Summer 2023 Summer 2022 Summer 2021 Summer 2020 Spring 2020 Fall 2019

Psychoanalysis and the Trouble with Breathing

Faculty: Patricia Gherovici, Silvia Lippi, and Jamieson Webster

July 19-27 2021, Lisbon

Tuition: €650

The whole world watched in horror when George Floyd was choked to death by a police officer, saying "I can't breathe." This terrifying phrase has returned again and again as if to define the unprecedented year of 2020. It bridges the gap between the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in the United States against police brutality and the air-borne coronavirus whose ravaging effects on the lungs have led to a frenetic rush to procure ventilation machines, both of which are deployed against a backdrop of questions concerning climate crisis and the pollution of the air. Many patients utter the phrase, “I can’t breathe,” which seems to announce a collective psychic cry, a new feeling of panic, whose unconscious roots point to asphyxiating forms of oppression felt in our bodies and in reality. Is there something psychoanalytic thought might specifically bring to bear on the question of breath?

That question, along with readings by the likes of S. Freud, S. Ferenczi, J. Lacan, D. Winnicott, L. Irigaray, Franco “Bifo” Bernardo, Emanuele Coccia, and J. L. Tristani, will guide us through a collective, transversal inquiry into the forces of racism, antiblackness, ecology, plague, anxiety, law, violence, and corporeality that almost compose the air that we struggle to take in today. Intended for clinical practitioners and academic researchers, this course aims to discover what psychoanalysis has to contribute on the question of breathing.  

Seminar and discussions will take place on site at Lisbon’s Fábrica Braço de Prata, and tuition includes full lunch and full dinner each day from Fabrica’s restaurant. If Covid restrictions remain in place, we will do our best to hold the event while maintaining social distancing measures. (There may be a possibility of participating via Zoom if you cannot travel, so please inquire if that interests you.)

To apply, please send to isci@theisci.org a letter of interest, your cv, and a sample of your work (provide a link for large files) and indicate that you are applying to the “Psychoanalysis and the Trouble with Breathing” summer school. Please also indicate the title of summer school in the subject line of your email and combine all written files into one pdf. 

Applications are rolling but initial reviews are underway, so please apply now to guarantee full consideration and in order to arrange institutional funding if applicable. Note that the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry cannot provide financial aid at this time but will do our best to respond to queries about it. 

About the Faculty:

Patricia Gherovici a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor and recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group; Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS); Honorary Member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City; and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome, (2003) winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize, Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (2010), and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference. (2017) She has published with Manya Steinkoler two edited volumes, Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can't (2015) and Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy, (2016) and, with Chris Christian, Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, (2019) Gradiva Award for best edited collection and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize.

Silvia Lippi practices psychoanalysis in Paris, where she has emerged as one of the leading psychoanalytic theoreticians of her generation. In addition to The Decision of Desire (which won the French Prix d’Oedipe)she is the author of the books Rythme et Mélancolie; Freud: La Passione dell Ingovernabile, and Transgression: Bataille et Lacan. She co-edited the books Marx, Lacan: L’acte révolutionnaire e l’acte analytique and Il sesso, l’amore. Conferenza di Milano: Con un saggio di Alain Badiou. She is an associate researcher at the Centre de Recherche Psychanalyse, Médecine et Société at the University of Paris 7; a full clinical psychologist at the psychiatric hospital Barthélémy Durand, in Etampes; and faculty at the Istituto di Ricerca di Psicoanalisi Applicata in Milano and Ancona. Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst and philosopher, she was an actress and dancer with an international career.

Jamieson Webster is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York where she works with children, adolescents, and adults. She teaches at The New School for Social Research and Princeton University, as well as, supervising graduate students through City University's doctoral program in clinical psychology. She is a founding member of Das Unbehagen, an organization that explores psychoanalysis outside of an institutional or organizational framework. She has written for Apology, Cabinet, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Playboy, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, as well as for many psychoanalytic publications. The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis, is published with Karnac (2011). Stay, Illusion!—written with Simon Critchley—is published with Pantheon Books (2013) and Conversion Disorder is published with Columbia University Press (2018). She is currently working on a new book on Jacques Lacan. 

ALSO HAPPENING THROUGH THE ISCI:

Queer Theory Rewilded II 

An Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry and Fåbrica Braço de Prata Summer School

Faculty: Jack Halberstam, Tavia Nyong’o, and Damon Young

July 5-14. 2021, Lisbon 

Tuition: €650 

Queer Theory Rewilded is back for a second run! Queer theory has from the outset raised the question of its own proper subjects and objects, and its ongoing project includes rethinking its foundations, genealogies, and trajectories. This seminar will take up the problem-space of queerness at a time of escalating global crisis. How has queer theory contributed to the decentering of the Western liberal subject, and to the emergence of new imaginaries and forms of solidarity? What can “queer” mean or do at our current conjuncture? What methods and counter-methods are called for to respond to the emergencies of the present?  

Through collective readings of classic and new texts in the history of sexuality and theories of the body and power, we will explore how the encounter between “queer” and “theory” generates possibilities for examining the world and forging a new one. Topics might include queer futurity; kinship; wildness; collectivity; digitality; post-humanism; archives; and fabulation. Halberstam, Nyong’o and Young will offer readings and exercises drawn from a rangy archive of queer theory, and engage seminar participants in debate, thought experiments, writing projects and rigorous discussion filtered through a series of readings, online performances, and images.

The seminar offers an opportunity for students, artists, and faculty at all levels to dive into or immerse themselves further in the questions and methods of queer theory. As the systems that structured the “normal world” reveal their incapacity in the face of global climate and economic crisis, join us in an experimental foray into the intellectual wilds of a “field” that has resisted that denominator and been invested, from the outset, in exploring what lies outside the realms of the apparently possible.

All instruction will take place on site at Fábrica Braço de Prata, and tuition includes full lunch and full dinner from Fabrica’s restaurant on days of instruction. If extensive Covid restrictions remain in place, we will try to hold the event while respecting social distancing measures.  

To apply, please send a letter of interest, your cv, and a sample of your writing or art or other representative work to isci@theisci.org Please also put “Queer Theory Rewilded II Application” in the subject line of your email and combine all written files, including the letter of interest, into one pdf.)  

Applications are rolling but initial reviews will begin in early late January/early February; please apply early to guarantee full consideration and in order to arrange institutional funding if applicable. Note that the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry is unlikely to be able to provide financial aid. 

About the faculty:

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University and the author of the books Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of MonstersFemale MasculinityIn a Queer Time and PlaceThe Queer Art of FailureGaga Feminism: Sex, Genderand The End of Normal, and, most recently, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Halberstam also recently published Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and is currently working on a companion volume titled The Wild Beyond: Art, Architecture, and Anarchy.  

Tavia Nyong’o teaches black and queer studies at Yale University, where he is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater & Performance Studies. He is the author of two books, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, along with numerous articles in academic and art venues. He co-edits the book series Sexual Cultures for New York University Press. 

Damon R. Young is Associate Professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also teaches in the Program in Critical Theory, Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Berkeley Center for New Media. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies and the co-editor, with Nico Baumbach and Genevieve Yue, of “The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism,” a special issue of Social Text, and, with Joshua Weiner, of “Queer Bonds,” in GLQ.

AND ALSO:

Collaborative Experimentation in Sound

An Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry and Fåbrica Braço de Prata Summer School

Faculty: David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner 

July 12-17 2021, Lisbon 

Tuition: €650

David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner will lead participants in multidisciplinary explorations of sound, body, and space, combining traditional and theoretical knowledge with hands-on experimentation in using sound as an art form. How can we approach sound as something other than morphology or sign? What happens when we bracket musical aesthetics?

Participants in this hybrid workshop/seminar will be guided through a process of collaborative research and critical and creative production, with five days of instruction culminating in a public event that will combine performances, readings, demonstrations, and discussions. A fundamental orientation for these collaborative efforts will be that “everyone does everything,” on the understanding that the most fruitful collaborations occur when individuals are able to gain practical experience of every relevant mode of production. Readings, viewings, and listenings will be assigned both prior to and during the workshop, and they will provide artistic and theoretical reference points for our work and discussions. Writing, both individual and collaborative, also will feature prominently, especially with a view toward language as sonic material and practice.

Grubbs and St. Werner look forward to working with individuals with diverse skills representing a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, and encourage people to apply who have experience in sonic arts, sound studies, electronic and computer music, performance, dance, installation, art history, critical theory, and literature (particularly poetry and experimental writing practices).

All instruction as well as the performance will take place on site at Fábrica Braço de Prata; tuition includes full lunch and full dinner from Fabrica’s restaurant each day. Enrollment will be capped to ensure a seminar atmosphere. If Covid restrictions remain in place, we intend to hold the event while respecting social distancing measures.  

To apply, please send to isci@theisci.org a letter of interest, your cv, and a sample of your work (provide a link for large files) and indicate that you are applying to the “Collaborative Experimentation in Sound” summer school. (Please also indicate the title of summer school in the subject line of your email and combine all written files into one pdf.)  

Applications are rolling but initial reviews will begin in early January, so please apply early to guarantee full consideration and in order to arrange institutional funding if applicable. Note that the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry cannot provide financial aid at this time and may be slow to respond to inquiries about it.

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of The Voice in the HeadphonesNow that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all Duke University Press) and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists (Pioneer Works Press). Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums, appeared on more than 190 releases, and was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait. He is also known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch. 

Jan St. Werner is an artist and electronic music composer based in Berlin. Widely recognized as one half of the electronic music group Mouse on Mars, he has also pursued a solo career creating music under his own name as well as Lithops, Noisemashinetapes, and Neuter River. Starting in the mid-1990s as part of Cologne’s A-Musik collective, St. Werner has released a steady stream of records both as a solo artist and with Mouse on Mars. He has collaborated with Oval’s Markus Popp as Microstoria and contributes music for installations and films by visual artist Rosa Barba. During the 2000s Werner acted as the artistic director for STEIM, the Dutch Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music. In 2013 St. Werner released Blaze Colour Burn, the first of a series of experimental recordings called the Fiepblatter Catalogue. St. Werner has been a visiting lecturer at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) and currently serves as Professor for Interactive Art and Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg.