Opus alchymicum : arte como cuidado de si

Abstract

The present work addresses creation based on a relationship established between the artist (understood in this work not as a subject given in advance, but as someone who is changed by its creation) and the material of his work. This relationship between work on oneself and the production of a work as consubstantial and indivisible is the central theme — or the psychological and initiatic drama — of alchemy. The aproach with the text Opus Alchymicum by Giorgio Agamben is central to the proposals that will be developed in this writing, as well as Michel Foucault's lessons compiled in The hermeneutics of the subject and Pierre Hadot's studies on spiritual exercises and ancient philosophy. This is not a defense of the vast alchemical literature as a genre or creative process, but of the understanding that it is, perhaps for the first time, an art that seeks its foundation in a reference — both fictional and real — to an extratextual practice. In this sense, the practitioner of art is not a sovereign subject who owns the creative operation and the work as a property, but an anonymous living person who in his relationship with works (which are works of language), with the vision, the material bodies, seeks to experience itself and maintain a relationship with a potency, that is, to constitute or create his life as a way-of-life (dimension of a choice in which a type of life is so closely linked to its form that it is inseparable from it). As a theoretical-practical dissertation, there is a chapter reserved for the presentation of works in their supports, as well as a detailed deepening of the creative process.