Greek Tragedy and the Freudian Death Drive: Spectral Presences

Broadcast 1 March, 2023. Duration: 1 hour 32 minutes

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What was the impact of Greek tragedy on Freud’s development of psychoanalytic theory? How did the discovery of the ‘death drive’ help to reformulate Freud’s conception of the human psyche and propel the advances in critical theory in the 20th and 21st centuries? How can a reading of classical texts through a Freudian lens help to enrich contemporary social and political debate?

In this special event, held to mark the opening of the Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire exhibition, Professor Paul Allen Miller (University of South Carolina) and Professor Mario Telò (University of California, Berkeley), will discuss how the concept of the death drive, which Freud first theorised in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), can be deployed to open up exciting new perspectives on the classic texts of Greek tragedy.

In the context of Telò’s radical new anti-cathartic reading of Greek tragedy, as expounded in his recent book Archive Feelings, the speakers will also examine the crucial role of the death drive in the development of post-Freudian thought, drawing on works such as Derrida’s Archive Fever, which was initially delivered as a lecture at the Freud Museum London. From there we will branch out to explore the death drive’s various manifestations in contemporary society and politics and so emphasise the enduring relevance of the Greek tragic corpus.

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Speakers:

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, and Distinguished Guest Professor in English, Ewha Woman’s University. He has held visiting appointments in Bochum, Paris, and Beijing. He has published ten books, fifteen edited volumes, and 93 articles; his latest book is Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth.

Mario Telò is Professor of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, UC Berkeley. He is the author of Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (2016), Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (2020), Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis (2023), and Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading Through Pandemic Times (2023).