"To Be Continued? ... Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Today

To Be Continued…? Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Today

Participants: Aleš Bunta, Lorenzo Chiesa, Moritz Hermann, Adrian Johnston, Peter Klepec, Paris Lavidis, Vesna Liponik, Emily Monaghan, Boštjan Nedoh, Holden Rasmussen, Arsalan Reihanzadeh, Jelica Šumič Riha, Tadej Troha, Alenka Zupančič, Marisa Žele

The relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis has always had a decidedly ambivalent character. Freud, who initially wanted to become a philosopher, rejected philosophy as yet another manifestation of a totalising Weltanschauung – but at the same time, he never completely abandoned his philosophical aspirations. Lacan, who initially dismissed philosophy as “always theological”, repeatedly drew inspiration from philosophical figures in the development of psychoanalytic thought – and eventually referred to his own project as “philosophy.” Badiou, who described psychoanalysis as antiphilosophy, considered working through psychoanalysis to be a prerequisite for modern philosophy – and came to recognise its Lacanian variant as “philosophy homogeneous to mine.” Psychoanalysis that tried to isolate itself from philosophy has become its hybrid, and philosophy that wilfully ignored psychoanalysis does, after all, know something about psychoanalysis – it just doesn’t know that it knows.

Is the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis still productive today? Have we already said everything about the interface between philosophy and psychoanalysis? Is it time for the two paths to diverge – or are we not quite at the end yet?

PROGRAMME:

Day 1, November 15 (Institute of Philosophy, Meeting Room)

10:00 Lorenzo Chiesa (Newcastle University) & Tadej Troha (ZRC SAZU): Introduction

Section 1 (chair: Tadej Troha, ZRC SAZU)

10:30 Holden Rasmussen (Newcastle University, PhD student): “As you know...a good many other zones are concerned”: The Synchronic Genesis of Fantasy, Sexuality, and Subjectivity 

11:30 Emily Monaghan (Newcastle University, PhD student): Phylogenesis Lost? On Sexuation and Species

12:30 Moritz Herrmann (Newcastle University, PhD student): The Concave Mirror Experiment. Lacan’s First Revision of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetics

Section 2 (chair: Lorenzo Chiesa, Newcastle University)

15:00 Paris Lavidis (University of Ljubljana, PhD student): La formalisation vraie, et la fausse: From Freud's Matheme to Lacan's Mytheme

16:00 Vesna Liponik (ZRC SAZU): The Uncanny Animal

17:00 Arsalan Reihanzadeh (ZRC SAZU): One Unites into Two: On the Neo-Platonic God

Day 2, November 16 (venue: Atrium ZRC SAZU)

Section 3 (Chair: Adam Potts, Newcastle University)

11:00 Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico): ‘A Mass of Fools and Knaves’: Psychoanalysis and the World’s Many Asininities

12:15 Jelica Šumič Riha (ZRC SAZU): Psychoanalysis in the Times of the “ineluctable modality of the visible”

Section 4 (Chair: Lorenzo Chiesa, Newcastle University)

15:00 Tadej Troha (ZRC SAZU): The Case of Metapsychology

16:15 Boštjan Nedoh (ZRC SAZU): Anxiety and Ontology: Toward the Lacanian Materialist Metapsychology of the Affect

Day 3, November 17 (venue: Atrium ZRC SAZU):

Section 5 (chair: Adam Potts, Newcastle University)

10:00 Marisa Žele (ZRC SAZU): The Primal Meal: Transubstantiation and Medieval Monstrosity

11:15 Aleš Bunta (ZRC SAZU): The Unconscious and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

12:30 Peter Klepec (ZRC SAZU): Psychoanalysis is not Failosophy

Section 6 (chair: Tadej Troha, ZRC SAZU)

15:00 Alenka Zupančič (ZRC SAZU): Lacan as Speculative Thinker?

16:15 Lorenzo Chiesa (Newcastle University): Badiou/Lacan-Badiou. Beyond Anti-Philosophy

17:30 roundtable final discussion

The conference is sponsored by the Slovenian Research Agency under the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy”, the research project J6-2589 “The Structure and Genealogy of Perversion in Contemporary Philosophy, Politics, and Art”, the research project J6-3139 “Reconfiguring Borders in Philosophy, Politics, and Psychoanalysis”, the research project “Conceptualizing the End: its Temporality, Dialectics, and Affective Dimension”, and the research project N6-0286 “Reality, Illusion, Fiction, Truth: A Preliminary Study.”