CartTimely Thoughts on War & Death Instructor: Franziska Aigner - Austin GrossProgram: History, Design & Worldmaking, Critical Philosophy, Trandisciplinary StudiesCredit(s): 1Date: February 9th, 16th, 23rd, March 2ndTime: 14:00-16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: In our past Seminar, “Lethe: Forgetfulness and Concealment,” we re-read Freud’s report on a summer trip through the Balkans. As Freud untangled his forgetting of the name Signorelli, painter of frescoes of the Last Judgment, the Great War, then over a decade away, cast a shadow après-coup over his associations. This Season, we will take the same approach in order to re-read—comb, map, interrogate—three other moments in Freud’s œuvre that are shadowed by catastrophe. The rise of Nazism, which these works anticipated in 1915, 1921 and 1930 respectively, casts its shadows on them; as it does on our times. As we read, we will attempt to trace these shadows of war and death together, collectively.
Session 1: General Introduction to the works we will be reading and the themes of the Seminar.
Session 2: Discussion of a group of short pieces written in 1915, amidst the Great War.
Readings: Freud, Timely Thoughts on War and Death; Freud, The Perishable; Freud, Mourning and Melancholia.
Session 3: Discussion of Freud’s 1921 reflections on war trauma, with which he introduces the death drive. This theory of authoritarianism and (perhaps less obviously) its diagrams of modes of identification have never lost their pertinence.
Readings: Freud, Crowd Psychology and Ego-Analysis.
Session 4: Discussion of Freud’s Malaise in Culture (i.e. Civilization and its Discontents), a work written in 1930 and accused of pessimism and conservatism, yet still cruelly, inexorably relevant.
Readings: Freud, Malaise in Culture.
IMAGE: Käthe Kollwitz Two Dead, 1920.
To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.