This one-day conference will explore reports of near-death experiences as well as fictions of after-death journeys from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, and film. From Plato’s myth of Er to Foucault’s “death of the author;” from Freudian concepts of repression and foreclosure to contemporary “post-mortem” cinema; from PTSD, trauma, and coma to diverse aesthetic practices, we aim to analyze the current state of the border between the living and the non-living.

Schedule:

10:30 am   Catherine Malabou (Philosophy, Kingston University, UK),
Orpheus’ Gaze and The Thought From Outside (Foucalt, Blanchot and us)

11:15 am   Stefania Pandolfo (Anthropology, UC Berkeley),
Irréaliser: Lacan, Blanchot, Quranic Healing, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

12:00 pm   Adrian Johnston (Philosophy, University of New Mexico),
Night of the Dead Living: Fantasy, Identity, and Subjectivity in Lacanian Psychoanalysis

1:00 pm    Break

2:30 pm    Érik Bullot (Film, École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges),
Truly Alive: Animation, Puppets, and Ventriloquism

3:15 pm    Arne de Boever (American Studies, California Institute of the Arts),
Reanimating the Novel: J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

4:00 pm   Olivia Harrison (French and Italian, University of Southern California),
Jean Genet’s Palestinian Death

4:45 pm   General Discussion

This event is free and open to the public.

Presented by the Anthropology Department and The Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Malabou will also offer a public Una's lecture on April 14, 2014, titled Odysseus' Changed Soul.

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