'Psychoanalytic Bodies'

A contribution to The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, this chapter explores a number of key texts and writers of late nineteenth century French writing, notably Baudelaire and Huysmans, and their 'neuraesthenic' sensibility through the lense of Freud's conception of the 'acual' neuroses. Invoking Walter Benjamin as well as Freud, the chapter suggests that the unrepresentable 'actuality' of bodily excess is the insistent predicament to which these texts return.