Penumbr(a)cast - The Other Scene

In this episode Heidi Arsenault and Daniel Wilson discuss ARIA, their clinical practice through music and play with nonspeaking children and teens from around the world in Montreal, as a way of exploring a concept of the child that takes subjective experience and its search for an unprecedented space-time into account. The notion of creativity is considered from the perspective of a subjective experience that seeks expression and can be accompanied and sustained rather than limited or interpreted by others, in this case the adults around the child. The concepts of child and creativity are discussed in today's context of mundialization, AI, and medical focus on the child's symptoms through diagnoses, psychotropic, and behavioral treatments. 

With thanks to Kellen Corrallo for sound editing.

In this interview, philosopher and psychoanalyst Monique David-Ménard shares her investigation of negation as a phenomenon with a specific function under transference in her clinical practice, and also as a concept in the writings of Freud, Lacan, Hyppolite, Hegel, and Kant. David-Ménard shows the  articulations of the two disciplines she engages, as well as their differences and limits when faced with questions of negativity. The conversation emphasizes the creative, transformative potential of negativity in the scene of analysis, when the unconscious is conceived in ethical rather than ontological terms. 

Many thanks to Kellen Corrallo for his editorial assistance with the audio file.

In this episode of the New Psychoanalytic Spaces sub-series, Sophie Mendelsohn responds to questions about the work of the Collectif de Pantin she founded in 2018 and continues to operate in Pantin, a diverse Paris suburb, with a focus on interrogating race in the analytic experience and on observing the effects of taking race, as well as coloniality and postcoloniality, into account in clinical and social contexts. Sophie Mendelsohn reflects on problems of articulating clinical experience to the social and political in Lacanian psychoanalytic institutions in France since 1967, as well as on the notion and necessity of a concrete universal. 

Sophie Mendelsohn has a private psychoanalytic practice in Paris, and she is the author of Vagabondes (Arachnéen, 2015), as well as of many essays. With Livio Boni she has coedited La vie psychique du racisme (La Découverte, 2021) and, most recently, Psychanalyse du reste du monde. Géo-histoire d'une subversion (La Découverte, 2023).

Collectif de Pantin website:
https://www.collectifdepantin.org/

Thanks to Kellen Corrallo for editorial assistance with the audio file. 

This episode’s interview is with Derek Hook, who studies and practices psychoanalysis and is Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan, among many other works and important edited volumes on Lacan’s Écrits and Lacan and Race, among others. To respond to the prompt for this series of Penumbr(a)cast, on a life-changing or at least impactful artwork, following Freud’s powerful experience with Michelangelo’s Moses sculpture, Dr. Hook points to an image from photojournalism in 1994, where three members of a neo-Nazi group in South Africa are arrested and killed at the end of apartheid during the Bophuthatswana crisis. Hook's experience with this image prompts a fascinating discussion on his trajectory discovering psychoanalysis, white privilege, racism, and embodiment, and to his recent work of reading Lacan in conversation with Afropessimism.

Many thanks as always to Kellen Corrallo for his work on sound editing.

In this episode, Fabrice Bourlez, who teaches aesthetics (ENSBA) and practices psychoanalysis in Paris, speaks about his exploration of concepts of tact and elasticity in his practice, and in his reading of Freud, Ferenczi, and Lacan, as well as of Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and queer theory. The author of Pulsions pasoliniennes (Pasolinean Drives) and of Queer psychanalyse: clinique mineure et déconstructions du genre (Queer Psychoanalysis: Minor Clinic and Deconstructions of Gender) discusses the importance of sustaining a conversation across queer politics and the metapsychology and technique of psychoanalysis in the 21st century, as part of awakening ethics and listening in a minor mode.

Amelia Gayle reads the English translation in this recording. Interview translated from French by Cynthia Mitchell. Thanks to Kellen Corrallo for his editorial work.

In this episode, Fabrice Bourlez, who teaches aesthetics (ENSBA) and practices psychoanalysis in Paris, speaks about his exploration of concepts of tact and elasticity in his practice, and in his reading of Freud, Ferenczi, and Lacan, as well as of Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and queer theory. The author of Pulsions pasoliniennes (Pasolinean Drives) and of Queer psychanalyse: clinique mineure et déconstructions du genre (Queer Psychoanalysis: Minor Clinic and Deconstructions of Gender) discusses the importance of sustaining a conversation across queer politics and the metapsychology and technique of psychoanalysis in the 21st century, as part of awakening ethics and listening in a minor mode.

Psychanalyste et professeur à l'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA), Fabrice Bourlez parle dans cet épisode de son travail avec les concepts de tact et d'élasticité dans son travail clinique et dans sa lecture de Freud, de Ferenczi et de Lacan, aussi bien que dans la lecture d'écrivains tels que Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, et de la théorie queer.
L'auteur de Pulsions pasoliniennes et de Queer psychanalyse: clinique mineure et déconstructions du genre souligne l'importance de soutenir, au 21ème siècle, une conversation de la politique queer avec la métapsychologie et la technique de la psychanalyse. Il s'agit, suggère-t-il, d'une tactique pour réveiller une éthique et une entente en mode mineur. 

Merci à Kellen Corrallo pour son travail avec le fichier audio.

In this episode, Dr. Stephen Sternbach (Harvard Medical School; Cambridge Health Alliance; member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and of the École freudienne du Québec) speaks of his journey into psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and also literature as a space to explore the encounter with the Real. Sternbach discusses the changing relationship to psychoanalysis in psychiatric education and practice over the past decades in the United States. He touches on the concept of the defect in language in Willy Apollon's metapsychology, and concludes by sharing his aesthetic experience with a Wordsworth poem. 

This episode's interview with Ankhi Mukherjee focuses on her recent book, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor. It discusses Mukherjee's research on Freud's free clinics and their afterlives in different cities and projects that make psychoanalytic interventions in marginalized communities. We discuss the roles literary criticism can play in the work of these clinics, as well as the urgent need for spaces for subjectivity that are not limited to economic elites and that extend beyond the couch.

Many thanks to  Kellen Corrallo for editorial work on the episode.

This episode features an interview with Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Professor Emerita of the Centre d'études féminines et de genre at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-St. Denis, founder of the CNRS research lab for Gender and Sexuality Studies LEGS, and affiliated Romance Studies Professor at Cornell University. Berger shares her thoughts on the status and implications of reading and writing, the links between deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and their current political relevance and challenges, and she shares her aesthetic experience of Maria Callas' interpretation of Gluck's French version of the 1774 aria "Eurydice," which lead her to reflect about loss, grief, love, and addressing an absent Other beyond the limits of gender.

References in this episode:

Colloquium "Qui a peur de la déconstruction?"
https://institut-du-genre.fr/actualites/qui-a-peur-de-la-deconstruction/#:~:text=Colloque%20organis%C3%A9%20du%2019%20au,les%20sciences%20et%20la%20culture%20%C2%BB.

France culture interview with Anne Berger on the colloquium:
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/avec-philosophie/que-reste-t-il-a-deconstruire-4307698

Anne Emmanuelle Berger, "Reading and its Discontents" OLR 44.2 (2021)

Many thanks to Kellen Corrallo for his editorial assistance.


 

This episode is an interview with Juliet Flower MacCannell, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and English at UC Irvine, and author of The Hysteric’s Guide To The Future Female Subject  (2000), The Regime of the Brother (1991), Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious (1986 and 2014, reprinted), and with Dean MacCannell The Time of the Sign (1982), as well as of many essays.

This third experiment in inviting the interviewee to discuss a work of art that profoundly moved them engages with James Joyce's story "The Dead," first published in 1914 in Dubliners. The episode focuses on the problems of sexual difference and woman that MacCannell examined in her books at the turn of the 21st century, thinking about how they resonate today.

Recent essays by MacCannell mentioned in this episode:

'Sexual (In)difference in Late Capitalism: "Freeing Us from Sex"' in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexualities From Feminism to Trans*. Edited by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkholer.

"Why Culture? A psychoanalytic speculation,"  in Reibung und Reizung. Psychoanalyse, Kultur und deren Wissenschaft Insa Härtel (Hg.) https://textem-verlag.de/media/publication-images/9783864852374_leseprobe_01.pdf

Many thanks to Amelia Gayle and Kellen Corrallo for helping to make this episode happen.