*CFP* "A THERAPY OF THINGS? MATERIALITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS IN LITERATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS", WORKSHOP

A Therapy of Things? Materiality and Psychoanalysis in Literature and the Visual Arts

Workshop at the Department of German Studies/English and American Studies, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

03.12.2021 & 10.12.2021 (online)

 

Psychoanalysis has a long, if sometimes troubled, history of being literary theory’s ally and accomplice (Felman). In the wake, however, of work in new materialism, literary theory and criticism have recently tried to move beyond such constants as ‘the symbolic’ or ‘the human subject’ (Clarke and Rossini; Herman). These constants – or so the story goes – are precisely the staples of psychoanalysis, thus apparently making psychoanalysis vulnerable to the new materialist critique of being blindly centered and premised on the human subject: compare Bruno Latour’s remark about how “the very violence” with which the Moderns “strip invisible beings of all external existence and insist on locating them only in the twists and turns of the self, the unconscious, or the neurons” reveals “a deep discomfort,” an “intense anxiety” (185). Can we approach psychoanalysis in such a way that it does contribute to a non-anthropocentric approach to literature, after all? And can we, for this purpose, rethink some of the key terms and ideas of psychoanalysis in their material dimension?

*CFP* "WHAT DOES THE ALGORITHM WANT? PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRITIQUE OF DIGITAL CULTURE", SPECIAL ISSUE, CLCWEB

This special issue of CLCWeb asks: “What does the algorithm want?” Contributions are invited from scholars working in the area of psychoanalysis and digital/online media.

What does psychoanalytic criticism offer us as a practice for critically interrogating digital and online media?

Who among us does not already know about the critique of digital platforms? We hear all the time about big tech, big data, platform capitalism, communicative capitalism, surveillance capitalism, control society, and so forth. The Edward Snowden leaks about the PRISM program in 2013 provided evidence for what we all already secretly believed: that our online interactions and communications are all the time being monitored and collected by mega corporations and the government. 

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, revealed by whistle blower, Christopher Wylie, in 2018 taught us even more about the ways platforms manipulate users’ views of the world and the ways this impacts our actions and behaviours, our ethics and our politics.

*CFP* "MEMORY, CINEMA AND PSYCHOANALYSIS", MEMORY STUDIES WORKSHOP

Memory Studies Workshop

Memory, Cinema and Psychoanalysis

Online Workshop

17 August 2020 (Timing TBC) 

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Academic LAB

Sigmund Freud, in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), wrote: "Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says." Indeed, from a psychoanalytical perspective, we can never be certain if our perception of the past is completely accurate, yet the narrative we construct has an undeniable impact on how we define ourselves. Often we might summon up seemingly innocuous details about previous events; it's what the conscious mind fails to recollect that becomes the real object of inquiry. The very function of memory is wrapped up in mystery, as is the experiential reality of remembering, which appears closely linked with repetition.

*CFP* "ASKING AND ANSWERING THE SUBLIME QUESTION: VISIONS, VIEWS, VITALITIES", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS

One of the reasons why the Sublime has remained submerged while other branches of aesthetics have flourished throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century could be its theoretical ‘ungraspability’, if we are permitted to use the word. It remains ungraspable because it has been historically understood to be antagonistic to something more theoretically stable and reflectively concrete as the beautiful, not to mention the trajectory that the Sublime has had to chart from being a concierge of divine metaphysics to being an ‘inside-out’ metaphysical abnormality. To cite an example, when Longinus says: “Sublimity raises us towards the spiritual greatness of God”, one is bound to enquire the concreteness of ideas like “spiritual”, “greatness”, “God”, the relationship between this triad and “raising”, and if this “us” implies that the atheistically-driven human cannot experience the Sublime, or if Sublimity extirpates everything that does not believe in God as in-human, or as “not” us. On the contrary, Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Man, Heroic and Sublime), apart from being massive in size and devastating in effect, promotes an intelligent paradox, if I may tweak Lyotard’s critique of his painting: the ‘Present-ness’ of sublime metaphysics. This disturbingly huge theoretical playground contends something acute: Is there a way of explaining away the elusiveness of the sublime? This is not a question that this volume seeks to answer; instead, it seeks to elaborate the possibilities of a theoretically sound question that can be posed to better understand sublime elusiveness rather than explaining it away. To put it in another way, the need for promoting a framework that explains obscurity without explaining it away – the necessity of paradoxical ontologies as opposed to paradoxes answered is the first and only objective of this volume on the Sublime. 

*CFP* "PSYCHOANALYSIS TO COME: COMMUNITY & CULTURE", A DAS UNBEHAGEN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Psychoanalysis to come: Community & Culture

A Das Unbehagen International Conference

Copenhagen, July 24-26, 2020

We are welcoming paper and panel submissions for an international conference on the future of psychoanalytic community | psychoanalysis and culture to be held in Copenhagen, July 24-26, 2020.

We intend this three-day conference to be a space for those of us committed to psychoanalysis to think through the future of psychoanalytic community, the possibility of an international psychoanalytic network “without borders” and the forms this may take in relation to other established organizations, culture, film, digital media, technology, publishing, academia, philosophy and the arts.

As we know, psychoanalysis has not survived so much by way of psychology departments and the field of “mental health” at large, but more so through the humanities, philosophy, literature and film theory, creating a discourse and culture of its own.

*CFP* “TRAUMA AND CONSUMPTION”, CHAPTER BOOK

This volume aims at opening new theoretical vistas in conceptualizing how the notion of trauma may be fruitfully applied to consumer research, as well as offering fresh perspectives on how traumatism may modify, moderate, re-orient and re-evaluate consumption experiences. The increasing emphasis in consumer research that has been laid over the past few years on the unconscious in an attempt to identify and account for psychological processes that pass under the radar of a homeostatic ego that is driven by the pleasure principle calls for an extensive and multi-faceted scrutiny of the notion of trauma.

The concept of traumatic neurosis that was originally popularized by Freud in his seminal treatise Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) marked a critical turning point in psychoanalytic theorizing. It laid the foundations for one of the most heavily researched topics in contemporary psychologically oriented research, namely PTSD, while it has been instrumental in the consolidation of cultural trauma theories which constitute common conceptual currency in cultural studies and cultural sociology, among other disciplines. To a lesser extent and at a less speculative level, traumatic experiences have been scrutinized in consumer research, largely in the context of psychologically inflected experimental studies.

*CFP* “IT’S BECAUSE OF THE IMPLICATION: ESSAYS ON THE FX SERIES IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA”, EDITED COLLECTION

Editor seeks original essays for an edited collection on the long-running FX comedy series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. This collection is under contract with McFarland Publishers and will address the cult following of this series as it goes into its 14th and 15th seasons on the lesser known network. Featuring a cast of outright detestable characters, IASIP has a tremendous online following and a very loyal fanbase that keeps it busy year after year.

While many attribute the success of the show to its “low-brow Frasier-esque” appeal, this series has survived, even thrived, in a culture that has brought down shows for a lot less than the scandalous political, racial, and social commentary explored by Sunny. I welcome proposals on any facet of the IASIP series, including, but not limited to the ideas listed below. If you have other ideas or proposals for chapters, please feel free to email inquiries.

Chapters in the proposed collection can focus on one or more of the following categories:

*CFP* "PSYCHOANALYSIS, SEXUALITIES AND NETWORKED MEDIA", 2020 ISSUE, PSYCHOANALYSIS, CULTURE & SOCIETY JOURNAL

For psychoanalysis, sexuality, how it is both individually thought about and lived and how it is culturally constructed, is key to understanding both the human psyche and social change. Freud believed that the sexual behaviour of an individual, from the earliest stages of development onwards, provided key insights into how they related to others and themselves in life more generally. While Freud stressed that there is no ‘normal’ sexuality and heterosexuality was a myth, his particular theories of female sexuality were nonetheless critiqued by feminist thinkers. Initially for Freud, the symptom itself was a distorted or covered manifestation of sexual activity which related to conflicts. Those ideas were developed by post-Freudian psychoanalysts in numerous ways. It is psychoanalysis that fundamentally contributed to the theorisation and understanding of the role that sexual desires and fantasies play in our (un)conscious forms of relating to ourselves and others. While psychoanalytic schools have come to understand sexuality in different ways, other disciplines such as queer theory, cultural studies and philosophy have grappled with and drawn on those conceptualisations of sexuality. Particular notions that are often taken for granted in every day discourse – perversion, fetishism, voyeurism – were (and are) developed by psychoanalysts. The call for papers for a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society takes psychoanalytic theories of sexuality / sexualities and how they were adapted/critiqued by other disciplines as a starting point for analysing contemporary networked media, online spaces and digital phenomena.

*CFP* SOUTH AFRICAN SOCIETY FOR CRITICAL THEORY, 3RD ANNUAL CONFERENCE

The South African Society for Critical Theory (SASCT) invites abstract submissions of up to 500 words for its 3rd Annual Conference which will take place at the Howard College Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, from the 22nd to the 23rd of November 2019.

SASCT invites papers which address the vexed notion of the “human” in the contemporary age. As part of such considerations, this conference welcomes papers that consider the possibilities and pitfalls of identity theory in relation to Critical Theory. What analytic and conceptual resources does identity politics offer Critical Theory? What might a critical analysis of identity politics reveal? Do identity politics serve as an instance of a process whereby we come to view our own individuality in terms of pre-constructed cultural categories? What stance should Critical Theory adopt towards identity politics?

*CFP* "A CRITICAL COMPANION TO ROBERT ZEMECKIS", CHAPTER PROPOSALS

The Critical Companion to Popular Directors series seeks chapter proposals for a new volume dedicated to Robert Zemeckis. The director’s oeuvre includes major blockbusters such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Back to the Future trilogy, Forrest Gump and Cast Away, as much as equally-successful stories such as What Lies Beneath, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, Flight and, most recently, Alliedand Welcome to Marwen. All of his achievements have offered (and still offer) an incredibly fertile ground for critical examination, analysis and discussion. Indeed, the scholarship on Zemeckis has never ceased to proliferate and several volumes have focused on the director’s works.

This anthology will explore Zemeckis’ multi-medial oeuvre from multidisciplinary perspectives. This volume seeks previously-unpublished essays that explore the director’s heterogeneous career, not only through his “greatest hits,” but also his earliest works (I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars) as well as his less success full works (Romancing the Stone) and his work for TV. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the subject that can illuminate the diverse facets of the director’s work and his visual style.

*CFP* "DE CÓMO LA COPLA CANTA EL DESEO DE LA MUJER", X CONGRESO DE ANÁLISIS TEXTUAL TRAMA Y FONDO

Parte notable y notablemente viva de la cultura popular española, la copla ha sido durante décadas, salvo honrosas excepciones, injustamente ignorada por el mundo intelectual y académico, víctima de caducos prejuicios ideológicos que resulta obligado remover de una vez por todas.

Creemos, por eso, llegada la hora de escucharla, de pensarla, de tomarla en serio. De pensar su lugar en la vida cotidiana de quienes la han cantado, de quienes la han escuchado y de quienes, tarareándola, la han convertido en la música de fondo de sus vidas. Los antropólogos, los sociólogos y los psicólogos sociales pueden sentirse concernidos en ello.

Y porque, nacida antes de la guerra civil, siguió presente en la posguerra tanto en el interior como en el exilio y se hizo escuchar igualmente durante la transición, los historiadores pueden también sentirse interesados en ella. No menos los filósofos y los psicoanalistas, dada la intensidad con la que en la copla se escucha el deseo de la mujer en tantas de sus modulaciones. Y ello incluso en tiempos de los que se decía que a ellas les estaba prohibido nombrar su deseo.