Unconscious Berlin

08/08/2024

🎶✨ Join this evening for a lecture and musical experience: “MUSIC/DRIVE” in Berlin! 🎵✨

🕖 7pm CET
📍 Kreuzberg
📩 DM for invite!

See you there! 🎉

06/08/2024

🚗✨ Join us for an exciting event exploring the connection between drive and music! 🎶✨

We all know the drive influences everything we do and are as humans, just like music. But how do they relate? Do they touch each other, or is there a curious non-relation, maybe even a “s*xual relationship”?

Come for a short speculative talk on music and drive—with live music!—and stay for an open conversation. Bring your own musical examples for an even richer discussion! 🎵

📅 Date: 8.8
🕒 Time: 7 pm CET
📍 Location: register to receive address in Berlin

Don’t miss this unique blend of insight and tunes! See you there! 🎼👫

Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious, and is currently working on Drive/Music, a book about music and the legacy of the Freudian concept of “death drive.” Since 2019, Brodsky serves as director of the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, which fosters experimental collaborations between artists and scholars at the University of Chicago and around the world. He is also executive editor of the biannual journal/magazine Portable Gray, and runs the music-sound-performance initiative Gray Sound.

19/08/2023

Thank you Emma Lieber for visiting us in Berlin and talking to us about q***rness and childhood.

29/07/2023

The talk

24/07/2023

In-person talk with Dr. “Love, Drugs and Libido” to be held in Berlin this Saturday (29th 6pm) hosted by .berlin.

Register here for an invitation for the in-person event in Neukölln (also link in bio):

https://forms.gle/n1TDBkg7YSSayHVFA

OR JOIN THE LIVE STREAM on .berlin Instagram.

In this talk Nathan will discuss how the trade in altered states of consciousness, particularly in the form of psychedelics, draws attention to the contradictions and inconsistencies that characterize the status and stakes of the subject in neoliberal society. Nathan will suggest that psychoanalysis can be useful in understanding the history of psychedelics and their implications for the human experience, elaborating their therapeutic value and impact on our understanding of contemporary forms of suffering and enjoyment.

20/07/2023

Join .berlin for their first in-person guest lecture "Love, Drugs, and Libido" with Nate Gorelick.

REGISTER for invitation for the in-person session in Neukölln (link in bio):

https://forms.gle/n1TDBkg7YSSayHVFA

Blurb:
The intermediary decades between the first and new wave of institutionally sanctioned psychedelics enthusiasm saw the displacement of psychoanalysis by behaviorism and the new therapeutics of adaptation. This shift away from psychoanalysis and towards behaviorism reflects a broader trend in the neoliberal economy towards the commodification of mental health and wellbeing. This increasing corporatization of psychedelics is attempting to remake them into devices for the governability of individuals and populations.

In this talk Nathan will discuss how the trade in altered states of consciousness, particularly in the form of psychedelics, draws attention to the contradictions and inconsistencies that characterize the status and stakes of the subject in neoliberal society. Nathan will suggest that psychoanalysis can be useful in understanding the history of psychedelics and their implications for the human experience, elaborating their therapeutic value and impact on our understanding of contemporary forms of suffering and enjoyment.

29th of July, 6pm, Neukölln, Berlin.

Also LIVE streamed on Instagram.

01/07/2023

We’re coming back this summer with some exciting events in Berlin. First up is Nate Gorelick on “Love Drugs and Libido”. 29th of July in NK. See you there.

21/05/2023

This is going to be an interesting talk: s*xuality beyond consent.

In this talk, Dr. Leon Brenner will sit down with Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou to discuss her book and the concept of "limit consent" - a q***r form of consent that is about risking experience and soliciting the future.

17/01/2023

Lecture on Lacan’s non conclusive binary in his thesis on gender. THURSDAY 6pm in-person in Berlin and online.

With Calum Neill (Edinburgh). In English.

Register for free .berlin or arrive in-person at IPU Lecture Hall 1 (Stromstraße 2).

Abstract:
The Lecture will explore Lacan’s reformulation of two of Freud’s key myths- that of Oedipus and that of the primal horde- and will show how Lacan fruitfully offers us a radically new conception of gender. This new conception not only contests the naturalism of the male/female binary, but unearths a radical political potential in our rethinking of s*xuation which requires an unshackling from any identity politics.

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18/10/2021

psychoanalytic love letters
_________

23/08/2021

Donna J. Haraway, "When Species Meet":

“Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism.

First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut.

The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inflicted that cruel cut too.

The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too.

I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well”
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22/08/2021

Some people believe that many psychological symptoms intensify during the two days of the full moon phase.

In the Northern mythologies we can find the stories of werewolves - human beings who transform into a wolf on the very night of a full moon.

The mythological descriptions of these transformations indicate that some kind of psychotic processes were present in the mythological people changing into werewolves.

As if a full moon was somehow causing „insomniac psychosis”.

Nowadays still many people complain about the insomniac nights, depressive moods and emotional upheavals on these specific nights of the month.

Also - at least a half of .berlin team are metaphorically werewolves suffering from a full moon insomnia 😉
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17/08/2021

Lauren Berlant:

Identity is marketed in national capitalism as a property. It is something you can purchase, or purchase a relation to. Or it is something you already own that you can express: my masculinity, my q***rness. But identity need not be simply a caption for an image of an unchangeable concrete self. It is also a theory of the future, of history.

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***r

24/06/2021

“It [anxiety] is something that is situated outside our bodies, a fear, but a fear of nothing that the body, the mind included, can provide a reason for. In short, the fear of fear! A lot of these fears and anxieties, at the level at which we perceive them, have something to do with s*x. Freud used to say that, for the speaking animal called Man, s*x is without remedy and without hope. One of the analyst’s tasks is to find, in the patient’s speech, the knot between anxiety and s*x, that great unknown.” 

Lacan - “Freud Forever, an Interview with Panorama” (1974)
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