Book Discussion: The Impossible Return – Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning, by Anna Fiszon

Session Submission Type: Book Discussion Roundtable

Brief Description

The Impossible Return is an experiment that aims to bridge critical writing, academic discourse, and the deeply personal. While it is informed by the conventions of autotheory and other types of autobiography, the present book draws inspiration from Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, its equal commitments to lyricism and philosophical rigor; from the passionate statements of the Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky; and from the philosophical flourishes of David Wills’s Prosthesis, a work that explodes many literary sensibilities, every generic expectation, and makes no compromises in its theoretical aims. Intentionally out of tune, broken, and possessed, Nancy, Vysotsky, and Wills convey their devotion to language and characterization. The book ultimately seeks its own trespass, its own particular emancipation from convention, its own psychoanalytic reflections on survival, prosthesis, and mourning. The detours it takes through Brezhnev-era animation, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and opera may seem indulgent, and probably are. But these sections, independently and in concert, offer arguments about the very concepts of reconstruction, repetition, haunting, and cure. They feature perestroika and the phenomenology of “late socialism,” the object-voice as silence, the circular drive accompanying change.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Juliane Fuerst, Centre for Contemporary History (Germany) / Central European U (Austria)

Roundtable Speakers

• Eliot Borenstein, New York U

• Anna Fishzon, Inst for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

• Cate I. Reilly, Duke U

• Victoria Smolkin, Wesleyan U