April 2016
A/cephalic Discontents: Session I
a/cephalic discontents is a series of discursive experiments reflecting on community and group structures, leading up to a conference in March 2017. Each discussion is based on a text or a handful of texts that all participants are asked to read. Each session is also co-curated by a different Philadelphia or NYC group who will open, frame and inflect the session in a creative manner particular to their concerns and engagements. Everyone is welcome to participate in one, some,…
Find out more »March 2016
Guilherme Massara Rocha: The Secret of Her Eyes – Necessity and Contingency in a Fragment of a Psychoanalytical Treatment
Guilherme Massara Rocha will present a fragment from a single case study from a Lacanian perspective on his work with a patient facing congenital blindness. When we lose the eye as the phallus that guarantees the consistency of the visual, the blindness that ensues is not simply a non-signifying darkness, but rather an 'undifferentiated palate of images.' The event of an ocular castration gives way to a seething imaginary without the security of a local iconography, and in the desperate…
Find out more »February 2016
Freud as a Thinker of the Social Body: Fear and Distress as Political Affects – A Conversation between Vladimir Safatle and Marcus Coelen
Lacan famously said that affects lie, and the only affect that doesn't lie is anxiety. The question of affect is of course a dense topic in Freud, not quite emotion, not quite drive, perhaps something repressed, perhaps some kind of oozing of the repressed, all of which seems to make and break social bonds. What is the relationship between affect and language? What is the difference between affect, psychoanalytically speaking, and the more conventional 'feeling'? While it is true that…
Find out more »INSTITUTE NO INSTITUTE: What Makes a Psychoanalyst?
Becoming a psychoanalyst is founded upon a subjective transformation that occurs in a personal analysis. It cannot be measured or predicted, yet it is the necessary factor that allows one to conduct analytic treatment. Neither the analyst alone nor a group of independent observers can determine its occurrence, but somehow together they may. That something so difficult to determine lies at the heart of professional transmission has troubled the field of psychoanalysis from its inception. Institutes, schools, and broader communities…
Find out more »December 2015
New Das Unbehagen Website
We are excited to announce the new Das Unbehagen website. As a headless web-master-less organization we hope this becomes a tool for our growing community to share ideas, events and resources. We hope you submit posts and events through the site and send images to our dasunbehagen instagram.
Find out more »A Panel for the Launch of George Makari’s “Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind”
The New School Ferenczi Center hosts George Makari in conversation with Das Unbehagen on the topic of his new book Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind Following a brief introduction, Dr. Makari will engage Das Unbehagen interlocutors: Drs. Victoria Malkin, Orna Ophir, and Will Braun in a lively conversation moderated by Jeremy Safran and Jill Gentile *Come early to join us for wine and Cheese at 7:30. More informaiton and RSVP Makari Event
Find out more »DOUBLE ENTENDRE: Katy Bohinc, Rachel M. Wilson, and Jamieson Webster respond to Alain Badiou
Performances & discussion of Bohinc’s “psycho-sexual thriller” Dear Alain, Webster’s The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnarc Books, 2011), which addresses Badiou’s theory of love and asks how it may be conceived from the psychoanalyst’s discourse; and Wilson’s “Fifteen Theses,” on her artist’s book created from Badiou’s Being and Event to investigate the rhythms of reading, pleasure in distraction, and the book as a "cover." Badiou will attend performatively, as an audience member.
Find out more »PANEL: The Candidate’s Voice
Panelists will include: Emma Lieber PhD, Orshi Hunyady PhD, Donald Moss MD, Orna Ophir PhD, Pascal Sauvayre PhD, and Aleksandra Wagner PhD. Introduced/Moderated by Manya Steinkoler PhD To inaugurate the journal’s sixth Issue on Belonging available at http://thecandidatejournal.org/issues/6/ The Candidate Journal and Das Unbehagen are hosting a panel and discussion on what it means to speak or write from the position of a candidate. What is assumed in the candidate’s voice, what perspective is that voice meant to take? If…
Find out more »November 2015
NEAL GOLDBERG: What is Unsaid – Psychoanalysis and the Contemporary Theater
What can we learn from the relationship between speech and desire in the modern or contemporary theater? This is a question that analysts rarely ask, yet is of great importance to our work. For Lacan, the idea that psychoanalysis has something to learn from the theater – rather than the other way around – was, of course, critical to his view of speech and desire. Iconic characters like Hamlet or Antigone, in particular, were central to this effort, and contributed…
Find out more »October 2015
A Panel for the Launch of Barry Yourgrau’s “Mess” with Nuar Alsadir and Jamieson Webster
Please join us to celebrate the publication of Barry Yourgrau’s Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act (W.W. Norton, 2015) with a panel discussion featuring the author and psychoanalysts Nuar Alsadir and Jamieson Webster. Things collected, perfectly packed away, overly organized, preserved in plastic, but also broken, stuffed into drawers, or accumulated into a confusion of piles that betray the objects’ proximity to detritus—what better spectacle of the object is there than in the many varieties…
Find out more »Dany Nobus: Writing as an Instrument of Torture – An Exploration of Kant’s Practical Reason via Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’
Of the twenty-eight substantial papers and six shorter contributions that make up Lacan’sÉcrits, ‘Kant with Sade’ is generally regarded as one of the toughest nuts to crack, and this opinion is shared by some of the most eminent and knowledgeable commentators on Lacan’s work. In this seminar, I will unpack one of the crucial lines of Lacan’s argument in ‘Kant with Sade’, notably that the contents of Sade’s libertine novels, which he also designated as “the Sadean fantasy”, i.e. the…
Find out more »JOSH COHEN: Psychoanalysis, Art and the Logic of Indifference
Wednesday, October 14th, 2015 / 8-10 p.m. The New School, 63 5th Avenue, Room 200 Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of numerous articles and four books on psychoanalysis, modern literature and cultural theory, most recently How to Read Freud and The Private Life:Why We Remain in the Dark. Psychoanalysis, Art and the Logic of Indifference Beginning from Freud's invocation of the 'Nirvana…
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