In his lecture, Laurence Rickels reenters the exchange between Walter Benjamin and Alexander Mette, which led to Mette’s review of Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in Imago and brought Benjamin to consider the clinical picture of schizophrenia, the topic of Mette’s dissertation-book, which he in turn reviewed. While this contact underscores Benjamin’s interest in the clinical picture of psychosis (he attended at this time to Schreber’s Memoirs and to Freud’s analysis of the document), which Rickels sees as fundamental to Benjamin’s understanding of the melancholic mode of allegory, Rickels’ emphasis this time lies on the research Mette pursued as bona fide psychoanalyst in Nazi Berlin. After his 1934 book on the psychoanalytic elaboration of Nietzsche’s Apollo/Dionysus dyad was censored, he turned in a 1939 study to the interpretation of dreams recorded during the recent past. What links and separates the German dreams from 1917, 1926, and 1935 amounts to an allegory of the instrumentalization of adolescence in the Third Reich, between its reabsorption within the fairytale of childhood and its elevation to the position of superego. His final psychoanalytic study in 1940, which was also his last publication during the Nazi years, consolidated the dream insights in a “depth psychological” interpretation of the childish clown as the ultimate delegate of Dionysus.

Speaker Bio:

Laurence Rickels, born in 1954, lives and works in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemburg. He studied English, German, comparative literature, and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Freie Universität Berlin, and Princeton University (Magister Artium 1978), receiving a doctorate in German Literature from Princeton in 1980, with the thesis The Iconic Imagination: Pictorial Signs in Lessing, Keller, and Kafka.

1981 – 2011: Professor of German Literature and Comparative Literature, and extraordinary Professor of Art and Film at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Since 2005 he has been the Sigmund Freud Professor of Media Theory and Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS), and a Guest Professor at Art Center College, Universität zu Köln, New York University, Otis College of Art and Design, and Umeå University.

Since April 2011, Laurence Rickels has been Professor of Art and Theory and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe.

Selected Publications:

• I Think I Am. Philip K. Dick, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010
• The Devil Notebooks, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008
• Ulrike Ottinger. The Autobiography of Art Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008  [Ulrike Ottinger. Eine Autobiografie des Kinos, Berlin: bbooks 2007]
• Nazi Psychoanalysis (Bd 1 Only Psychoanalysis Won the War; Bd. 2 Crypto-Fetishism; Bd. 3 Psy Fi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2002
• The Vampire Lectures, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999  [Vampirismus Vorlesungen, Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose 2007]
• The Case of California, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991- Aberrations of Mourning, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988  [Der unbetrauerbare Tod, Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1990]

 

A more detailed list of publications is available on Laurence Rickels’ Wikipedia page.

Original biography published by the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (available here)