Landscapes of the Impossible: Psychoanalysis and the Climate Crisis [Session 3: Living to Die: the Death Drive in a Time of Climate Breakdown]
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
This event is free to attend but registration is required. Please use the link above to book your place.
Seminar 3 (of 3) for researchers and students, developed by Dr. Catherine Lord (Media and Culture, Literature and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam)
Synopsis for 3-part Seminar:
These three sessions offer an introduction to the burgeoning field of eco-psychoanalysis. With its emphasis on the climate crisis, environmental humanities can engage in a fruitful dialogue with psychoanalytic thinking. In our current environmental emergency, how do we mourn what we are losing from the more-than-human world? The first session focuses on mourning, the second addresses how environmental humanities can queer and decolonize itself, while the third focuses on matters of extinction and the death drive. If they wish, students can bring a cultural object of their own choice to the second and third sessions; the case study can be a literary, film or media object. This could comprise one student’s short piece of creative writing (one short poem is preferable) or one short film (no more than two minutes). The sessions present two aims. The first is to make explicit connections between ecological thinking and psychoanalysis as a cultural, critical practice. The second is to address chosen artistic case studies, so as to let them ‘speak back’ to our theoretical concerns.
These sessions are geared towards MA students, but PhD candidates and early-career researchers may find them helpful.
Please note that the reading materials of all three sessions can be accessed here as pdfs.
Session 3: Living to Die: the Death Drive in a Time of Climate Breakdown
Freud, Sigmund. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE XVII. 3-66.
Rose, Jacqueline. 2023. “Living One’s Own Death: Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic.” The Plague. London: Fitzcarraldo Edition. 36-60. [Kindle page numbers, please check book – in Birkbeck library. Recommend buying.
Professor Rose’s lecture/ LRB text (original versions of the above) are close read by Michelle Stephens in her article below. Freud Institute Annual lecture, 2020, “To Die One’s Own Death – thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic” online - https://youtu.be/uPCGf2pqxng
Stephens, Michelle. 2022. “Just in Time: Managing Fear and Anxiety at the End of the World.” A Journal of Critical History. 12(1): April 2022.
Case Study: a short piece of your work. To be selected.
Supplementary Reading:
Lord, Catherine. 2023. The Flowers of Extinction: an Ecocritical Flâneur in London between April 2019 and April 2020.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. Vol. 26. No. 4. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14688417.2023.2202193
Catherine Lord is an author, scholar and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. She teaches in Literature and Cultural Analysis, as well as Media and Culture. Her research explores the interdisciplinary fields between environmental humanities, philosophy, queer studies, psychoanalysis and feminism. In literary studies she has published on the writings of Walter Benjamin, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Jeannette Winterson, and in eco-cinema, the films of Werner Herzog, Franny Armstrong, Terrence Malick, and Lars von Trier. She is currently working on a book about eco-feminisms and psychoanalysis in contemporary women’s poetry (US and UK). She is also a performance-based researcher in art film and theatre. https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/l/o/c.m.lord/c.m.lord.html
Contact name:
Prof Esther Leslie