Workshop and research discussion
Saturday 21 February, 2pm-5.30pm
St John’s College, Oxford
Papers explore the mother’s body as reference-point in art and in psychoanalytic thought. Papers by the speakers may be pre-circulated to registered attendees and only presented in short version at the meeting. Responses will be offered, and followed by open discussion with the audience.
This is an in-room meeting only and public video-attendance is not provided. To attend please register, giving full name and affiliation (academic, professional, or other – please specify) at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com. Venue will be confirmed to registrants beforehand.
Speakers:
Louise Braddock (Independent Scholar): ‘”It’s the body, stupid”: Where else can projection be?’
Jarrad Felgenhauer (Seattle): ‘Hegel and Feminist Metaphysics’
Charlie Gere (Lancaster): ‘Human Technicity and Maternal Presence and Absence’.
Respondents:
David Collins (Cambridge) and Susanne Herrmann-Sinai (Magdalen College School).
Programme:
2.00 Introduction
2.10 Charlie Gere, ‘Human Technicity and Maternal Presence and Absence’
2.40 Louise Braddock, ‘”It’s the body, stupid”: Where else can projection be?’
3.10 David Collins and Susanne Herrmann-Sinai: responses so far.
3.30 Tea
4.00 Jarrad Felgenhauer, ‘Hegel and Feminist Metaphysics’
4.30 David Collins, Susanne Herrmann-Sinai, Charlie Gere: further responses.
4.45 Discussion: round-table and audience.
Abstracts
Louise Braddock, ‘”It’s the body, stupid”: Where else can projection be?’
Wollheim writes, we are at home in our mind ‘somewhat as in a body… if this is the image that the mind sees when it sees itself this is in part at least because it is this image that the mind draws when it draws itself.’ His remark points to the mother’s body as total environment for the infant’s nascent consciousness. I argue that, from a position of naturalism, there is nowhere else for its mind to ‘be’ and no other reference-point from which to understand itself. Phantasy alone can’t do the job; it is a placeholder for what really goes on.
Jarrad Felgenhauer, ‘Hegel and Feminist Metaphysics’
This paper aims to examine positive resonances of two philosophies that rarely go together: Hegelian and contemporary feminist metaphysics. My focus in the paper is Hegel’s famous thesis that we must understand the true “not only as substance, but equally as subject,” as a way to explore a shared fundamental goal between the two approaches. Namely, the undermining of binary metaphysical approaches in favour of understanding reality as a non-reductive and entangled intra-activity of nature-culture, materiality-language, subjectivity-objectivity, and so forth which I believe provides fruitful ground for further exploration.
Charlie Gere, ‘Human Technicity and Maternal Presence and Absence’
The paper starts with Sigmund Freud’s FORT/DA game and its subsequent development in Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ and in Lacan’s ‘objet petit a’ and connects this to the latter’s emphasis on the primordial biological discord between us and our environment, arising out of the premature birth necessitated by human bipedality, and out of which language and culture emerge. This is linked to ideas about the fundamental relation between bipedality and technicity developed by Leroi Gourhan, Derrida, and Stiegler and to Heidegger’s tool analysis from Being and Time. Human technicity is thus understood as a response to maternal presence and absence.
Please register at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com.
After Wollheim: The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project, phase 3 