Psyche(d) with Tempo
organized by Dr. Talha C. Işsevenler
What untimely works can inform our rethinking of subjectivity as we are finding ourselves in new technological, political and ecological grounds? In this open-ended reading/research-group, we will closely look at seminal and contemporary studies of psyche, thinking, affect and materiality in their entirety as unexhausted potential of these works might return to animate us with new ideas & rhythms.
Three broad questions orient this selection:
1) Technological & historical constitution of unconscious
2) opposition of feeling to thinking
3) politics of difference and universality.
1) Generally put: How do historically specific media and technology affect unconscious? Specifically: feminist film/media theorists conceptualized a historical turn from masculine obsession with mastery over elusive sign epitomized in filmic narrative structure towards pre-Oedipal separation anxiety foregrounded with televisual flow. How can we explore this oscillation between rigid frame and fluid intersubjectivity in the context of digital media?
2) Psychoanalytic training and clinical practice seem to be driven by an unresolved problematic whereby thinking is seen both as a defence as in intellectualization and as an achievemen as in mentalization. How can we explore and perhaps resolve the opposition of feeling to thinking?
3) How do concrete particulars (class, race, gender...) affect abstract universals (individual, family) of psychoanalysis? Can psychoanalysis/psychology/psychotherapy take part in their own transformation through political events?
By practicing a slow-temporality of reading and gathering i.e., once a month, a series of occasions and a long-term momentum are hoped to be created in order to engage demanding theoretical, empirical and literary works that (may) play foundational roles in establishing new research areas and effectuating turns in critical thought.
Meetings will be held online on the last Friday of each month, between 2pm-4.30pm. Please email talha141@gmail.com to receive the readings and links. Continuous participation is not required to be part of the reading group.
March 31, 2023 — anxiety: part 1.
“Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1925) Sigmund Freud
April 28, 2023 — obsessive-compulsion & separation anxiety in media: part II.
“High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy” (1992) Patricia Mellencamp https://archive.org/details/highanxietycatas0000mell
May 26, 2023 — psyche amidst political intervention.
“Toward the African Revolution” (1964) Frantz Fanon
June 30, 2023 — thinking as hyper-cathexis.
“Organization and Pathology of Thought” (1951) David Rapaport.
“What is called thinking?” Martin Heidegger
July 28, 2023 — subjectivity as limit experience part I.
“Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and The Taboo” (1962) Georges Bataille
August 25, 2023 — subjectivity as limit experience part II.
“Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia” (2023) Avgi Saketopoulou
September 29, 2023 — material ground(s) of memory, narrativity and temporality
“Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” (1995) Jacques Derrida
“Plato’s Pharmacy” Jacques Derrida
October 27, 2023 – multiplicity and capital.
“Outside in the Teaching Machine” (2008) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
November 24, 2023 — machinic unconscious as unknown/unknowable/untimely
“Red Grass” (1950) Boris Vian.
December 29, 2023 – nonhuman environment: regression & becoming-child
“The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia,” (1960) Herald Searles
January 26, 2024 — existential psychoanalysis: aesthetics & ethics
“Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr,” Jean-Paul Sartre
February 23, 2024 — mentalization & intellectualization
“Mentalizing in Clinical Practice” (2008) Jon G. Allen, Peter Fonagy, Anthony Bateman.
March 29, 2024 — withdrawnness
“Friendship” (1971/1997) Maurice Blanchot
April 26, 2024 — metaphysics & transcendence
“The Unconscious God” (1985) Viktor E. Frankl
*June 7, 2024 — cybernetics & auto-poetics
Cybernetics for the 21st Century, Vol.1: Epistemological Reconstruction (2024)
June 28, 2024 — transparency
Deniz Gul / There is life between us (+transparency)
July 27, 2024 — worlding & terraforming
What is a world? On postcolonial literature as world literature (2016) Peng Cheah