All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 3 months.
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Abstract:
This seminar, which responds to the significance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) for post-Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, will unfold across several stages:
In the first stage, the prelinguistic homophony that Jacques Lacan called lalangue (using Joyce as exemplar) will be compared to and contextualized alongside Freud’s extrapolation of the significance of the Mother’s voice for introducing every subject to coherent speech and meaning.
In the second stage, Frances Restuccia’s Kristevan-Deleuzean response to Freud in Joyce and the Law of the Father (1990) will be considered closely. In Restuccia’s text, the critic identifies Joyce as a masochist who expels his Fathers (both allegorical and biological) from the symbolic order on behalf of the Mother, embedding himself in the Écriture féminine (feminine writing) of written lalangue by manipulating the unique and maternal possibility of the moterial letter (‘moterial’ referring to Lacan’s term for the ‘materiality’ of the ‘word’ [mot]). Here, the letter as material substrate is directly related to what Freud says of the Mother’s voice and to the way that this voice flows across the body of the child and lends phonemic structure to meaningless babble.
In the third stage, Restuccia’s reading of the artist’s use of lalangue as a form of masochism will be extended and critiqued through a close reading of Part I, Section VII of Joyce’s Wake. In this section of Joyce’s infamous book, Joyce’s textual alter ego—the character Shem the Penman—is revealed via a series of racist remarks to be racially Black or African. In reply to the imposition of his Blackness through the violent tropes and slurs that his brother, Shaun, hurls at him herein, Shem defecates into his own hand, using excrement to write a miniscule reconstruction of the Wake across his skin in an act that decidedly exonerates him, per Joyce, of the ‘black animal,’ or of a certain excessive Blackness. Using reference to recent developments in Black radical critique, this final stage questions how Shem’s Black ‘exoneration’ alters Restuccia’s interpretation of Joycean masochism, asking if creative access to the maternal or feminine realm of lalangue cannot not take place but through a caricaturing of Blackness that ultimately absolves the artist of an association with ungendered Black non-being (per Hortense Spillers), or with what DS Marriott, after the anti-colonial analyst Frantz Fanon, calls ‘Blackness n’est pas’ [is not].
In the end, movement through these stages should condition not the abandonment of the radical possibilities of feminine writing, but a deep critical reconsideration of those possibilities if feminine writing can indeed be sighted in historical entanglement with an anti-Black violation.
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Speaker:
Dylan Lackey is an instructor and PhD student in Virginia Commonwealth University’s transdisciplinary Media, Art, and Text program. Their research addresses the space between Lacanian psychoanalysis, Black insurgent philosophy, and contemporary queer and trans art theory. Currently, Dylan is working on a manuscript considering the post-War German artist Anselm Kiefer’s 2023 visual adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the effects of encountering this exhibition alongside new readings of Jacques Lacan’s 23rd Seminar.
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Tickets:
Suggested donation £10-£15.
Minimum donation £1.
The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.
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The Freudian Research Seminar Series
The Freudian Research Seminar Series (FRSS) will convene virtually once every month and seeks to establish a forum which both cultivates and circulates new psychoanalytically informed research. We welcome both PhD students and Researchers across disciplines (inc. psychoanalysis, psychology, literature, art, film, history), to participate and form a community in which new ideas can be openly discussed and developed. To celebrate the Women & Freud exhibition currently on display at the Freud Museum London, this series will feature papers that examine and extend the ideas raised by the exhibition regarding concepts of gender and sexuality.
Each seminar will commence at 6pm (London) and last for an hour and thirty minutes, with thirty-forty minutes for the paper followed by a discussion. The seminar will be in a Zoom webinar format, which means attendees will enter with their cameras and mics turned off to allow a smooth and uninterrupted delivery of the speaker’s paper; however, for the discussion, we welcome and encourage attendee participation and people may request to have the camera and audio turned on.
Seminars will be recorded for those registered to playback for 3 months but please note they will not be later made available on the On Demand service.
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Schedule:
Thursday 20 February – Anil Aykan, Intrapsychic Dynamics in Bertha Pappenheim’s ‘In the Junk Shop’
Thursday 20 March – Harriet Mossop, Slave Play in the Psychoanalytic clinic: a self-theorisation of overwhelming experiences of queer, inter-racial erotic transference
Thursday 24 April – Sophia Rohwetter, The Sphinx as Figure
Thursday 22 May – Dylan Lackey, Joyce’s Lalangue: On Masochism, Anti-Blackness, and Écriture féminine
Thursday 19 June – Faye Mather, A Return to the Mother, an exploration of the transition from Freudian fathers to Kleinian mothers in psychoanalysis
Thursday 24 July – Anushka Jasraj, Send this to someone: The psychoanalytic function of Instagram reels in female friendships
