ARCHIVED: PAD SPEAKER PROGRAMME 2014/15
Thurs 4th December 2014.
Fabio Camilletti (Department of Italian, Warwick).
'Gertrude and the (Erased) Name-of-the Father: the Suppression of the Master's
Discourse in Manzoni's I Promessi sposi (1840)' [Translations of sources will be
provided.]
Abstract: Initially conceived as a Walter Scott-like historical novel, not without
Radcliffean nuances, the final edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi
(The Betrothed, 1840) skilfully manages to conceal its Romanesque origins,
through a meticulous process of self-censorship by which the author erases all
allusion to ‘sinful’ passions. One of the most tenacious remnants of the novel’s
remotest origins, however, can be identified in the character of Gertrude, a fully
Gothic ‘bleeding nun’ inspired by the historical Virginia Maria de Leyva, a
Spanish Mother Superior indicted for adultery and witchcraft in 17th-century
Milan. By analysing the description of Gertrude provided by the novel, this paper
shows how Manzoni shapes this character through a close confrontation with
coeval medical literature (principally French) on the psychopathology of
hysteria. At the same time, it interprets the narrator’s construction of Gertrude
as a hysterical subject through the Lacanian concept of the Analyst’s discourse,
showing how the long account of Gertrude’s infancy and of her forced entrance
in the nunnery may be read as a sort of clinical anamnesis, depriving the subject
of her speech while it attempts at historically reconstructing the genesis of her
disease. By so doing, the novel liquidates Gertrude’s desire, quite tellingly in the
moment when – in the final edition of I promessi sposi – Manzoni decides to
leave Gertrude’s father unnamed. Eliding the Name of the Father means eliding
the ‘infernal machine that welds desire to the Law’ (Deleuze and Guattari), and
consequently the possibility itself of understanding the Gertrude’s symptom as
‘the signifying event of a relation to the Other’ (Didi-Huberman). Thus, I
promessi sposi accomplishes what Friedrich Kittler has termed the liquidation of
the Master’s discourse on the part of the ‘discourse of the novel’ (Romandiskurs)
– intending by this notion both literary novels (Romane) or the ‘family romances’
coined by Freud after the abandonment of the seduction hypothesis
(Familienromane).
Thurs 22nd January 2015.
Matt ffytche (Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex)
'Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Traumas of History: Alexander Mitscherlich
Between the Disciplines'. [You are invited to read the attached extracts from The
Inability to Mourn in advance of the seminar (extract 1, extract 2).]
Abstract: This paper aims to track the rifts which occur when psychoanalysis
moves ‘across the disciplines’. In particular, it examines the limits on
representing history in psychoanalytic social psychology as practised by various
key mid-century figures, including Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focusing
primarily on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist
associated with the later Frankfurt school, was influenced by Erikson, Riesman
and others, but was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in post-war
Germany. This makes him significant for tracing the ways in which the
experience of the Second World War and the Third Reich were filtered out of
psychosocial narratives being constructed in the period – precisely the accounts
in which one might expect such ‘trauma’ to be a major object of attention.
Mitscherlich’s 1967 work The Inability to Mourn, co-written with Margarete
Mitscherlich, appears to provide a counter-narrative in which the historical
experience which had been filtered out finally floods back into the theorisation
of German psychology and society. However, in contrast to much contemporary
work, I argue that this ‘epoch-making’ book in fact doesn’t really hail the shift
towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often
associated. Thus the final limitation I consider is itself a historical one: these
more sociological writers from the middle decades of the century were cut off
from the ‘psychoanalysis of history’ because they wrote before the impact of
several trends occurring in the 1980s-90s, which led to the formation of trauma
studies and the psychoanalytic preoccupation with the transgenerational
transmission of trauma. The post-1990s concern with history and mourning
allows one to pin-point some important limitations within the project to apply
psychoanalysis to society, as it was conceived in the immediate post-war climate.
Thurs 26th February 2015.
Dan Katz (Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies,
University of Warwick)
“One Big Accident”: History, Protest, and the Chances of Chance"
Abstract: This paper briefly examines the questions of contingency and “chance”
as found in leading movements of 20th century thought, notably Surrealism,
Situationism, and psychoanalysis. The stakes of such problems will be examined
in the context of campus protest in the 1960s, especially May 1968 in France.
Here, where Situationism’s emphasis on the role of the university within the
society of the spectacle meets Lacan’s structuralist view of the subject, we face
the problem the 20th century could not solve: how to to think progressive
political agency beyond the confines of enlightenment or existentialist
rationalism.