Lecture in English

Sigmund Freud Museum, May 27,  7 p.m. 

Registration: office@freud-museum.at, 01-319 15 96-11

Philosophy and the Clinic of the Death Drive

Because of its speculative method, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is known as Freud’s most overtly philosophical work. The psychoanalyst’s reflections on life and death situate his work within the tradition of Empedocles, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. However, an attentive reading of the text shows that Freud’s intention was not philosophical at all. The goal of his wandering meditations was not to establish a method to judge the legitimacy of human knowledge, but rather to assert that psychoanalysis can and must begin in the clinic. The death drive—which, for Freud, is exemplary of the drive in general—names the point where both analysand and analyst encounter something that remains radically unrepresentable; something that the analysand is incapable of articulating either to him- or herself or to others. And it is precisely at such a point that psychoanalysis discovers its object and most far-reaching vocation. In this sense, psychoanalysis is inherently anti-philosophical. Nonetheless, many philosophers have taken an interest in Freud’s theory precisely because of its rejection of the philosophical standpoint. Most of them simply reclaim Freud for philosophy by upholding his rejection of philosophy as the consummate philosophical act. In this respect, the work of Jacques Derrida is an exception. Rather than merely appropriating psychoanalytic concepts for philosophy, he considers that psychoanalysis is unintelligible—if not historically meaningless—if it is extracted from the limits that it sets upon itself. This lecture presents the way in which Derrida’s reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle seeks to respect these limits to examine the consequences of this respect within Derrida’s approach to the politics of destruction.

Steven Miller is the 2010 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis and teaches at the University of Vienna. He is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at State University of New York, Buffalo.

International Conference

From 25 to 27 March 2010 the Sigmund Freud Museum is hosting an interdisciplinary conference bringing together psychoanalysis and cultural studies in focusing on the transformation of contemporary family constellations.

The opening lecture will be held by the anthropologist John Borneman of Princeton University.

At the center of the three-day conference are the upheavals occurring in systems of familial relationship at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The transformation of the genealogical order and its psychical bonding force, which was a key stabilizing factor in modern social organization, can be seen in the growing equality of the sexes, the separation of sexuality and reproduction, the recognition of non-reproductive sexual orientations, the implementation of post-sexual reproductive technologies, and in the diversity of new ways of life. According to Freud, that order’s foundation was the incest taboo as the law of the father, whose internalization was central to heterosexual identity and to the patrilineal succession of generations. The disintegration of prohibiting authorities and the changing psychodynamics of the relationship between parents and offspring, adults and children, has led to a new definition of the difference between the generations, whereby roles, identifications and the borders of intimacy have been subjected to new evaluations.

The conference will illuminate this transformation from anthropological, ethnological, medical, sociological, psychoanalytic, religious and cultural perspectives, tracing theoretical displacements that have as yet received little attention and discussing its emancipatory side. Familial and social upheavals are also the theme of a film screening and reading that will end the conference.

Conception: Irene Berkel, scholar of religious and cultural studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna 

The keynote lecture on 25 March will be held by John Borneman, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Participants

John W. Borneman, Princeton University

Karola Brede, Goethe-University Frankfurt

Wilhelm Brüggen, Berlin Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

Johannes Huber, University of Vienna

Michi Knecht, Humboldt-University Berlin

Martin Treml, Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin

Conference Locations

Keynote Lecture on 25 March: Atrium of the Österreichische Beamtenversicherung ÖBV, Grillparzerstrasse 14, 1010 Vienna

Conference sessions on 26 and 27 March: Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, 1090 Vienna

Vortrag von Rubén Gallo (Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis)

in englischer Sprache

2.12.2009, 19 Uhr, Sigmund Freud Museum