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 is mostly known as the philosopher of plasticity, a concept she drew mainly from her groundbreaking interpretation of Hegel. Not only “the nature of that which is ‘plastic’, being at once capable of receiving and of giving form”, plasticity is also the destruction of form as its non-transcendental condition of possibility. “Destructive plasticity” thus concerns the paramount role of death in life processes: in order to give and take form, subjectivity needs to “explode” from time to time and face its own erasure.

Itself a plastic concept, plasticity strongly informed Malabou’s encounters with some of today’s most pressing issues, like (among others) the neurosciences (whose plasticity-centred notion of subjectivity she showed as strikingly similar to Hegel’s), artificial intelligence, anarchism, feminism.