Who Was Oscar Masotta? Response to Derbyshire

Philip Derbyshire (‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysisin Argentina’, RP 158) should be commended for his insightful consideration of the literary and psychoanalytic writings of Oscar Masotta, one of the most important Argentine intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to make a case for juxtaposing these texts with Masotta’s idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary explorations of aesthetics, which included actual artistic production between 1965 and1967 – years omitted from Derbyshire’s account. This period lies directly between the early and later phasesof Masotta’s writing, the former being more focused on literary criticism, the latter on Lacan. I can offer two reasons for including Masotta’s brief interest in art in any larger history of his output: first, a full picture of his relationship to foreign sources only becomes clear in light of these activities, and second, there is some intriguing shared ground.


⤓ Click here to download the PDF of this item