The London Graduate School and the London Society for the New Lacanian School present a Symposium on Quentin Tarantino and psychoanalysis beyond the paternal principle.1-6pm 4th April, Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London
Register here
‘Daddy’s dead. Noooo!’ (Tarantino, From Dusk Till Dawn) Tarantino’s movies frequently turn on the abjection of a paternal figure (Marcellus Wallace, Jacob Fuller, Bill, Stuntman Mike), who loses his place and authority to become a redundant figure of consumption and expenditure. Tarantino’s movies themselves, in their restless play of reflexive images and references, are always seeking to produce the maximum in cinematic affect irrespective of the aesthetic unities of generic form, symbolic consistency, realism. This symposium explores the suggestion that Tarantino’s movies best symptomatise a tendency in Hollywood generally where cinema is no longer a vehicle of (anti)Oedipal desire, but a febrile, speculative generator of thrills, pleasures and anxieties swarming along an accelerating death drive which is itself death proof. In Tarantino’s film of the same name, for example, the impotence of itinerant ex-stuntman Mike is the condition of a romance between two iconic automobiles, vehicles not of male potency but an altogether Other jouissance.
INTRODUCTION,
Véronique Voruz, the London Society of the New Lacanian School
TOUGH LOVE,
Marie-Hélène Brousse, practising psychoanalyst in Paris, a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis.
TARANTINO’s GIRLS,
Gérard Wajcman, writer, psychoanalyst, curator and art critic. He teaches at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University and is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.
POST-PHALLIC LIBIDINAL ECONOMIES,
Hager Weslati, London Graduate School, Kingston University.
SCREEN, DRIVE, ROMANCE,
Fred Botting, London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001)
PSYCHE, THAT INGLOURIOUS BASTERD,
Scott Wilson, London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001)
BROUSSE, Marie-Hélène,
Marie-Hélène Brousse is a practising psychoanalyst in Paris, a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. She is an associate professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University. She has contributed numerous articles to Lacanian studies, among others in Reading Seminars I and II (SUNY Press: 1996), Reading Seminar XI (SUNY Press: 1995), The Later Lacan (SUNY Press: 2007), and is a regular keynote speaker in the Freudian Field and in universities in Spain, Italy, South America and Australia.
WAJCMAN, Gérard
Gérard Wajcman is a writer, psychoanalyst, curator and art critic. He teaches at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University and is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. He also directs the Research Centre on the History and Theory of the Gaze. Recent publications include: L’œil absolu (Paris: Denoël, 2010), L’objet du siècle (Verdier, 1998), Collection (Nous: 1999), Fenêtre, chroniques du regard et de l’intime (Verdier: 2004), Les animaux nous traitent mal, photographies de Tania Mouraud (Gallimard, 2008).
BOTTING, Fred
Fred Botting is Professor in the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London. His two most recent books are Limits of Horror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) and Gothic Romanced (London: Routledge, 2008). He is co-editor (with Scott Wilson) of Bataille: A Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1998). His research interests include cultural and critical theory (psycho- and schiz-analysis); Bataille and general economy; romanticism and postmodernism; techno-poiesis; uncanny media (gothic technologies; cybergothic; neuromanticism); smoking, sublimity, consumption and horror.
WILSON, Scott
Scott Wilson is Professor in the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London. His two most recent books are: The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment (SUNY Press, 2008) and Great Satan’s rage: American negativity and rap / metal in the age of supercapitalism (Manchester University Press, 2008). He is co-editor (with Michael Dillon) of the Journal for Cultural Research (Taylor & Francis) and co-editor (with Fred Botting) of The Bataille Reader (Blackwell). His research interests include cultural & critical theory, particularly psychoanalysis and the legacy of Georges Bataille. He is currently working on a book on the audio unconscious.
WESLATI, Hager
Hager Weslati is lecturer in Critical Theory and American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. Her teaching is at the interface of philosophy/ literature; and media/culture. Her research interests are focused on interpretations of Hegelian philosophy and on the critical theories of space with particular interest in nomadology, heterotopias and mobility. Her book chapters include “Travel in Disguise: On Travel Writing and Cultural Governance” in Not So Innocent Abroad: the Politics of Travel and Travel Writing (CSP, 2009); “Deserts in Literary and Religious Fundamentalism” in Literary Encounters of Fundamentalism (Heidelberg UP, 2008); “Aporias of the As If: Derrida’s Kant and the Question of Experience” in Derrida After Kant (Clinamen, 2003). Articles include: “La pensée du désert: the Paradox of Theory and the Narrative of Boom and Bust in Cultural Studies” Tropismes (October, 2010); articles on Lacanian psychoanalysis, philosophy and transference in Journal for Cultural Research ( January, 2007) and Anamorphosis. A Journal of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies. Her translations include articles by Jean Joseph Goux, (in Cultural Values, 1997) and Georges Bataille (in Parallax, 2001). Her current book project is titled “Absolute Error: The Kojevean Century and the Idea of Europe”.
