Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Beth Guilding (Goldsmiths)
‘The end is in the beginning and yet you go on…’
Thus speaks Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame, thereby observing a simple, yet profound truth: that every end constitutes a new beginning, and every beginning contains – whilst being simultaneously driven toward finding - its own end. It is an observation that permeates the definitions of both beginning and ending with an uncanny simultaneity: for both, it would seem, come to mean origin and completion alike.
Taking this thought forward into the works of Blanchot and Freud, this paper will examine the meaning of the ‘origin’ as it appears in Freud’s 1914 case study of the Wolf Man, and Blanchot’s 1980 text The Writing of the Disaster.
Both Freud and Blanchot are thinkers for whom the terms origin and beginning take on an absolutely central role in their works; and this is a fact that becomes no more evident than in the two versions of the primal scene to be explored in this paper.
By taking Freud’s original construction of the primal scene alongside the primal scene that Blanchot presents us with in The Writing of the Disaster, this paper will attempt to demonstrate how it is that the impossibility of ‘experiencing’, or of ever truly ‘encountering’, the origin can be understood in terms of an ‘Impossible Necessary’ event. This shall be done by examining the Freudian term Nachträglichkeit (deferral/afterwardness), in conjuntion with the possible ways of comprehending the Blanchotian ‘disaster’.
Both Nachträglichkeit and the disaster invert the common definitions of beginnings and endings. For each of them an ending – a manifestation, a piece of literature – always contains within it a lost beginning, a lost origin; the task of this paper will be to understand how this loss contains within it the interminable question Blanchot asks of us: ‘a primal scene?’
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Feb 2014 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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