A thematic project devised by Vanessa Ohlraun (October-November 2011) with Pierre Bismuth, Felix Ensslin and Robert Pfaller

Pierre Bismuth – Melanchotopia
Pierre Bismuth in conversation with Anne-Claire Schmitz
October 13, 2011, 19h

In the past few years, Pierre Bismuth has regularly integrated dynamics of randomness and irrationality as a strategy in developing determined and rational ideas. Recent works such as Following the right hand of… or En suivant la main gauche de Jacques Lacan – l’âme et l’inconscient, 2010 include play, fortune and hazard. Anne-Claire Schmitz will talk to him about these notions and question their capacity to function as rule setters within his artistic practice.

Fiction is Just an Interpretation of Reality
A workshop by Pierre Bismuth
October 14, 2011, 10-18h

In this workshop, Pierre Bismuth will engage the students in a process of interpretation through observation and the creation of narratives. Following two specific protocols, students will wander through the city, registering a moment, an incident, a conversation and elaborate on it in writing. In this process, the ordinary is to be transformed into fiction, or semi-fiction, extrapolating from an observation an imaginary world that is shaped by the student/writer’s perspective – revealing a multifaceted collective unconscious.

Is it not amazing to what degree our recent culture experiences enjoyment as unbearable – especially the enjoyment of the other? How does it come that objects and practices which, until recently, had been sources of pleasure and elegance – such as drinking, smoking, studying freely without restrictions, wearing furs, adult language, sex etc. – now are regarded as embarrassments and threats? Why are we so anxious? And what would be necessary to call the time before we die a life?

What We Wish and What We Need
A Workshop by Robert Pfaller
October 21, 2011, 10-18h

Is pleasure an easy thing? Are human beings by their very nature hedonist, and can only education bring them to pursue some higher goals? Why is it then that some epochs – like ours – have such a difficult relationship with pleasure? What does it mean in political terms if we are unable to claim what life can provide us with? Questions like these will be presented and discussed, based on texts by Epicurus, Epictetus, Benedict de Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, Alain Badiou, Bertolt Brecht, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek and others. (Copies and a relevant movie will be provided.)

The Artist and the Psychoanalyst: Two Sides of the Same Discourse?
A Public Lecture by Felix Ensslin
October 27, 2011, 19.30h

Jacques Lacan famously created the four discourses of the master, the hysteric, the university and the analyst. Absent from this list is the artist. The talk will approach the question if in fact Lacan’s theory of art is implied in his theory of the psychoanalyst. Since the victorious days of Critical Theory it has been a commonplace that good art deals with the „non-identical“, with that which has no place in the pseudo-ontological constructions of reality of our social world or within the discourses of our contemporary lien social. Lacan offers this as a description of a discourse: it is a social bond. The social bond of psychoanalysis is a peculiar social bond, one that seems to exist only in its negation – bringing it close again to a thought of non-identity. Yet it might be possible that psychoanalysis offers us a way to bring this thought of subversion and non-identity together with a constructive side: e.g. in the making of art. If this is the case, then each making of art is equivalent with making an artist; just as each analysis in the discourse of the analyst is equivalent with making an analyst.

The Artist and the Psychoanalyst: Two Sides of the Same Discourse?
A Workshop by Felix Ensslin
October 28, 2011, 10-18h

In this workshop the issues of the public lecture of the previous evening will be discussed in more detail in conjunction with relevant readings by Jacques Lacan.