Event Date: 4 April 2011
Institute for Contemporary Arts
The Mall
London SW1Y 5AH
Quentin Tarantino and Cinema’s Other Enjoyment
The London Graduate School and the London Society for the New Lacanian School present a Symposium on Quentin Tarantino and psychoanalysis beyond the paternal principle.1-6pm 4th April, Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London
‘Daddy’s dead. Noooo!’ (Tarantino, from Dusk Till Dawn) Tarantino’s movies frequently turn on the abjection of a paternal figure (Marcellus Wallace, Jacob Fuller, Bill, Stuntman Mike), who loses his place and authority to become a redundant figure of consumption and expenditure. Tarantino’s movies themselves, in their restless play of reflexive images and references, are always seeking to produce the maximum in cinematic affect irrespective of the aesthetic unities of generic form, symbolic consistency, realism. This symposium explores the suggestion that Tarantino’s movies best symptomatise a tendency in Hollywood generally where cinema is no longer a vehicle of (anti)Oedipal desire, but a febrile, speculative generator of thrills, pleasures and anxieties swarming along an accelerating death drive which is itself death proof. In Tarantino’s film of the same name, for example, the impotence of itinerant ex-stuntman Mike is the condition of a romance between two iconic automobiles, vehicles not of male potency but an altogether Other jouissance.
INTRODUCTION
Véronique Voruz (the London Society of the New Lacanian School) .
TARANTINO’s GIRLS
Gérard Wajcman (writer, psychoanalyst, curator and art critic. He teaches at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University and is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis)
read by Scott Wilson
[AUDIO HERE]
POST-PHALLIC LIBIDINAL ECONOMIES
Hager Weslati (London Graduate School, Kingston University)
[AUDIO HERE]
SCREEN, DRIVE, ROMANCE
Fred Botting (London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001))
[AUDIO HERE]
PSYCHE, THAT INGLOURIOUS BASTERD
Scott Wilson (London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001))
[AUDIO HERE]
TOUGH LOVE
Marie-Hélène Brousse (practising psychoanalyst in Paris, a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis)
[AUDIO HERE]
