Neurodiversities | Cate I. Reilly: Cruel Translation: Psychoanalysis and Worlding

April 12, 2019
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CATE I. REILLY (Assistant Professor of Literature) asks: Is it possible to think the global dissemination of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century on the basis of a "cruelty" (Grausamkeit) imagined by Freud himself and structurally connected to the diverse and asynchronous translation project by which psychoanalysis was made legible on the international stage? This paper interrogates how psychoanalysis and its institutional concretizations (for example: the IPA, Berlin Psychoanalytic Association, Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina) not only engaged with practical considerations of language in localized contexts, but also produced a picture of the world in turn – a psychoanalytic cartography of sovereign territories and regional networks alike. The legacy of psychoanalytic "worlding" (modalisation, Derrida) is an instructive prelude, warning, and provocation to how a multi-national neurodiversity and its attendant lexicon of difference might be understood.

Part of tgiFHI is a speaker series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretative social sciences and arts the opportunity to present on their current research to interlocutors in their fields.

This event is also part of a two-day symposium, “Neurodiversities,” presented by the CHCI Medical Humanities Network and the Duke Health Humanities Lab @ FHI. Co-sponsored by FHI Humanities Futures, DIBS/FHI Neurohumanities Research Group; UNC Institute for Arts & Humanities & HHIVE.