ego and Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Languages, we will attempt to formulate a concept of origin, that will provide the basis for our further work. By examining Artaud's essays on the theater and Nietzsche's early text On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense we will shed light on issues and questions raised by the representation, in its relationship to thought and language; and at the intersection of Rousseau’s works on politics and Nietzsche’s work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, we will, after acknowledging a new understanding of the problem of representation, point out the junctures between the theater and the state. The thesis will be concluded with emphasis on the importance of the problem of representation that the latter presents in the transition from modernism to conceptual art.
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