The field of the ‘posthuman’ emerged in the mid-1990s as a major area of academic enquiry. It examines the extent to which our understanding of ‘the human’ is rapidly being redefined by advances within cybernetics, informatics, artificial intelligence and genetics. Far from simply providing the latest gadgets to be wielded by humans as tool-using animals, posthumanism argues that recent technoscientific developments have a transformative impact on both the (philosophical) concept and the (embodied) experience of subjectivity.
Given this core concern with evolving forms of contemporary subjectivity, it is remarkable that posthumanism’s engagement with psychoanalysis has thus far been so limited. Even critical discourses on the posthuman that are guarded about the emancipatory promise of technology have claimed that psychoanalytic models of subjectivity have been rendered obsolete by recent ‘informational’ theories of the human. Yet this lack of engagement applies in the other direction too. Psychoanalytic cultural theorists such as Slavoj Žižek have tended to find only alarming ethical consequences in the cultural shift that new technologies represent towards an elision of sexual difference and a ‘flattening out’ of the other. Rarely has the engagement with psychoanalysis by the posthuman taken full account of the evolution in psychoanalytic thought since Lacan’s early writings, and conversely, psychoanalysis has seldom engaged with the notion of the posthuman as a means of contextualizing its own clinical work in the contemporary setting.
The aim of Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman is therefore to address this lack of engagement by facilitating a sustained encounter between critical posthumanism and psychoanalysis. Funded by the Departments of Cultural Studies and French and Francophone Studies at The University of Nottingham, it is also an event of the Nottingham Centre for Critical Theory.
All are very welcome to what promises to be an extremely stimulating event! Unwaged pay only £20, waged £30.
Programme
September 7-8th, 2009 ,The University of Nottingham, Arts Centre
Monday 7th September
9:30 Coffee and registration
10:00 Plenary Session 1: John Marks (University of Nottingham): ‘The Biopolitics of Life and Information’
11:15 Coffee
11:45 David Roden (The Open University): ‘Posthumanism and Technogenesis’; Neil Turnbull (Nottingham Trent University): ‘Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects: Psychoanalysis, the Posthuman and Cognitive Science’
13:15 Lunch
14:15 Stefan Herbrechter (Heidelberg) and Ivan Callus (Malta): ‘Hammelette’; Jon Hacket (Sussex): ‘Speculating with Freud’
15:30 Tea
16:00 Plenary Session 2: Jerry Aline Flieger (Rutgers): ‘Fractal Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman ‘Alien’’
19:30 Dinner, Staff Club
Tuesday 8th September
9:30 Scott Krzych (Oklahoma State):‘Phatic Touch, or the Instance of the Gadget in the Unconscious’; Constantina Papoulias (Middlesex): ‘The Inhuman Core of Subjectivity: Psychoanalysis, Relationality and the Other’
11:00 Coffee
11:30 Plenary Session 3: Véronique Voruz (Leicester): ‘Why Psychoanalysis Still Matters: Making Singular Sense in the Era of the Average Man’
12:45 Lunch
13:45 Scott Wilson (Lancaster): ‘The Brain-Dance of the Hikikomori’; Luca Bosetti (The University of Nottingham): ‘Prosthetic A - (d)dictions and Treatments of the Human in Contemporary Life’
15:15 Coffee & closing discussion
Accommodation
All delegates (excluding keynote speakers) are requested to book and pay for their own accommodation.
Provisional reservations have been made in Cripps Hall, one of the university’s halls of residence.
To book your room please contact the Conference Sales Office on: + 44 115 846 8000 as early as possible.
Cripps Hall provides en-suite single room accommodation. Rooms are charged at £43.70 + VAT per person per night. Breakfast is included.
Should you encounter any difficulties in booking accommodation please contact either colin.wright@nottingham.ac.uk or suzanne.dow@nottingham.ac.uk
Directions and Campus Map
Go to : http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/about/campuses/maps.php
Registration
Download a
registration form