Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin

A new Parrhesia course, starts mid-Jan, details to follow.

Félix Guattari’s Mental Ecology: Between Freedom and Care

With Carlos Segovia.

This course explores the Guattari's concepts of deterritorialization & territorialization in the light of two ideas: freedom & care.

By questioning rigid conservative territories that sacrifice freedom for stability, & capitalism’s random deterritorializations, which reduce everything to exchange relations, Guattari's later writings point up the need to play rhythmically between territory & deterritorialization: caring for things which are finite & fragile, yet being free to explore the new.

Only then, he believes, can new values be created to enrich our subjectivities & existential territories.

We will also ask about the role of chaosmosis (the transition from chaos to cosmos) in relation to the care & freedom of self? Can it open up a form of care based on something more than the acknowledgment of our relational condition – of something even more essential connected tour inherent fragility, our springing from chaos, living for an instant, then dying & dissolving back into chaos?

Also, can chaosmic thinking help us interact with reality in ways previously unimagined?

The later Guattari was convinced it could & conferred increasing relevance on art. For artists, as children and lovers, & also schizophrenics, feel the need to invent the world anew everyday.

Guattari thus spoke of a new aesthetic paradigm. He insisted on the ethical nature of this paradigm: as open-ended, creative existential activity must also be responsible. In parallel with freedom & care, the aesthetic & the ethical stand as two key components of what Guattari calls 'mental ecology' (ME).

ME is as crucial as 'environmental ecology', yet Guattari saw that its own incorporeal species (love, friendship, solidarity, music, cinema, & thought) were menaced by neoliberalism & authoritarianism (as biological species are tpp).

The course focuses on these & related matters, & includes a practical workshop in which all participants will be able to play with this idea of a ME after their own vital experiences.

Art as Disruptive Connector

Leon Brenner’s theory of the dermic drive extends psychoa**lytic theories of the drive: a**l, scopic, oral, invocatory - and now ‘dermic’. The dermic drive, Leon makes clear, is crucial to boundary formations of the self.

Disruptive: Joulia Strauss suggested a disruption via this portrait of Jacques Lacan (as theory dictator) from 2001, in which the skin on Lacan himself figures the inflexion point of a möbius strip: it is both inside and outside, like Leon’s dermic drive.

Connector: For an exhibition at the Museum of Freud’s Dreams in Saint Petersburg in 2003, Joulia and Philipp von Hilger collaborated on the Diskursa**lysemaschine (discourse a**lysis machine). Joulia created a digital möbius strip (seen here as documentation), which the spectator’s eyes could wander along, that included a series of images of psychoa**lytic luminaries. As part of this installation, Philipp’s tracking machine could detect the ‘preferred’ images on which the eyes fell – performing a sort of capture of one’s psychoa**lytic unconscious – and, the image enlarging, key theoretical precepts of the thinker in question got played back. In this 2024 rendering, Leon Brenner also figures as a potential point of the psychoa**lytic lineage.

……

Education: Lacan has been compared to Mao. One sought to subtract thought from the authority of the university discourse, the other from that of state politics. But the movements that felt validated by basing themselves on the authority of these singular names (Lacan, Mao) also failed to move beyond them. Given the crisis of state education that has allowed our current era of remilitarization, we must subtract thought anew. But to what extent does our reliance on such singular authority solve the problems of university discourse? Can we subtract from the universitization of discourse without relying on a singular authority?

Art as Disruptive Connector
In this concluding segement to the book launch of Being Human by Fazil Moradi, Joulia Strauss opened the first episode of a Parrhesia series called art as disruptive connector. This segment aims to show art engaging with each of the topics presented as Parrhesia in its own way.
Art shows its power as disruptive, in this case of false oppositions. And it shows its power as a connector: with other forms of disruptive thinking -- anthropology and philosophy.
A Connector --
First, after a song by Ranav and Deep from the EAU collective, which uses material of a Napalese song that the artists found at the Humboldt archive, Joulia was able to spontaneously connect, with a song from her own tribe, the Maris, which she also found at the Humboldt Archive, recorded on a wax cyclinder. The song's lyrics are about "My soul is burning, what shall I do? I am missing home). The song was recorded from a Mari taken captive during WWI.
Disruptive - art can also work to disrupt the false dicotomies of Empire, - this is what Joulia shows with her "two-faced" statue, one side of which presents Leyla Zana, the other Abdullah Öcalan - both Kurdish resistance fighters. The European Union heralded the first as the good victim, the other as the bad terrorist. The falsity of the opposition is shown by the statue as a two-facedness of the European attitude toward the Kurds, and the insistance of "human rights" in this instance as an instrument of imperial power projection.
The "neo-classical" bust was first exhibited at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 2007. The press reaction in Germany and in Turkey predictably had recourse to the same false dicotomies that the work criticizes, missing this chance at a more in-depth debate.
The next instantiation of the series "art as disruptive connector" will be at Leon Brenner's talk next Wednesday. Join us to find what it is that "psychoa**lysts know about love" -- especially relevant for the age of the tinderization of everything.
Parrhesia will feature an "artist talk" with Joulia Strauss in late January 2025.
**lysis

THIS EVENING in Berlin! The winter (of our discontent) is long. Interrupting it collectively seems imperative. Come to Vierte Welt this Wednesday evening at 7-9 pm to listen to Leon Brenner distill the tactics and strategy of psychoa**lytic treatment. You are also welome to join us online via Zoom.

We will be discussing the distinctive nature of Lacanian psychoa**lysis in terms of its subject matter and act as well as what it passes down to us, as psychoa**lysts, or even as philosophers.

Please register here: https://parrhesia-berlin.net/