ON DEMAND – Psychoanalysis after Theory: Art, Culture, Criticism

All registrants will receive their access link in their confirmation email after booking.

Length of lecture: 4 hour, 40mins.

For more than half a century, French Theory decisively shaped the reception of psychoanalysis in the arts and humanities. As we leave behind the first decades of the twentieth-first century, this half-day online workshop explores the future of psychoanalytic theory after ‘Theory’. What role can Freud’s understanding of culture play today, at a time when the meaning of theory is shifting and branching out in a number of new directions? What psychoanalytic resources for rethinking art, culture, and criticism remain hidden in plain sight, like the Queen’s missive in Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’? What is the fate of psychoanalytic theory in the wake of the materialist turn, or in the shadow of our current ecological crisis?

Through a series of presentations from leading international scholars, as well as a closing round table discussion, this workshop will broach these and related questions in considering the future of the intertwined legacies of theory and psychoanalysis.

Programme

• 2pm (GMT): Welcome and introduction (Paul Earlie, Bristol))

• 2:15-2:45: Jean-Michel Rabaté (Pennsylvania), ‘The letter or writing? Notes on the Lacan-Derrida debate’

• 2:45-3:15: Dany Nobus (Brunel), ‘Reading Against the Grain (Lacan Libertango)

• 3:15-3:30: Coffee break

• 3:30-4:00: Elissa Marder (Emory), ‘The Shadow of the Eco’

• 4:00-4:30: Nicholas Royle (Sussex), ‘Magical Shrinking’

• 4:30-4:45: Coffee break

• 4:45-5:15: Isabelle Alfandary (Paris III), ‘Freud’s Early Case Studies: the Temptation of the Plot’

• 5:15-6:15: Book Launch / Round Table Discussion

Discussion chair: Elissa Marder (Emory)

Respondents:

• Jean-Michel Rabaté on Paul Earlie’s Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis (2021)

• Axel Nesme on Isabelle Alfandary’s Science et fiction chez Freud (2021)

Panelists: Dany Nobus, Nicholas Royle, Daniel Katz, Paul Earlie, Isabelle Alfandary

This event has been organised and supported by the University of Bristol.