What is “Nature” in Human Nature?

Internationale Konferenz zum Jahresthema “Menschsein” (auf Englisch)
In Memoriam Donna Orange

mit Sam Adriaenssens, Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, Max Cavitch, Marcus Coelen, Dominik Drexel, Nadine Hartmann, Esther Hutfless, Ulrike Kistner, Georgia Panteli, Nicaolas Ray, Jil Salberg, Raluca Soreanu, Ruud Welten, Herman Westerink, Jenny Willner

Donnerstag, 12. Juni
16.00-19.00: Panel 1: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Scientific Knowledge
Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, Moderation

16.00: Welcome and Introduction

16.15-17.00: Ulrike Kistner (ZAF): Casuistics and Causality in Psychoanalysis. The Elaboration of an ‘Aetiology of Neurosis’, 1893-1906

17.00-17.45: Ruud Welten (NL): The Conflict between Science and Religion in Freud and Zola

17.45-18.30: Nadine Hartmann (DE): “The Symbolic is not the tomb of matter”: Catherine Malabou on Sexual Difference

19.00: Eröffnung Schauraum 19

Freitag, 13. Juni
10.00-11.30: Panel 2: “Bioanalysis & Biology”
Sam Adriaenssens (BE), Moderation

10.00-10.45: Jenny Willner (DE) and Herman Westerink (NL): Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Freud’s Bio-Analytical Project

10.45-11.30: Raluca Soreanu (UK): Blue Psychoanalysis: Ferenczi’s Exploration of the Sea in Thalassa

Kaffeepause

12.00-13.30: Panel 3 “Human Animal Encounter”
Dominik Drexel (AT), moderation

12.00-12.45 Max Cavitch (USA): Kicking “Spot”; or, The New Psychomorphism

12.45-13.30 Nicolas Ray (UK): Freud, Animals, and ‘Human Nature’: From Hermeneutic Suspicion to the Anthropogenic Machine

Mittagspause

15.30-17.45: Panel 4: Post- and Transhumanism

Georgia Panteli (AT), moderation

15.30-16.15: Esther Hutfless (AT): “You’re not human until you’re posthuman” On Cyborgs, Techno-Bodies and Prosthetic Gods… and Psychoanalysis as a Cyborg Technology

16:15-17.00: Marcus Coelen (DE): Clinical Geologies. The Pre- or Para- of the Human in Psychoanalysis

17.00-17.45: Jill Salberg (USA): Living While Humanity Ws on the Precipice: Psychoanalysis, Ethics and Human Nature

Abschlussdiskussion

What is “Nature” in Human Nature?
A Freudian answer to the question of what defines human beings and humanity consists of more than a reference to the unconscious and the ego not being a master in its own house. It implies also a reflection on the multiplicity of drives, needs, affects, and psychic capacities in functions that human beings may or may not share with animals and other life forms. For Freud, the question of what defines human nature entails a reflection on the continuities and discontinuities between animality and humanity, nature and culture, and on the question of how to think humans’ interactions with larger ecological systems. Notably in the often speculative inquiries into the “nature” of human nature we find Freud applying and further developing key concepts from a body of scientific knowledge, notably physics and biology. The question of what defines human beings can thus not be disentangled from the way psychoanalysis defines its relation to scientific knowledge.

Today, we are in the age of the Anthropocene and transhumanism – which marks nothing less than the beginning of a new civilization. The new constellation of humans and digitalization with the aim of optimizing human capabilities raises important questions that show us the limits of our “old” humanistic values. What role does psychoanalysis play in this discourse, how can psychoanalytic concepts help us to meet these challenges, or to what extent is it inevitable to expand psychoanalysis in the sense of posthuman or postanthropocentric thinking?

The presentations in this conference explore perspectives on these issues from different perspectives and disciplines.