Jane Avril: la danza del desiderio

Jane Avril, a former patient of the Salpêtrière, feigned the grand hysterical attack to escape the medicalizing grasp of psychiatry through a practice of dissimulation. This maneuver involves a tactic where the “fake” becomes a dodge, granting the nosographic gaze the idiocy of diagnostic gratification to deceive it at a deeper level. It is here that the mimetic and metamorphic art of Charcot’s patients becomes the dancing subversion of a power relationship, thanks to the hysterical metonymy’s ability to evade any clinical capture. The demand for hysterical dance, which Jane transposes from the “clinical theater” of the Salpêtrière to the stage of the Moulin Rouge, eroticizes the impossible, engaging with life and mocking the “master”. It is this “menadic” nature of hysterical desire that uncouples the erotic body from the normativity of biology. My contribution will seek to investigate, in reference to the conceptual figure of Jane Avril, not only within a genealogy of “transference neurosis” but also in the context of its differential framing compared to other clinical and psychoanalytic constellations, the subversive trait of hysteria and its decisive role in the economy of desire.