Lutecium Psychoanalytic Group Seminar with Katerina Kolozova & Creston Davis

Lutecium Psychoanalytic Group Presents: 

San Francisco, California

THE SYMPTOM OF HISTORY’S DEADLOCK; OR, THE FEMINO-PSYCHOANALYTIC BREAKOUT!

A Seminar by Katerina Kolozova & Creston Davis

The Symptom:

There’s an old joke, “How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?”  The answer, “Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change!”  As my friend, Bruce Fink nicely glosses this joke, the problem here is that it supposes the patient actually wants to change.  Yet Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis maintains the opposite stance, namely that the patient may say they want to be relieved of his or her symptoms, but in fact, the patient not only doesn’t want to change, they more precisely enjoy their symptoms because as Bruce Fink says, “they provide satisfaction of one kind or another, even though it may not be obvious to outside observers or even to the individual saddled with the symptoms.”[1]  Of course there are many different kinds of symptoms: obsessive-compulsive behavior, gambling, alcohol, drug, sex addiction, and so forth.

But this seminar will begin with a symptom organized by the general state of things in our time and from which we are all suffering and, yes, even enjoying.  The symptom could be called something like, a universal loss of desire.  The symptom is Zombie, a living death! Moreover this “Zombie” state is a symptom that maintains that most of us have lost our desire to live (even if we don’t recognize this loss).

History has arrived at an uncanny deadlock in which all areas of life, from social and economic exchange (capitalism), to the overly rationalized work and play spaces, to mass pharmaceutical addiction, to political pretense, to global energy and climate crisis, education and religious regimes, to a suffocating  “traditional family” Christian idealization, and even the food we eat.  On every level our lives have hit a deadlock that neutralizes desire to live a healthy, fulfilled life.  This seminar will take as its starting point this Zombie symptom of desire’s death that plagues our existence.  There are many ways that a symptom can be exposed, so our seminar will focus on the core-psychoanalytical concept of “The Real” that is, the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language.  The “Real” always already was birthed in the primordial pre-consciousness state and so it remains in a state of loss and yet its presence elusively persists and haunts language, our identity, the core truth of life as such.  In particular, we will focus our attention on the work of Feminist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst, Katerina Kolozova’s work on how the “Real” functions as she takes her cues from Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Francois Laruelle, and Judith Butler.

This seminar will have two sessions:

1-    “The Real: Freud, Lacan, Zizek, & Laruelle” [Saturday, January 14]

2-    “The Real: A Feminist and a Non-Philosophical Take” [Sunday, January 15]

Seminar Leaders:

Dr. Katerina Kolozova Professor of philosophy, gender studies, and psychoanalytic theory at the University American College-Skopje. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and besides in her home institution, she also teaches at several universities in Former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria (Universities of Skopje, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Sofia). During 2008-2009, Katerina Kolozova was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric-Program of Critical Theory at the University of California-Berkeley. She is the author of The Lived Revolution: Solidarity with the Body in Pain as the New Political Universal (2010; in English),  The Real and ‘I’: On the Limit and the Self (2006; in English), Conversations with Judith Butler: The Crisis of the Subject” with Judith Butler and Zarko Trajanovski (2002 in English and in Macedonian), The Death and the Greeks: On Tragic Concepts of Death from Antiquity to Modernity (2000 in Macedonian), and editor of a number of books from the fields of gender studies and feminist theory, among which the latest co-edited together with Svetlana Slapshak and Jelisaveta Blagojevic Gender and Identity: Theories from/on Southeastern Europe, Belgrade: Belgrade Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center and Athena Network, 2006 (in English). She is also Editor in Chief of the Journal in Politics, Gender and Culture Identities, member of the Non-Philosophical Society (ONPHI), of AOIFE and the European Network for Gender and Women’s Studies -ATHENA (now AtGender).  She is working on two publications including a monograph entitle The Cut of the Real (forthcoming with Columbia University Press with an Introduction by Creston Davis), and an edited volume on Feminist and Queer theory with Creston Davis & Margaret McLaren.

Dr. Creston Davis is based in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.  He is the author of Truth After the Death of Meaning and The Contradictions of America: A Mediation on Jefferson’s Monticello.  He has co-authored, Paul’s New Moment (with Slavoj Zizek & John Milbank) and The Monstrosity of Christ and edited Hegel and the Infinite (with Clayton Crockett and Slavoj Zizek), and ­Theology and the Political­ (with Zizek and Milbank).  He is on faculty at the Lutecium Psychoanalytic Group (San Francisco) and is working on a book with Katerinia Kolozova and Margaret McLaren on Feminist and Queer theory along with his book on Hegel forthcoming with Columbia University Press.

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[1] Bruck Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory & Technique, (Harvard University Press, 1997) p. 4.

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