ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Psychoanalysis has thoroughly transformed the traditional concept of the human. The psychoanalytic findings, such as the discovery of the unconscious, the intersubjective figuration of the self, the subject’s embeddedness in language, to name a few, continue to challenge any narrow or forcefully unifying vision of the self, transforming the social apprehension of the human as much as its aesthetic figuration. The presentations at this seminar fuse all these concerns to propose a perpetual agency of psychoanalysis in conceptualization of what it means to be a human.

Friday, March 24

Megan Obourn, NYU, and Annie Lee Jones, New York Harbor Department of Veterans Affairs
“Mothers, Readers, Race, and the Analyst in Andre Green and D. W. Winnicott”
Yianna Ioannou, CUNY-The Graduate Center
“From Mad/Man to HuMan”
Cristian Melchiore, University of Western Ontario
“The Alien’s Other, The Human: The ‘Anthropological’ Situation in Laplanche”
Lili Hsieh, University of Pennsylvania
“The Degree Zero of Desire: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Feng Meng-Lung’s Buddhist Parable, ‘The Story of Du Zecun’”

Saturday, March 25

Michael Ziser, University of California-Davis
“Animal Mirrors: Lacan, von Uexküll, and Zoosemiosis”
Chris Forster, University of Virginia
“Why the Birds and Bees Don’t Look at Dirty Pictures: Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of Pornography”
Erick S. Sierra, Rutgers University
“The Ecstatic Limits of the Psychoanalytic Subject”
Dorothy Stringer, James Madison University
“Narcissism and Trauma as Limits of the Human in Nella Larsen”

Sunday, March 26

Nataly Tcherepashenets, SUNY-Empire State College
“Beyond the Door: Rediscovering the Multiple Self”
Shirli Sela-Levavi, Rutgers University
“Adoption as Hospitality: A mother’s challenge to Hegelian-psychoanalytic conceptions of otherness in Castel Bloom’s Dolly City”
Brian Bethune, Cuyahoga Community College
“Fortinbras: A Remaindered Subject of the Postmodern Stage: A Lacanian examination of Lee Blessing’s version of Hamlet”
Martin Blumenthal-Barby, Yale University
“The Paradox of Trauma: Hiroshima Mon Amour”