In reading the seat of the father in Freud’s science as a construction of analysis, Rickels provides a summary of his theory of unmourning and the psychotic break. The lecture closes on the transportable therapy setting that stabilized the break for performance artist Yakoi Kusama and performer Brian Wilson.

2021

Author Laurence Rickels

Sound engineer Jochen Jezzusek

In VOICEOVER, film material is recommended for watching while listening to the lecture.

Don’t Look Now (1973) should be muted while viewing.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rickels returns to the Melanesian Cargo Cult, a mainstay of Aberrations of Mourning, to interpret the other term for what is at stake in Cargo: Savvy. While Cargo is carried by their ancestors, the Melanesians ascribe Savvy to the living. In the course of the Second World War, America replaces Europe and Australia on the Melanesian horizon. The Melanesians would have noted that Black Americans were in the US military. The Savvy ascribed to Americans (notably in the Johnson Movement) reflects the copresence of Blacks and amounts to a reading of American hipness as dependent on Black Savvy. The Trump Movement is the latest last hurrah of white Savvy, last seen in full array in Nazi Germany. That whiteness is by now a contact low is the estabishing shot of the denial that the Trump Movement symptomatizes.

2020

Author Laurence Rickels

Sound engineer Jochen Jezzusek

In VOICEOVER, film material is recommended for watching while listening to the lecture.

Blade (1998) should be muted while viewing.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Heinz Kohut on narcissistic rage meets Erika Kohut in Elfried Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin and, in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste, as interpreted by Isabelle Huppert. Jelinek’s inheritance of post-WWII Austrian language pessimism is examined as a narcissistic disorder symptomatized in the life and work of Walter Poppelreuter. Closer to home Ulrike Ottinger treated the symptom picture in her direction of Jelinek’s play Begierde und Fahrerlaubnis. Jelinek’s masterpiece Kinder der Toten was the reward of recovery from the narcissism of unmouring the mother tongue.

2021

Author Laurence Rickels

Sound engineer Jochen Jezzusek

In VOICEOVER, film material is recommended for watching while listening to the lecture.

La Pianiste (2001) should be muted while viewing

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.