[Discussion] CFP: Psychoanalysis, Community, and Language (6/30/05; APCS, 11/4/05-11/6/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: d-bilsky@northwestern.edu

Proposal for Panel
PSYCHOANALYSIS, COMMUNITY, AND LANGUAGE

For The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS)
Annual Conference on PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COMMUNITY

November 4-6, 2005 at Rutgers University

Plenary Speakers: Willy Apollon and Eric Santner

Dana Bilsky, Northwestern University, Panel Chair

Popular notions of language locate successful communication in eloquent 
speech
or elegant writing. Our criticism of public figures suggests that an
inarticulate speaker, prone to malapropism, may be unfit to represent the
interests of a given community. Yet psychoanalysis contends that apparent
linguistic failure conveys unconscious intent and latent meaning. In 
what ways
are communities constituted by these unconscious exclusions that linguistic
misfires embody or point up? How might a more perceptive apprehension of
infelicitous speech performances yield new insight into the conflicts 
with which
communities are riven?

This panel seeks explorations of linguistic failure�for example, 
slips of
the tongue and the pen, mispronouncing, misspelling, mishearing, combining
words, substituting names as introducing to the public sphere that which 
cannot
be admitted in ordinary social discourse. Papers might ask, for example, 
how an
unintentional speech act mimics or departs from the logic of an hysterical
symptom, parapraxis, joke, or dream in bringing an unconscious goal into 
social
reality. How might apparent mistakes communicate the repressions, anxieties,
inexpressible aggressivity, and wishes on which communities are founded? 
Or, by
what perversions of language are unspeakable things misspoken?

Discussions of literary texts, cultural artifacts, historical archives,
ethnographic and clinical material are equally welcome. Paper proposals 
should
attempt to bring a psychoanalytic methodology to bear on a linguistic
phenomenon�s place within the norms of a community broadly defined
(linguistic, political, etc.). Psychoanalytic approaches could include 
but are
in no way limited to Freud's discussions of condensation and displacement,
Ferenczi�s discussions of supposed mistakes, Lacan's discussions of
aphasias, Abraham and Torok's discussions of encrypted words, and Bollas's
discussions of normotic illness, to name a few.

Paper proposals should be up to 300 words and sent as an e-mail 
attachment in
Word to d-bilsky@northwestern.edu by June 30, 2005.



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