Book Review

The demand that philosophy be relevant is not new. The book under review, without escaping this outcome, displays constant tension between supporting, on the one hand, a practical agenda with a rich display of deeply philosophic works, and on the other hand demonstrating useful application of those same texts, without compromising their complexity. Despite suggestive links to Nancy, Derrida, and Rancière, not enough attention is paid to the subtlety of deconstruction, and the result is a tenuous mixture of theory oriented toward the fascinating fields of art, psychotherapy, and politics. Collins begins by building her case from Rancière’s notion of ‘partage du sensible’, or, distribution of the sensible, and argues for, not necessarily the curative, but palliative effects of art therapy, stating in effect that ‘artwork makes political sense’ (1). Her book is divided into two parts. In the first, Collins seeks to demonstrate the affectivity of art objects and their utility toward healing individuals in a manner that, in bypassing the clinic, also challenges it. Each mode of the triadic structure of aesthetic experience – that is, artwork as aesthetic object, the spectator and their aesthetic encounter, and the relation conjoining artist and their creative art process – sustains the possibility for stimulating a transformative therapeutic. The hope is to cultivate a sense of, and provide a theoretical basis for an art practice that could exist independent of clinical intervention, without substituting it absolutely. Once having established support for an agency of transformative art practice, Collins in the second part works to expand this concept into a critical method of thinking that could institute socio-political change.