Reading groups

Jamieson Webster's lecture “Breathing and the Unconscious”:

ABSTRACT Derrida famously said that philosophy always unites speech and breath making it pneumatological instead of grammatology — a whole world of privileging spirit over matter, trace, and writing. This question becomes more fascinating when looking at the history of psychoanalysis. Breuer, Fliess, Jung, Rank, Reich, and Ferenczi all touched on a question of breath, a moment that was identified by Freud as heretical, leading him to break violently from each of these figures. The choice was between breathing or Oedipus as the center of psychoanalytic work, between anxiety and symptom formation. What can breathing tell us about the unconscious and the talking cure?

The FILM AND DEATH project is organizing a close reading of the preface and introduction of Thomas Lamarre’s book The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) on “how to read anime.”

If you are interested in joining us, please write back to us before February 16 (lucasferraco@gmail.com).

This reading group is a preparation for the workshop he will give at the Ifilnova on March 9, 2024, titled “Half Life: Radiation and Animation”. 

Slavoj Žižek's essays on Kieślowski, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, and Lynch, among other filmmakers, are the perfect way to begin with Žižek's approach to psychoanalysis, ideology, and cinema. This reading roundtable invites all researchers, professors, students, artists, and psychoanalysts interested in the ‘littoral’ space between psychoanalysis and cinema: working with the unconscious and language's clinic; of the desire to be the Other's desire, of repetitions, of transference and drives. What can we, in our five sessions, elaborate on this strand of land by the sea when reading Lacrimae Rerum together and talking about it? ​We will dive right in Lacan's psychoanalytic 'imaginary', 'symbolic' and 'real' orders in which the death-drive encapsulates all human drives.

Catherine Malabou first arose to prominence in the International philosophical landscape in the 1990s, thanks to her groundbreaking interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s system as one revolving around plasticity, which eventually became the key concept of her own philosophical production. Itself a plastic concept, plasticity (“the nature of that which is ‘plastic’, being at once capable of receiving and of giving form”) strongly informed her eventual encounters with the neurosciences (convincingly showing that Hegel and the neurosciences share a very similar, plasticity-centred notion of human subjectivity) as well as with some of the most pressing issues of our present day: among many others, artificial intelligence, anarchism (advocating a reconnection between “anarchism” and “anarchy”) and feminism (advocating a reconnection between “feminism” and the “woman”; “difference” and “essence”).

Plasticity, however, is threefold. It does not consist merely in the capability of giving form and receiving form, but also in the destruction of form as the non-transcendental condition of possibility of the other two. In order to give and take form, subjectivity needs to “explode” from time to time, and face its own erasure. This is what Malabou calls “destructive plasticity”, a key facet of plasticity corresponding to the paramount role of death in the life processes, not unlike Freud’s “death drive” but beyond Freudian and Oedipal frameworks.