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In times as ambivalent as these—ambivalent to the second power—let us tackle ambivalence two times. Hate, Freud said, is older than love; and the two are not originally opposites. The genealogy of love-hating (or hate-loving) one another requires careful work—of speculation, deduction, reading, psychoanalyzing—to know better the shape of its late constructions and their destiny. In these two events, we will explore ambivalence, first, in what patients tell us from the couch, and second, through a reading seminar on Freud looking beyond love and hate towards the very establishment of the object of desire in identification and annihilation.
This second event on ambivalence is a reading seminar with Judith Butler, Marcus Coelen, and Jamieson Webster. In this reading seminar we will turn to Freud’s papers, Instincts (Drives) and Their Vicissitudes (Destinies) (1915), and On Negation (1925). Freud ends his discussion on the origins of love and hate stating that ambivalence—as a destiny of the drive—points to the influence of the three great polarities that dominate psychic life: “that of activity-passivity as the biological, that of ego-external world as the real, and finally that of pleasure-unpleasure as the economic polarity.” The paper on Negation, likewise, speaks to forms of judgment—mostly unconscious—around which ambivalence forms; not only, yes and no, acceptance and rejection, but also me and not me, inside of me and outside of me, real or imagined, maybe merely remembered. This testing of the object has vast implications, especially for life as a group. For Freud, this is not only an ambivalence that defines human relationships, but the very force of identification as a negotiation of the loss of the object, the murderous wishes that inform empathy and guilt as social bonds that are fragile and unstable, as well as, something more primordial in the human—drives as a kind of beating, rhythmic, structural montage, whose rift and drift require repetitive renegotiation. What is possible with such impossible ambivalent beings? Does psychoanalysis cure us of ambivalence or give us a way to live with it? What can Freud tell us about the increasing ambivalence and anxiety we feel in the contemporary landscape? Reading Freud’s texts together, we will explore the polarities of psychic life and the discontents (or solutions) framed by psychoanalysis.
Registered attendees will receive the Zoom link via email.
Presented by the Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College and Das Unbehagen.
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Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor Emer. in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of The Force of Nonviolence, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Frames of War, Precarious Life, The Psychic Life of Power, Excitable Speech, Bodies that Matter, Gender Trouble. They are affiliated with the Psychosocial Program at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Marcus Coelen is a psychoanalyst in New York and Berlin. He also teaches literature and literary theory in the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at Columbia University New York. He has translated into German and edited several volumes of texts by Maurice Blanchot. Publications include: With Mark Hewson, Georges Bataille – Key Concepts, (Routledge, 2016). He is currently preparing, together with Jamieson Webster, a book on Jacques Lacan.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York and author of Conversion Disorder (Columbia UP, 2018), Stay, Illusion!, with Simon Critchley (Pantheon, 2013), The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011) and is currently working on a book on Jacques Lacan with Marcus Coelen. She has written often for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Artforum, Cabinet Magazine, Spike Art Quarterly, and in many psychoanalytic journals. She currently teaches at The New School for Social Research, and is a member of IPTAR and Das Unbehagen.
This event is part of The New School's Gender & Sexualities Studies Institute's 2021 Gender Matters Symposium. You can browse other events here.
The purpose of this symposium is to gather all New School faculty working on gender and sexuality studies in order to share ideas and visions for the new Gender & Sexualities Studies Institute while building bridges between the different divisions and schools. By facilitating discussions between faculty and bringing in external keynote speakers, we aim to nurture a vibrant GSSI community internally but also build connections and bridges with the outside world, joining efforts to promote existing gender and sexualities studies.
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