Vita

Claire Nioche is a practicing psychoanalyst. She studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and at the Université Paris Sorbonne. She obtained her PhD in philosophy and psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VII, on the notion of the singular. She has been a junior lecturer at the Department of Humanities and Clinical Sciences at the Université Paris 7 (Paris) and did a three-year internship in a psychiatric ward.

Her research interests encompass questions of singularity, madness, nomadism, and writing. Among her publications are a series of articles on literature (Maurice Blanchot, Claude Simon), contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis (Deleuze, Derrida, Freud, Lacan).

Wandering: An Ambiguous Lifeline.
Between Inventiveness and Destructivity

ICI Project 2014-16

Wandering, in the experience of madness as well as in creation, can be both alive and destructive, repetitive and inventive. The project comprises three parts:
1) a philosophical ground, on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notions of “lines of flight” and “nomadology”. Lines of flight do not define a future, but a becoming. Because it escapes all coordinate system, the “line of flight” is creative, but at the same time, it is highly exposed to miscarriage, failure and other forms of self-destruction.

2) a clinical experience: “wander lines”. This second part of the project is very much inspired by a clinical experience in a psychiatric hospital with psychotic patients. In the wake of Fernand Deligny’s experiment with autistic children, we will develop a language to express wandering and any movement without intentionality (“gesture for nothing”, “wander line”, “detour”…)
3) “adventures of lines” in art (drawing and writing): this part of the project will reflect on the non-purposive (and even accidental) part of artistic processes (Paul Klee, Henri Michaux).