Mind and Spirit: Psychoanalysis and Spirituality in History, Literature, Photography

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The past decade has seen the publication of a number of distinguished books that collectively seem to signal the re-emergence of psychoanalysis into the critical mainstream of Latin American literary and cultural studies. Our discussion builds on the recent interventions of a diverse group of critics (Bruno Bosteels, Jean Franco, Sibylle Fischer, Rubén Gallo, among others) to address the current salience of psychoanalysis and its relationship to other kinds of critical theory, particularly Marxism, subalternist and decolonial approaches. In the context of what Enzo Traverso has called “left-wing melancholia,” the excavation of freudianism and other forms of psychoanalytic thought represents, among other things, an effort to realize untapped emancipatory potential in the bitter and uncertain aftermath of revolutionary and counter-insurgency violence.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Chair

• Kent L Dickson, California Polytechnic University/ Pomona

Discussant

• Sibylle Maria Fischer, New York University

Individual Presentations

• On the Mexican Exhumation of Freud: Psychoanalysis and Infrapolitics - Michael Martinez-Raguso, Colby College

• Psychoanalysis in Rivera Garza and Roncaglio, or, the 'nostalgic cannibalism of history' - Kent L Dickson, California Polytechnic University/ Pomona