Create! Strategies of Survival

This article deals with creative strategies and the subject of creation. The concept of creation refers to the imperative to create, to what we could call a drive to create. This is a subjective commitment of not giving in, at any cost, to melancholic breakdown or physical destruction. The creative impulse is an act involving the subject, an act of choice between life and death, as well as a shield against anxiety. Creation figures in the subject’s sense of time and inscribes him in a temporal dimension, by producing a pattern of signs linked together by imaginary lines. These lines are the subject’s lifelines and tracing them out means being able to exist in time. What is it that impels us to shape things, to produce forms, which are simultaneously our internal points of reference, lines guiding us towards the outside? This work of drawing lines and of lineage is the subject’s way of adjusting the boundary between the inside and the outside, of creating internal points of support through an exploration of matter. In this way, as the author has argued in a previously published text, this surface becomes extra-topical, both psychical and plastic.By examining the autobiography of the painter Gérard Garouste, this article explores the artist’s memories and the way in which a creative act impresses itself as urgency, a life force.