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:
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ painting Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808–1827) marks the beginning of the modern interpretation of Oedipus as philosopher who, by solving the riddle with a single word – the “first word of philosophy” (Lacoue-Labarthe) – secured his tragic fate and cast the Sphinx into the abyss. This seminal image inaugurated a series of artistic interpretations throughout the 19th century and into the present, exploring the intricate relation between knowledge, desire, and sexuality.
This talk turns to psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist readings of the Oedipus myth in modern and contemporary art and film, focusing on selected works from the 1960s to the 1990s, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s feature film Edipo Re (1967), Laura Mulvey’s and Peter Wollen’s feminist experimental film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), and Mike Kelley’s installation Riddle of the Sphinx (1991). By placing the riddle of the Sphinx – what Freud identified as the primal scene of the instinct for knowledge – at the center of their Oedipus adaptations, these artists reformulate the relation between knowledge and desire within the frameworks of capitalist relations of production and feminist critiques of psychoanalysis. If Oedipus is a philosopher, what role does the Sphinx play in these works? As Jean-Joseph Goux argues in Oedipus, Philosopher, the Sphinx – like Echidna, the mother of the monsters – remains “the unthought element” of the Freudian movement, a riddle unresolved by psychoanalysis. What, then, is the place of the Sphinx in art?
Drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay “Oedipus as Figure,” the talk positions the Sphinx in relation to two other figures: Oedipus (as the subject of desire) and the worker (both as the ‘male’ subject of production and the ‘female’ subject of reproduction). How do Pasolini, Mulvey/Wollen, and Kelley configure this triangular constellation – Oedipus, Sphinx, worker – in their work, and thereby define the relations between myth and modernity, desire, knowledge, and production, the instinct for knowledge and the scopic drive, and artistic form and commodity form? Finally, what might these works reveal about the continuing relevance of the Oedipus myth and the role of psychoanalysis in art and art history?
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Speaker:
Sophia Rohwetter is a University Assistant and PhD candidate at the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna. She studied art history and cultural studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg and completed a Master’s in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with a thesis on the tragic and the comic in the work of visual artist Mike Kelley. Her research interests include the history and philosophy of modern and contemporary art, psychoanalysis, Marxist aesthetics, and film theory. She regularly writes for Texte zur Kunst and, in 2024, was awarded the 1st AICA Prize for Young Art Criticism.
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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
