Faculty House, Columbia University
Psychoanalytic Studies Program at ICLS
Affect Studies University Seminar
Affects have troubled psychoanalysis since its inception. Freud privileged the decipherment of the unconscious text and the analysis of its mechanisms and procedures over a psychology of emotional inner life. And yet the enigmatic “quantum of affect” traverses the text of psychoanalysis since Freud’s Project of 1895 and the most fundamental mechanism called “identification” is defined by him as an “affective binding”.
My talk will trace some of the vicissitudes of this enigmatic affect-object in psychoanalysis by referring to Freud, Lacan, Klein, Bion and others. I will explore how a psychoanalytic perspective—both clinically and theoretically—is able to remain sceptical in relation to the vocabulary of affect, feeling, and emotion as well as in relation to the evidence of their truthfulness without giving in to a tendency of intellectualisation.
I will try to show that psychoanalysis, in this perspective, is not a theory of affects, that is has—paradoxically—not much to say about them and is still by affected by them and pushed into the construction of a matter of its own, a peculiar stuff, an impure amalgam of ethics and language.
Marcus Coelen teaches comparative literature at the University of Munich and is a practicing psychoanalyst. He has taught psychoanalytic and literary theory at Columbia University, Université Paris Cité, Tel Aviv University and elsewhere. He translated, edited and commented extensively on authors such as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille.
Please RSVP and/or direct any questions to the seminar rapporteur, Alec Joyner (alj2140@columbia.edu).
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
