Works in Progress is a new monthly workshop where our candidates and faculty can present their work jointly in the institute. Coming together is the heart of our mission, as it creates a space of difference in whcih new ideas can emerge. These workshops are disigned with this aspiration in mind. By resisting the individualistic pull and participating in this space, we coudl create a potentiality where things can happen organically in the presence of others, rekindling our thinking and the life of our community.
Evan Chetnik and Kasen Scharmann
Coriolanus and the Oedipal Cosmos
Our thesis is that the cosmos that Shakespeare develops in his Roman History Coriolanus, a work whose “lack of atmosphere” is widely noted in critical literature, goes unnoticed due to its covert familiarity. A Newtonian physics, much the same as the Enlightenment schematic we understand as scientific truth today, replaces witches and ghosts with planets and gravitas. Our planet revolves around our Sun, which itself is captured by something denser, and on and on until one meets the “black hole” at the center of the galaxy, infinitely dense such that nothing, not even light can escape. We are curious about this finite regression to an infinite point as a metaphor for the clinic. It seems to us that the logic of gravitational capture has adhered itself to our language and even finds its corollary in Freudian mythology.
Tanja Auf der Heyde
Giving the impulse a space to expand: Thinking Contemporary Analysis with William Kentridge
This presentation takes inspiration from the work of South African artists William Kentridge’s animated film Felix in Exile and his nine-part series Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot. One of the central ideas of the last episode of the Self-Portrait series is that the optimism of hope is to be found in the space between the pencil and the paper, as the mark is made; Kentridge locates it in the “point of contact, in the physical activity, in the practical making.” Similarly, the act of speaking in analysis is essentially a hopeful act. Drawing parallels between the creative process and analysis, this talk examines how it can be clinically useful to focus on the speech act, on following the impulse arising in the body, and on taking up a position of not knowing. Kentridge offers us an immensely rich creative application of the processes Freud speaks about in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” as well as reflections that conjure Lacan’s ideas about the mirror stage. His work reminds us not to lose sight of the liberatory potential of the creative act.