Anke Hennig: SPECULATIVE REALISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Anke Hennig teaches at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and is a Research Fellow in the Collaborative Research Centre 626 ‘Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits’. Her recent publications have addressed cinematic fiction, the present-tense novel, and speculative poetics. She is the author of Sowjetische Kinodramaturgie (Soviet Cinematic Dramaturgy, 2010) and, in cooperation with Armen Avanessian, co-author of Präsens. Poetik eines Tempus (Present Tense. A Poetics, 2012) and Metanoia. Spekulative Ontologie der Sprache (Metanoia. Speculative Ontology of Language, 2014).

Paper Abstract: In my talk I would like to address a possible connection between Speculative Philosophy and Lacanian Psychoanalysis as concerns their concepts of knowledge. Both of them share a scenario that doubts our unterstanding of the world, which takes place by correlating a subject to an object. While Speculative Philosophy criticizes as “correlationism” the notion that our access to the world never goes beyond the conditions of the subject, I thought it useful to bring this criticism together with the Lacanian concept of knowledge, where the relation between subject and object is surmounted by the Other. I would like to continue with the idea that a process of Othering can be productively used to describe changes of the self, such as in the analytical process; fundamental shifts of worldview, such as Metanoia (conversion); or even to reach a material reality beyond objectivism, one that is in accordance with contemporary natural science.