Monday, January 11, 2010

POPULAR UNIVERSITY JACQUES LACAN WORKSHOP IN TEL-AVIV

            The Popular University
                 “Jacques Lacan”
                founded in Paris by
               Jacques-Alain Miller

Announces

Israel workshop on the subject:


                Shoah, Zionism, and the “lacanian” extreme left


Organizers:   Marco Mauas, lacanian psychoanalyst, GIEP member, New Lacanian School member.
Prof Dennis Sharbit, Open University, Social Sciences Faculty.
Gil Caroz, lacanian psychoanalyst, New Lacanian School Member, World association of Psychoanalysis Secretary.
General Program
3 monthly encounters, beginning 24th January
The workshop will be an effort to elucidate texts from so called “lacanian” extreme left intellectuals, beginning from Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. They are very well known authors, even admired by some young students and circles, and whose texts “analyze” the Jewish  name and situation, the complex realities of Israel, and Middle East, including its relationship with the Shoah.
This effort of elucidation—3 workshop meetings-- will not be surely exhaustive, but it may be very well a sort of opening for future investigations.

Some brief examples of the problems –reading problems- the workshop  will propose to open:


Slavoj Zizek, in a short text [1] about Joseph Fritzl, the well known incestuous Austrian dungeon who kept his “two families” in it during 24 years, compares  Fritzl with the (function of) the father in “The sound of Music”:
First, as a kind of introduction:
What if, however, we read the duality of the “normal” father and the primordial father of the unlimited access to incestuous enjoyment not as a fact of the earliest history of humanity, but as a libidinal fact, a fact of “psychic reality,” which accompanies as an obscene shadow the “normal” paternal authority, prospering in the dark underground of unconscious fantasies? this obscene underground is discernible through its effects – in myths, dreams, slips of tongue, symptoms… and, sometimes, it enforces its direct perverse realization (Freud noted that perverts realize what hysterics only
fantasize about).
This is a not so easy   introduction to the problem-function of the father—and paternal authority-- in Freud and Lacan! Let’s continue.
After that, we read:
 With regard to Austria, instead of the miserable attempts to blame for Josef ’s terrible crime the Austrian Nazi past or the Austrian excessive sense of orderliness and respectability, one should rather link the figure of Fritzl to a much more respectful Austrian myth, that of the von Trapp family immortalized in The Sound of Music:
another family living in their secluded castle, under the father’s benevolent military authority which protects them from the evil Nazi outside, with generations strangely mixed (the Sister Maria, like Elisabeth, a generation between father and children…) e aspect of kitsch is relevant here: TheSound of Music is the ultimate kitsch phenomenon, and what Fritzl created in his basement also displays features of a kitsch family life realized: the happy family getting ready for diner, with the
father watching TV with children while mother is preparing the food… However, one should not forget that the kitsch imagery we are dealing with here are not Austrian but belong to Hollywood and, more generally, Western popular culture: Austria in The Sound of Music is not the Austrian’s Austria, but the mythic Hollywood image of Austria – the paradox is here that it is as if, in the last decades, Austrians themselves started to “play Austrians,” i.e., identified with the Hollywood image of their own country. This parallel can be extended to include the Fritzl-version of some of the most famous scenes from The Sound of Music. One can imagine the frightened children gathered around mother Elisabeth, in fear of the storm of the forthcoming father’s arrival, and mother calming them down by a song about some of “some of their favorite things” they should focus their minds on, from the toys brought by father to their most popular TV show… Or what about an upstairs reception in the Fritzl villa to
which the underground children were exceptionally invited, and then, when the time for bed comes, the children performing for the assembled guests the obscene song “Aufwiedersehen, Goodbye” and departing one after the other… Really, in the Fritzl house, the basement, if not the hills, was alive with the sound of music.

Provocative as this comparison may be, it is a problem: can it be based in the function of father as Lacan formulated it for clinical psychoanalysis? Is this reading a reading within all the possible readings of Freud and Lacan?

There will be a fourth encounter, this time with a special guest from Paris: Yves-Charles  Zarka.
1st: Marco Mauas, Opening, remarks on chapter 20 of Jacques Lacan, Seminar 11 . ½ hour. An hour and a half of discussion and work will follow. We will add a text from Zizek or Badiou for this first meeting also.
The participants will be invited to work previously on the text and to bring references connected to their previous work.
2nd; Prof Dennis Sharbit: remarks on the reading of Alain Badiou’s text “On the uses of the name “Jew” “.
3rd; A text by Slavoj Zizek will be read. Name of the text and the lecturer will be announced.



[1] Slavoj Zizek: “My Own Private Austria”, http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/3781-my_own_private_austria.pdf