- This event has passed.
On Violence: Civilization and its Blisscontents
May 1, 2015 - May 3, 2015
$200
On Violence: Civilization and its Blisscontents
Violence today seems not to address only our physical bodies and sense of safety: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, ISIS, but also our positions as subjects: the medicalized body, the surgically aesthetically improved body, civic subjectivity reduced to consumption, mental health reduced to pharmacology. Timothy McVeigh said, “the government is increasingly hostile,” and blowing up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was what he called “the just response.”
This conference asks questions about violence and its relationship to the Other. Freud famously showed how civilization brought discontent, a necessary consequence of repression. Today, with the command to enjoy as part of the social symbolic entreaty, perhaps we can say that we live in the age of blisscontent, a suffering from enjoyment and the command to enjoy particular to our moment.
How is violence tied to forms of cultural consumption and civic participation in an era where “enjoy” is a demand? How are new clinical symptoms part of the discontents of this social inscription? How has mental health “treatment” become the handmaiden of this system? Does psychoanalysis avoid this problem? How does the violence of surveillance, organizational management, evaluation, testing and even clinical “diagnosis” become manifest when the voice of the other — ethnic, neighbor, monster, foreigner, enemy, or 99% — or the 1% for that matter – is finally allowed to speak? How has global culture eviscerated the differences between bodies and information as we are increasingly induced to treat our neighbor as virtual matter?
Consider the convergence or complex relations between symbolic law and violent outbursts? When does symbolic law inspire “revolutionary” violence or awaken real and productive hopes and change in a people (The French Revolution, Hitler’s rise to power, The Arab Spring)? And how may we conceptualize all of the above in light of the various theories of the death drive?
Click here to view conference website
Sponsoring Organizations:
Das Ding, Philadelphia Lacan Study Group, California Psychoanalytic Circle, Das Unbehagen
Schedule:
Friday 05/01/15 – 2:00-7:45pm
2-2:25 Registration
2:25-2:30 Welcome – Manya Steinkoler & Vanessa Sinclair
2:30-4:20 “Philia Fiesta: Necro, Somno, Porno, Scopto”
(30 mins each + 20 mins response/discussion)
Danielle Knafo, “For the Love of Death: Somnophilic and Necrophilic Acts and Fantasies”
Ray O’Neill, “Fifty Shades of a: A Terrible Beauty is Porn”
Liz Monahan, “Violence and the Surrealist Unconscious”
Julie Futrell, chair/respondent
4:20-4:30 break
4:30-6:20 “The Violence of the Mental Health System”
(30mins each + 20 mins response/discussion)
Todd Dean, “How to Measure What: Universals, Particulars and Subjectivity”
Vanessa Sinclair, “Problems in American Mental Health/ Psychoanalytic Institutions”
Patricia Gherovici, “Terror and the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis in Argentina 1976-1983″
David Lichtenstein, chair/respondent
6:20-6:30 coffee break
6:30-7:45 (45 mins + 30 mins response/discussion)
Renata Salecl, Keynote
Genevieve Morel, chair/respondent
Saturday 05/02/15 – 9am-7:10pm
8:30-9:00 breakfast
9:00-10:30 “Violence in Psychoanalytic Theory”
(20 mins each + 30 min response/discussion)
Loren Dent, “Tragic Recognition”
Matthew Oyer, “Wounded Dramatization: Bataille, Hysteria, Psychoanalysis”
Alireza Taheri, “Violence as the Psychical Subreption of the Murder of the Primal Father”
Nuar Alsadir, chair/respondent
“Unbearable Structural Violence: Language, Privilege and Normalization”
(20 mins each + 30 min response/discussion)
Luce deLire, “Privilege as Counterfactual Violence”
Geoffroy Carpier, “Medicine, the State and Normative Violence: Laienanalysis’
Evan Malater & Michelle Alexander, “The Unbearable: Benjamin, Kafka, Freud”
Cecile Gouffrant McKenna, chair/respondent
10:30-10:40 coffee break
10:40-12:00 (45 mins + 25 min response/discussion)
Gerard Pommier, “Orgasm as the Metamorphic Point of the Death Drive”
Michael Garfinkle, chair/respondent
12:00-1:45 lunch
1:45-3:00 “National Systemic Violence”
(25 mins each + 25 mins discussion)
Tanya White-Davis & Anu Kotay, “Racial Opression and Health: A Biopsychosocial View”
Steven Reisner, “The APA & Guantanamo”
Will Braun, chair/respondent
“Violent Silence vs Violent Speech”
(25 mins each + 25 mins discussion)
Jill Gentile, “Freedom for the thought that we hate: Psychoanalytic considerations”
Scott Von, “Violent Silence: Psychoanalysis and the Sacred”
Martin Stone, chair/respondent
3:00-3:15 coffee break
3:15-5:00 “Modern Literary Encounters with the Blind Site”
(30mins each + 20mins response/discussion)
Jessica Datema, “Blind-Sightings of Black Swan: Glimpses in Mann, Kleist and Aronofsky”
Franz Kaltenbeck, “David Foster Wallace (DFW) on Violence”
Olga Cox Cameron, “A Terrible Beauty is Born: Colonial Counterviolence and its Fall-out in the Texture of Irish Childhood”
Jean-Michel Rabate, chair/respondent
5-5:10 short break
5:10-7:00 “Thinking Violence Today”
(30mins each + 20mins response/discussion)
Struggle in France from the 1950’s to the late 1980’s”
Paola Mieli, “On Hate”
Genevieve Morel, “Inclination Towards Terror”
Todd McGowan, “The Violent Failure of Enjoyment”
Patricia Gherovici, chair/respondent
8pm dinner
Sunday 05/03/15 9am-4:45pm
8:30 breakfast
9-10:30 Undergraduate Student Panel: “Violence and …”
(15 minutes each + 30 response/discussion)
Jane Blumenshine, “The Violence of Destiny and the Destiny of Violence: Calderon de la Barca and Maurice Blanchot”
Gabriel Saint Emeterio, “Hitchcock’s Psycho and Psychotic Violence: Is it Violence?”
Arion Toles, “Masculinity and Music and Violence”
Vallory Grant, “Sex and Kill = Skill”
Claire-Madeline Culkin, chair/respondent
10:30-10:40 coffee break
10:40-12:00 “Jack Gets a Bright Idea: The Solution of School Shooting and Understanding Psychotic Violence”
(25 mins each + 30 mins response/discussion)
Manya Steinkoler, “School Shooting: The Case of Adam Lanza”
Eve Watson, “‘Shining’ a Light on Psychosis and Triggers to its Violent Expression”
Todd Dean, chair/respondent
12:00-2:00 lunch
2:00-3:20 “Having it both ways: The Pleasures of Violence and Non-Violence”
(25 mins each + 30 mins response/discussion)
David Lichtenstein, “The Pleasures of Violence”
Donald Moss, “The Pleasures of Non-Violence”
Dany Nobus, chair/respondent
3:20-3:30 coffee break
3:30-4:45 – (45 mins + 30 mins response/discussion)
Dany Nobus, “Too Much Fun Will Kill You”
Jamieson Webster, respondent