Traces is an exploration of subjectivity, artistic creation, and contemporary culture through the guiding figure od the “trace”. Drawing on the seminal psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s concepts of containment, reverie, alpha function, caesura, and unsatured space, the book extends psychoanalytic thinking beyond the clinic into domains of aestetics, philosophy, neuro-aesthetics, and technological culture.
Like the act of tracing itself, this work proceeds associatively, considering traces as partial inscriptions that orient thought without fixing meaning. The trace serves as both epistemological method and athical stance: a way of sustaining thinking in conditions of instability, complexity, and acceleration.
Engaging contemporary debates on generative artificial intelligence, embodiment, and a-chronic temporality, this book argues that art and psychoanalysis function as analogous practices. Both sustain unsatured space, tolerate frustration, and allow form to emerge from not-knowing. Creativity is redefined as an embodied and relational intelligence capable of holding complexity without reduction.
This book seeks to contribute to interdisciplinary studies in humanities by articulating a non-reductive account of imagination and thinking grounded in relational process rather than cognitive mastery.
In an era increasingly dominated by prediction, optimization, and digital mediation, Traces proposes a post-Bonian ethics of openness - one that values incompletions as a condition of transformation.
“A man sets himself the task of drawing the world.
Over the years, he fills a space with images of provinces, of kingdoms, of mountains, of bays, of ships, of islands, of fish, pf dwellings, of instruments, of starsm of horses, and of people.
A short time before he dies, he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”
-JORGE LUIS BORGES, THE MAKER