Pleasuring Freud – A week long festival of talks, films, texts and discussions

30th November – 5th December 2020

2020 marks 100 years since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s landmark text Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The publication of this work marked a significant moment in his theoretical development, it is within these pages that Freud formulated the dialectic between Eros and Thanatos within the human psyche.

Glasgow School of Art and The Drouth will be marking the occasion with a week-long online programme which will reach its climax on Saturday  5th December with an online symposium.

Throughout the week, we will publish, host and curate creative and critical gestures which respond to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and its afterlives, from the vantage point of our contemporary moment. A body of the work will be published by The Drouth as part of our week-long séance with the legacy of Freud and this significant text.

Our scope is open and polymorphous and as we are embracing academic, theoretical, critical, artistic and creative reflections, reassessments, contestations and comments in textual, visual and multimedia form. As a publication which takes the interrogation of thought and culture seriously, the aim is always to encourage the expression of ideas which transgress the boundaries of discipline, form and convention.

Monday 30th November – Friday 4th December – The Drouth will post  films, artworks, talks and texts online each day. –see the footage of Sigmund Freud posted here today.

Saturday 5th December  2pm -5.30pm– Online Symposium                                                4 speakers will present a 15-20 minute talk each on Beyond the Pleasure Principle or a related aspect/topic. There will be ample time for discussion between , around and after the talks from the participants –and questions taken from the online audience too.

Tickets will be available on eventbrite here >

Programme of speakers

Pippa Goldschmidt  –     Uncanny Pleasure: what the uncanny teaches us about boundaries

Laura Gonzalez –           Performing Lacan: Jouissance & the Pleasure Principle 

Isabel Millar –                Time and Taboo: Death Drive in Outer Space

Lorens Holm  –              Beyond the Pleasure of Architecture

Biogs of Speakers

Pippa Goldschmidt is a writer based in Edinburgh and Frankfurt. She has a PhD in astronomy and writes fiction, essays and creative non-fiction exploring science and scientific practice. Her novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space were both originally published by Freight Books. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in a variety of places, most recently Litro, Mslexia, and the Times Literary Supplement. She’s a writer in residence at STIS (the science, technology and innovation studies unit in the University of Edinburgh).Her latest project is co-editing (with Dr Gill Haddow and Dr Fadhila Mazanderani from STIS) Uncanny Bodies, an anthology inspired by Freud, cyborgs and the history of Edinburgh, published by Luna Press in August 2020.

Isabel Millar is a philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist. She received her PhD  in psychoanalysis and philosophy from Kingston University, School of Art in 2020. Her thesis The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence is forthcoming as a monograph with the Palgrave Lacan Series. Her work has been published in Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, Vestigia Journal, JCFAR Journal, Stillpoint Magazine and forthcoming publications for the Courtauld Institute of Art, Routledge, Precog Magazine and the Palgrave Lacan Series’.

Laura González is an artist, writer, yoga teacher and an Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Her work inhabits the space between medical humanities, psychoanalysis, performance and Eastern thought, investigating knowledge production and the body of the hysteric. She has published books on madness, seduction, intersemiotic translation and performance and is currently writing one on hysteria. She is also translating Freud’s case histories into one-to-one durational works and exploring the dramaturgical potential of a breath practice.

Lorens Holm’s research is concerned with reconciling psychoanalytic thought on the self with contemporary architectural practice. My research takes as given that architectural space – the space that is the product of human work and labour and that is the chief constituent of our artificial world – is in a dialectical relation to how we think about ourselves as subjects of spatial experience. I teach architecture design and theory at University of Dundee, where I am also research lead.