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.

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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.

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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

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Ian Fleming introduced the organization SPECTRE into the world of James Bond late in his game. He was preparing the crossover of his Cold War espionage fiction from literature into film, and the medium of projection became the author’s outside chance for a final reckoning with his opportunism. SPECTRE is a true underworld in which all the figures from the Cold War’s recent past – World War Two – are back, surprise attack, upsetting the deep freeze opposition that denied both the perpetrators and the victims the love that was once live. Fleming reverses the denial of the recent past and awards Bond in the course of the three SPECTRE novels the adult profile of the mourner.

2007

Author Laurence Rickels

Sound engineer Jochen Jezzusek

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

From Russia with Love (1963) should be muted while viewing.

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Rickels follows the Golem as legend to the mapping of cybernetics and science fiction between the Devil and the Death Drive. Can there be thought without a body? Yes, but without the unconscious fantasy we tend to dismiss as sexual difference we are a foregone conclusion – forgone! forgone!

2004

Author Laurence Rickels

Sound engineer Jochen Jezzusek

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

Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920) should be muted while viewing.

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Rickels tracks the career of Walter Benjamin's review-swap friend, psychoanalyst Alexander Mette, who remained in Berlin during the Third Reich. But when Mette tried continuing to pitch work on Dionysus and Apollo it was tossed in 1934. He reworked his language in the Romantic gobbledyspook mode of the Nazi talking heads, publishing studies of contemporary dream books and the Dionysian clown, which between the lines, however, give a record of decisive changes altering psychic reality in record time.

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

Beach Blanket Bingo, William Asher (1965) Trailer

A free version of the film is not yet available online. Watching the film beginning with the first visit to the spaceship is recommended.

The film should be muted while viewing.

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Rickels follows out the postwar career of Wernher von Braun and his V2 rocket as caught on Disney TV. Because Nazi Germany can be seen as the first realization of science fiction, which reached a highpoint in films by Fritz Lang, the genre had to start over again as a postwar American exclusive. But repressed German science fiction was lurking in the margins before returning in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and the redesign of Tomorrowland. P.K. Dick's The Simulacra augured the return of repressed German science fiction and the prospect it carried forward of collective mourning.

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

Excerpt from the 1955 Disney TV show starring Wernher von Braun. The film should be muted while viewing.

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Through Gotthard Günther's probing of American science fiction for the beginnings of a new metaphysics, Rickels folds out the Enlightenment vision of life after death as enrollment in continuing education programs on the outer planets. A new secular afterlife that arrives from outer space in the 2016 SF movie Arrival orbits this Enlightenment introject. But the looping of time cannot elide wishing upon the stars -- and our second nature as daydreamers keeps our No's to the grind of unmourning.

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

Arrival, Denis Villeneuve (2016)

A free version of the film is not yet available online. Watching the film beginning with the first visit to the spaceship is recommended.

The film should be muted while viewing.

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Rickels excavates a sister's crypt in the Picasso corpus, finding a way there illuminated by Henri-George Clouzot's 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso. But it was Clouzot's earlier film, Les Diaboliques, that convinced the artist that this director commanded the science fiction and the fantasy of a wish to watch out for.

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

Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot (1955)

Begin with the scene of the schoolmaster's drowning.

The film should be muted while viewing.

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Rickels narrates the vampire's arrival in the new world inside science fiction. The science fictionalization of the vampire massified undeath through the epidemic of living death. Swarms of zombies crowding out the old-world aristo-vampire offer shooting practice for putting to rest what is already at rest. Science fiction counts down through two deaths, moving resolutely past the deferral position of a first life after death in vampirism to the zombie's second death, which secures the innovations of survival. But while relying on the compass of travel across space and time the decision for survival is easier made than reached.

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

Night of the Living Dead, George Romero (1968)

The film should be muted while viewing.

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