Nationalism and the Body Politic: Final Call for Papers
Orion Anderson
A LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE CALL FOR PAPERS
Dear Colleague,
The deadline is coming up soon (December 10th) for this exciting conference. However, you still have 10 days to submit your abstract of 200-300 words. We encourage you to share your ideas and to participate in this important event. Please send an abstract ASAP to psychoanaly...@libraryofsocialscience.com.
This conference poses a fundamental question: given the revival of nationalist ideology, what fantasies do these ideas give voice to? One theme is the fantasy of the nation as a body— and the Other (or heretic) as a foreign body that must be extirpated.
DETAILS—AND THE COMPLETE CALL FOR PAPERS APPEAR BELOW.
The Facebook page for Psychoanalysis and Politics is: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=168892079514
A book is planned based on papers presented at the conference.
With regards,
Hugh Galford, Marketing Director
Library of Social Science
718-393-1104
P. S. LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE—recognized as the premier firm organizing book exhibits for scholarly conferences—also promotes and distributes calls-for-papers for meetings we consider significant. For details, see http://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/cfps.html and/or call 718-393-1104.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POLITICS: |
MEENAKSHIE VERMA, Anthropology EHESS, Paris, “Violence, Memory, Amnesia and Propitiation: Anthropological Knowledge of Partition” MARTYN HOUSDEN, Reader in Modern History, University of Bradford, UK, “Erich Fromm on Politics And the Nation” SVEIN TJELTA, Group Analyst/Clinical psychologist, Norway, “The Making of the Iso-Type” | EARL HOPPER, Psychoanalyst, British Psychoanalytical Society, Group Analyst, International Association of Group Psychotherapy, “Traumatised Social Systems and the Basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/ Massification or (ba) I:A/M” SZYMON WRÓBEL, Associate Professor, Inst. of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Inst. for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Warsaw, “Populist Logic and the Concept of the Political. The Case of Poland” |
CALL FOR PAPERS
We cannot, argued Gullestad in Plausible Prejudice (2006), “understand the appeal of right-wing politics if we do not take into account how this rhetoric is underpinned by and embedded in rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas.” She argued that politicians from other than the right-wing populist parties have resisted specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist, rather than their underlying frame of interpretation. Recent news stories appear to lend support to her view: Civil rights campaigners have accused governments, not just in France but across Europe, of adopting anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies to win popular support. The issue of the so-called ‘Ground Zero mosque’ has caused agitation in the US. The Sweden Democrats has been battling up in the recent elections, appealing to hostility towards immigrants and Muslims in particular, employing the slogan “Tradition and Security”.
In relation to the Wolf-man’s phantasies, where the passive role he had played towards his sister had been envisioned as reversed, Freud (1914) wrote that they “corresponded exactly to the legends by means of which a nation that has become great and proud tries to conceal the insignificance and failure of its beginnings.” Given that we are witnessing a revival of nationalist ideas, this conference poses the question of what fantasies these give voice to. It encourages thinking about the nature of the iconic images celebrated and to what forms of violence and what losses are derealized within this framework of interpretation.
One might think in terms of ‘cultures of fear’ (Moïsi (2009) in reference to recent developments in USA and Europe), of fantasies of fusion or ‘imagined sameness’ (Gullestad). Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a body. This metaphor is echoed in Money-Kyrle’s (1939) characterization of ‘group hypochondria’ in connection with the burning of witches and heretics; “The Church, and State united to it, could tolerate no foreign body within itself, and turned ferociously upon any that it found.”
This is an interdisciplinary conference – we invite theoretical contributions and historical, literary or clinical case studies on these and related themes from philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, literary theorists, historians and others. Perspectives from different psychoanalytic schools will be most welcome. Papers must not be previously published and must be available for publication in the planned conference book. Presentations are expected to take half an hour; another 30 minutes is set aside for discussion.
Please send an abstract of 200 to 300 words to
psychoanaly...@libraryofsocialscience.com by December 10th 2010.
Organising Committee
Lene Auestad, Research Fellow, Philosophy, University of Oslo/Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities/ currently London. Jonathan Davidoff, Psychologist and Postgraduate Student in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Centre, London. Karl Eldar Evang, Psychologist from the University of Oslo, Psychoanalyst. Board member of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society. Håvard Nilsen, Intellectual Historian from the University of Oslo.