Talk

MFA Photography, Video and Related Media present Leo Bersani and Daniel Heller-Roazen, who will talk about Paola Mieli's book, Figures of Space: Subject, Body, Place (Agincourt Press, 2017). Their presentations will be followed by a discussion with the author. Refreshments will be served.

Figures of Space: Subject, Body, Place by Paola Mieli offers a radically new perspective on the relation between the human subject and space. Works by artists, filmmakers, architects as well as writers and performers are investigated through the lenses of Freud’s and Lacan’s inquiries into the topography of the psyche and the strategies it deploys to acknowledge its orientation and "trouble" its boundaries.

Leo Bersani is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of California Berkeley. His books include: The Future of Astyanax (Character and Desire in Literature), Baudelaire and Freud, Forms of Being (Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity), Caravaggio’s Secrets, The Freudian Body, The Culture of Redemption, Arts of Impoverishment, Intimacies (co-authored with Adam Philips), Is The Rectum a Grave?, Homos and Thought and Things.

Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. His books include Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World and Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers and No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming.

Paola Mieli is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York. A founding member and president of Après Coup Psychoanalytic Association and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, she has written on psychoanalysis and its relation to culture, literature arts and politics. Her books include: Being Human: The Technological Extensions of the Body (co-editor), A Silver Martian: Normality and Segregation in Primo Levi's Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge and Figures of Space, Subject, Body, Place.