CLiC

Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique

2010

 

Unless indicated otherwise all activities take place in:

Jan van Eyck Academie

Academieplein 1

6211 KM Maastricht

The Netherlands

http://www.janvaneyck.nl/

 

Wednesday 30 June

An impossible encounter: Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan

In collaboration with After 1968, Versus Laboratory, and the Hegel Seminar

Beyond Deleuze and Guattari's polemics against psychoanalysis and their generalized anti-Hegelianism, the workshop controverts concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in order to reexamine the political and philosophical problematics they confronted and to test the limits of these concepts at different stages of their thought, among others: univocity of being, sense, event, desiring machine, plane of immanence, virtuality, transcendental empiricism.

The workshop will be continued in December with papers by Giuseppe Bianco, Katja Diefenbach, Mladen Dolar, Dominiek Hoens, Tzuchien Tho.

13:00
Aaron Schuster
The philosophy of schizophrenia: Deleuze contra Lacan?
14:00
Samo Tomsic
Lacan's Anti-Oedipus vs. Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus
15:00
Break
15:30
Ana Zerjav
Oedipus and the paternal metaphor in Lacan
16:30
Vanessa Brito
Deleuze and the literature: the nothingness of the will
17:30
Oxana Timofeeva, Pietro Bianchi
Ambiguity of language and desire between Bataille and Lacan.
18:30
Anne van Leeuwen

19:30 General discussion, final comments

21:00 Dinner

 

Saturday 29 May

`

Being—Time—Bios
Lecture by A. Kiarina Kordela

Beginning with an ontological theory, we shall first focus on the exigency posed by Spinoza’s monistic account of substance and Marx’s analysis of the commodity and commodity fetishism for a radical reconceptualization of Being in secular capitalist modernity. This ontology soon turns out to be necessarily also a theory of time—a category which through Marx is revealed to be (not unlike Lacan’s real) a priori only insofar as it is the a posteriori effect of social reality. Along with the secular (ontological) shift from “spirit” to “value” comes the secularization of eternity, already indicated in Spinoza’s concept of sub specie aeternitatis. Next to finite linear time, eternity marks henceforth equally the sphere of economic exchange and the domain of semantic exchange (i.e., the signifier and, via Lacan, the human subject), opening up as much an ethical dimension as possibilities for biopolitical control. To approach this biopolitical exploitation of eternity, however, a theory of the body and bios (life) beyond extant theories of biopolitics is required. This we shall pursue through Marx’s conception of (and Paolo Virno’s commentary on) labor-power, and Sartre’s and Lacan’s accounts of the body and the gaze.

 

A. Kiarina Kordela teaches at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, and is the author of $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), as well as several articles on subjects ranging from German literature and literary theory, to philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, sexual difference, film, cultural studies, analysis of ideology, political theory, and biopolitics, published in collections and journals such as Spinoza Now (U of Minnesota), European Film Theory (Routledge), The Dreams of Interpretation (U of Minnesota), Modern Language Studies, Angelaki, Cultural Critique, Parallax, Rethinking Marxism, Political Theory, Radical Musicology, Monokl (in Turkish translation), and Hihuo kukan [Critical Space] (in Japanese translation).

11am-1pm

room 204

Wednesday 26 May

Derrida on animality: transcendental and genetic thought, philosophy and psychoanalysis
Lecture by Michael Lewis

I shall try, in as brief a way as possible, to situate Derrida’s understanding of the wolf man and the ‘werewolf’ (in the preface to Torok and Abraham’s Cryptonomies: The Wolfman’s Magic Word) in the context and problematics of his writings on ‘animality’ in general: in particular, The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997), and the first of his published seminars, The Beast and the Sovereign (2001–2).
I hope to be able to gesture briefly towards the way in which Lacan’s understanding of animality — and the relation between the animal and the human — may help us to differentiate psychoanalytic thought from transcendental philosophy.
A hypothesis developed in my earlier work proposed that we understand Derrida’s thought as a hyperbolic instance of transcendental thought. Here I shall test this hypothesis more thoroughly, particularly in light of Derrida’s most recent considerations of the animal, for at this point, the differences between Derrida and Lacan become most difficult to discern, and Derrida incorporates into his thought a number of surprising elements which one might more readily associate with a ‘genetic’ or ‘developmental’ theory of man, of the kind that is — perhaps — provided by Lacan (these elements include an invocation of the insights of certain natural sciences, the ‘hominisation process’ studied by paleo-anthropology, and so on). For this reason, among others, no doubt, it is crucial to consider Derrida and Lacan’s respective approaches to the question of ‘the animal’, in order ultimately to understand the relation between psychoanalytic theory and philosophy.

Dr. Michael Lewis is affiliated to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sussex (UK) and published a.o. Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)

5-7 pm

room 204

Wednesday 7 April

Verneinung, Verwerfung, Verleugnung

Seminar organized by Nathaniel Boyd, Dominiek Hoens and Eli Noé

This month's seminar will focus on three Freudian concepts and their dynamic interrelation to each other, to analytic theory in general and to our continued reading of the Wolf Man case in particular. The psychoanalytic concepts Verneinung, Verleugnung and Verwerfung have been variably translated as ‘negation', ‘disavowal' (denial), and ‘foreclosure' (repudiation). While negation has been clearly defined in relation to the process of analysis as a ‘way of taking cognizance of the repressed' insofar as the repressed – in terms of its ideational content – now reaches consciousness, it is also defined (more affirmatively) as that which enables ‘thinking [to] free itself from the restrictions of repression' (SE., XIX, 235-6). By contrast, the concepts of disavowal and foreclosure are less clearly defined in the Freudian corpus and, more often than not, conflated with each other. Rather than relating to the processes of analysis in general, they have been casually thematized as more or less specific mechanisms of pathogenesis (Verwerfung in the case of psychosis; Verleugnung in the case of perversion). Our goal this month will be to clarify these latter concepts in relation to the process of analysis alongside a detailed reading of the concept of negation; and to develop all three of them as specific tools with which we may be able to more thoroughly open up the dynamic case history of the Wolf Man.

5-7 pm

Auditorium

 

Sunday 7 March

 

REGISTRATION REQUIRED at coordinator.events@janvaneyck.nl

Lecture by Slavoj Žižek

Is it Possible to be a Hegelian Today ?

4 pm

Auditorium

 

Saturday 6 March

 

Lecture by Geneviève Morel on the different conceptions of psychosis in Lacan's work

Introduced by Samo Tomsic

abstract :

In my talk I will outline an assembly of functions of the symptom, notably the separation, based on the last part of Lacan's teaching (Le sinthome, 1975), which I will compare, at this point, with the Lacanian theory of 1958. With the help of clinical examples and the reading of psychoanalytic texts, I will try to discuss the originality of this later teaching (1974-1977) in relation to the paternal metaphor and the Name-of-the-Father as the signifier of the law (1958), and in relation to the doctrine of fundamental phantasy (60's).

Geneviève Morel
is working as a psychoanalyst in Paris and Lille. She studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, did an MA in mathematics and obtained a PhD in clinical psychology and psychopathology. She is director of “Savoirs et clinique” and of “Collège de Psychanalystes d’Aleph”. She published Ambiguïtés sexuelles. Sexuation et psychose (Editions Anthropos-Economica, 2000, reedited in 2004); edited Clinique du suicide (Erès, 2002). Her two most recent books are L’œuvre de Freud, L’invention de la psychanalyse. Exploration et anthologie ( 2006); and recently La loi de la mère. Essai sur le sinthome sexuel (Anthropos, 2008).

Auditorium

3-5 pm

 

Wednesday 3 February

 

Discussion of From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The Wolf Man) (Freud, 1918 (1914))

Seminar organized by Pietro Bianchi, Dominiek Hoens, Samo Tomsic and Ana Zerjav

Auditorium

5-7 pm