I want to invite you to join my 5-week workshop at Parrhesia Berlin titled ‘Foucault and Derrida in Couples Therapy with Freud’. We start Tuesday Oct 18 and continue weekly until Nov 15, online (Zoom) and in-person (Berlin).
In the workshop we will discuss key factors in Foucault and Derrida’s long polemical argument over the question of madness; an argument that almost ended their friendship. Freud’s psychoanalysis will function as the common ground that would bring these two thinkers back together, (un)happily ever after.
Please try and register soon at https://parrhesia-berlin.net/courses/autumn-2022
About the workshop:
Michel Foucault’s innovative approach to madness in History of Madness greatly impacted the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and gave rise to the contemporary field of ‘mad studies’. It ignited a long dispute with Jacques Derrida and eventually drove Foucault to harshly criticize Derrida in the second edition of his book, deeply affecting their friendship. In response, Derrida rebuked the novelty of Foucault’s project in a series of essays, finally subordinating it to the same discourse it came to denounce: psychoanalysis. In this workshop we will discuss key factors in Foucault and Derrida’s long polemical argument over the question of madness. By doing so, the intersection of Foucault’s theory of madness with Freud’s psychoanalysis will be shown to be very fruitful territory. In particular, there will be a focus on Foucault’s philosophical elaboration of a constitutive exclusion underlying the discourse on reason and unreason, as well as his insistence on that exclusion’s singular relationship with madness. This notion will then be developed in psychoanalytic terms augmenting the constitutive gesture that Freud attributed to the plurality of subjective structures elaborated in his metapsychology.
* No prior knowledge on Foucault, Derrida or Freud is needed.
Hope to see you there.
Leon Brenner 