Workshop

The Mirror of Antiquity: The Non-Modern in a Lacanian Perspective

Workshop, 15-16 March 2018 organised by Christian Høgel (CML) and Nicolai von Eggers (Danish Institute at Athens)

In March 2018, Nicolai von Eggers (Danish Institute at Athens) and Christian Høgel (CML) co-organized a workshop on the use and applicability of Lacanian approaches to the non-modern. Based on the impression that psychoanalytic approaches have a tendency to deal with the modern and with the world known to founding figures as Freud and Lacan, the aim of this workshop was to explore the possibilities and difficulties that arise when transposing a psychoanalytic approach to anything beyond the society that formed psychoanalysis. Defining that modern sphere in partly Marxist ways (as depending on a capitalist mode of production), the workshop treated the non-modern through presentations ranging in time from the Old Testament to the early-modern French moralists. Various disciplines came under scrutiny (ancient philosophy, visual representations or rather incarnations, Byzantine literature), exploring such Lacanian concepts as Gaze and Voice, and a more general psychoanalytic vocabulary applied on non-modern texts and images. Approaches ranged from making the non-modern understandable to us in the light of psychoanalysis, to searching for structures and parallels where dialogue seemed plausible.