Event overview
Can those of us who dwell in 21st-century metropolises learn anything from Freud’s famous child patient Hans, who lived in bourgeois Vienna more than a century ago? Hans develops a phobia of horses and the street. Freud diagnoses a deviance in sexual development. Lacan detects a reluctance to enter into the symbolic order. Félix Guattari instead celebrates Hans’s phobia as a pragmatic political escape from an Oedipalization which serves capitalism by forming deterritorialized workers who are also adaptable consumers. For Guattari, Hans exemplifies the axiomatic of capital: the love object should always participate in the system of private ownership. Capitalism short-circuits class struggle by transforming social desire into individualized eros. This talk rereads the story of Hans as an early chapter in the genealogy of flexible labor. Hans’s fixation on his own sexual body enclosed in the family house recalls the plight of today’s deterritorialized cognitive worker. His phobia corresponds to the panic among today’s cognitive workers, whose precarious conditions have transformed the Other into a competitor. If the privatization of social desire leads to phobia, then the best therapy would be the reestablishment of a lost social solidarity.
Janell Watson is Professor of French at Virginia Tech, where she teaches language, culture, and critical theory. She serves as editor of the minnesota review: a journal of creative and critical writing, published by Duke University Press. She is the author of two books, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge UP 1999) and Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing between Deleuze and Lacan (Continuum 2009). Publications also include numerous articles on literature, culture, and theory.
Objects and Relations Visual Cultures Public Programme Autumn 2013
Within the theoretical humanities there has recently been a resurgence of interest in objects and objectivity – often pitched against those ontologies that are more relational. Of course, it might be said that an interest in objects has always been a concern of art history and practice (not least contemporary practice) – and that ideas of a ‘relational aesthetics’ have, for some time now, been a dominant trend in art theory. The Autumn term Visual Cultures Public Programme uses these latest developments in philosophy and art as a point of departure for a series of talks from thinkers and artists that might be said to connect with, parallel, pre-date or critique what has come to be known as the ‘speculative turn’.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Oct 2013 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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