This talk revisits Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51 (1952), a film that Gilles Deleuze made famous for its way of "seeing convicts" in a range of social institutions, including the factory, the bourgeois family, and the psychiatric hospital. Recent accounts of Rossellini's career have emphasized his role in manufacturing narratives of postwar national innocence. Though not always psychoanalytically inclined, these critical accounts see Rossellini as avoiding guilt and calling instead for collective self-exoneration. By contrast, I read Europa '51 as offering both a recognition of complicity and a critique of the Italian carceral state, though one that knows itself to be contained, disempowered, and confined. Focusing on the limits of this critique, I bring Rossellini's film into conversation with ongoing debates in the humanities about "reparative reading" and its alternatives. I turn to the work of the literary critic and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in particular, noting that Sedgwick builds on an interpretation of Melanie Klein that some recent readers have challenged. What would it mean to see Europa '51 as both a rejoinder to Sedgwick and a response to Klein? The talk is drawn from my book manuscript in progress, provisionally titled "Free Clinics," which begins with the Italian invention of electroconvulsive therapy in 1938 and centers on the critique of psychiatry that emerges in Italy and Brazil, among other places, in the 1960s and 1970s. In the book's first chapter, I argue that Rossellini's film anticipates this critique while also pointing to the key role that the aesthetic comes to play in mid-century debates about institutionalization and its alternatives. Throughout "Free Clinics," I show how the convergence of aesthetics and clinical work--the coming together of discourses and practices that are now often kept apart--allows for the rearrangement of both realms and the articulation of a forceful critique. This means that clinicians take their cues from artists, but at the same time art begins to aspire to the condition of radical psychiatry or dissident psychoanalysis.
Albany Senior Center
846 Masonic Avenue
Saturday, December 2, 2023
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Penelope Garvey
Zoom
(link forthcoming), Berkeley, CA
Saturday, February 3, 2024
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
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Domenico Cosenza, Ph.D.
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Steve Goldberg, Dr.,
Lee Rather, Ph.D.,
""What Should I Call You? Pronouns and the Scene of Address""
Judith Butler, Ph.D.
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Israel Katz, M.D.
"The Structure and Function of Part Objects"
Richard Rusbridger
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Murray Schwartz
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Jake Fraser, Ph.D.
"The Significance of the Anus in Psychoanalytic Theory"
Benjamin Y. Fong, Ph.D.
"Love, Hate and Knowledge: the Analyst’s Aesthetic Conflict"
Meg Harris Williams
"The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice"
Mitchell Wilson, M.D.
"Freud’s Nietzsche: Eternal Return, Symptomatic Acts and the Gay Apophrades"
Dany Nobus
"What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.
"Roads to the Unconscious: Some Parallels and Divergences between Psychoanalysis and the Writing of Poetry"
John Hart,
Helen Schoenhals Hart,
"Trans Realism: Psychoanalysis and the Trans Experience"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.,
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.,
"*POSTPONED* What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.
"*POSTPONED* Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique"
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.
"Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field"
Dianne Elise, Ph.D.
"Mama, Mnemo - Reading Kristeva with Montale"
Benjamin Davidson, Ph.D.
"The Maternal: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film"
Claire Kahane, Ph.D.,
Marilyn Fabe, Ph.D.,
"Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning and Mania"
Elizabeth Abel, Ph.D.
"From Freud's Mourning to Mourning Freud"
Madelon Sprengnether, Ph.D.
"Group Discussion: The Place of the Nonrepresentational and the Nonverbal in Psychoanalysis"
Margot Beattie, Ph.D.,
Israel Katz, MD,
"Freud's Seduction: Psychoanalysis and California"
Fernando Castrillon, Psy.D.
"Trans Psychoanalysis and Livable Embodiments"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.
"The Political Unconscious in Perilous Times"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.,
Lance Dodes, M.D.,
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.
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Steven H. Golderg, MD,
Jeanne C. Harasemovitch, LCSW,
"Incandescent Alphabets: Language and Art in Psychosis"
Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D.
"Homeland (In)Security: How Feminine Law Might Rescue Democracy, Truth and Free Speech"
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.
"Enigmatic Mechanisms: Some Reflections on Love, Affect, and Identification in Freud"
Marcus Coelen, Ph.D
"Refashioning Jouissance/Enjoyment for the Age of the Imaginary"
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Ph.D.
"Freud and the Frankfurt School"
Martin E. Jay, Ph.D.
"Thinking About The Future"
Christopher Bollas, Ph.D.
"Death Drive Dialogue #2"
Henry Markman, MD,
Israel Katz, MD,
"Psychoanalytic Knowledge"
Peter Hobson, Ph.D.
"The Alterability of the Memory Trace"
Rosaura Martinez, Ph.D.
"Conversion Disorder: Freud, religious transformation, Foucault and Agamben"
Jamieson Webster, Ph.D.
"Surviving Terror: An Interview with Ernst Federn"
Helen Schoenhals Hart, Dr.med.
"Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe: Women in Depressed Times"
Jacqueline Rose
"Keeping the Other Alive: Counter-trends to the Death Drive"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.
"Cultivating the Foreigner Within: Julia Kristeva and Hannah Arendt on Uncanny Art and Human Relations in the Contemporary World"
Elaine Miller, Ph.D.
"Enduring Inequality: Racism in America"
Jeffrey Prager, Ph.D.
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