Laurence A. Rickels

Since 1974, German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has created a substantial body of films that explore a world of difference defined by the tension and transfer between settled and nomadic ways of life. In many of her films, including Exile Shanghai, an experimental documentary about the Jews of Shanghai, and Joan of Arc of Mongolia, in which passengers on the Trans-Siberian Express are abducted by Mongolian bandits, she also probes the encounter with the other, whether exotic or simply unpredictable. In Ulrike Ottinger Laurence A. Rickels offers a series of sensitive and original analyses of Ottinger’s films, as well as her more recent photographic artworks, situated within a dazzling thought experiment centered on the history of art cinema through the turn of the twenty-first century. In addition to commemorating the death of a once-vital art form, this book also affirms Ottinger’s defiantly optimistic turn toward the documentary film as a means of mediating present clashes between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global. Widely regarded as a singular and provocative talent, Ottinger’s conspicuous absence from critical discourse is, for Rickels, symptomatic of the art cinema’s demise. Incorporating interviews he conducted with Ottinger and illustrated with stunning examples from her photographic oeuvre, this book takes up the challenges posed by Ottinger’s filmography to interrogate, ultimately, the very practice-and possibility-of art cinema today. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of several books, including The Case of California, The Vampire Lectures, and the three-volume Nazi Psychoanalysis (all published by Minnesota). He is a recognized art writer whose reflections on contemporary visual art appear regularly in numerous exhibition catalogues as well as in Artforum, artUS, and Flash Art.

The Psychoanalysis of Nazism explores the intricate relationship between psychoanalysis, language, and the sociopolitical forces of Nazi Germany. Through a detailed examination of psychoanalytic discourse during the Third Reich, the book reveals how analysts navigated the constraints of censorship and ideological conformity, often adopting a "camouflage" style to preserve their intellectual integrity. It focuses on the works of Alexander Mette and Gerhart Scheunert, two analysts whose contrasting approaches to psychoanalysis under Nazi rule illuminate the tensions between adaptation and resistance. Mette’s mastery of linguistic subterfuge allowed him to critique the regime subtly, while Scheunert’s dual identity as both a Nazi Party member and a psychoanalyst highlights the moral and professional compromises of the era. The book also delves into postwar controversies, including Annemarie Dührssen’s polemical history of German psychoanalysis and the ongoing struggle to reconcile Freud’s legacy with the field’s troubled past. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of psychoanalysis, history, and sociolinguistics, as well as anyone interested in the intersections of language, ideology, and intellectual resistance. It offers profound insights into the ethical dilemmas faced by psychoanalysts under totalitarian regimes and the enduring impact of these challenges on the development of modern psychoanalytic thought.

The Psychoanalysis of Nazism explores the intricate relationship between psychoanalysis, language, and the sociopolitical forces of Nazi Germany. Through a detailed examination of psychoanalytic discourse during the Third Reich, the book reveals how analysts navigated the constraints of censorship and ideological conformity, often adopting a "camouflage" style to preserve their intellectual integrity. It focuses on the works of Alexander Mette and Gerhart Scheunert, two analysts whose contrasting approaches to psychoanalysis under Nazi rule illuminate the tensions between adaptation and resistance. Mette’s mastery of linguistic subterfuge allowed him to critique the regime subtly, while Scheunert’s dual identity as both a Nazi Party member and a psychoanalyst highlights the moral and professional compromises of the era. The book also delves into postwar controversies, including Annemarie Dührssen’s polemical history of German psychoanalysis and the ongoing struggle to reconcile Freud’s legacy with the field’s troubled past. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of psychoanalysis, history, and sociolinguistics, as well as anyone interested in the intersections of language, ideology, and intellectual resistance. It offers profound insights into the ethical dilemmas faced by psychoanalysts under totalitarian regimes and the enduring impact of these challenges on the development of modern psychoanalytic thought.

Who Betrayed John Rittmeister? unravels the mystery of betrayal, resistance, and psychoanalysis in the shadow of Nazi Berlin. Rickels delves into the enigmatic circumstances surrounding the arrest and execution of John Rittmeister, a psychoanalyst and member of the resistance group Rote Kapelle. Through meticulous research and close readings of the works of Rittmeister’s colleagues and his close friend Werner Krauss, Rickels uncovers the complex interplay of psychoanalysis, political resistance, and survival under the Third Reich. The book explores the adaptation of psychoanalysis to the Nazi regime, the eclectic therapies of the Göring Institute, and the haunting legacy of betrayal. At its heart, the narrative examines Krauss’s fictionalized account of their resistance efforts, offering a profound lens into the psychological and linguistic underpinnings of National Socialism. This book is essential for readers interested in the history of psychoanalysis, the Third Reich, and modern Germany. It will captivate graduate students, scholars in the humanities, and those apprenticed to analytic theory, as well as art world enthusiasts drawn to Rickels’ unique interdisciplinary approach.

Who Betrayed John Rittmeister? unravels the mystery of betrayal, resistance, and psychoanalysis in the shadow of Nazi Berlin. Rickels delves into the enigmatic circumstances surrounding the arrest and execution of John Rittmeister, a psychoanalyst and member of the resistance group Rote Kapelle. Through meticulous research and close readings of the works of Rittmeister’s colleagues and his close friend Werner Krauss, Rickels uncovers the complex interplay of psychoanalysis, political resistance, and survival under the Third Reich. The book explores the adaptation of psychoanalysis to the Nazi regime, the eclectic therapies of the Göring Institute, and the haunting legacy of betrayal. At its heart, the narrative examines Krauss’s fictionalized account of their resistance efforts, offering a profound lens into the psychological and linguistic underpinnings of National Socialism. This book is essential for readers interested in the history of psychoanalysis, the Third Reich, and modern Germany. It will captivate graduate students, scholars in the humanities, and those apprenticed to analytic theory, as well as art world enthusiasts drawn to Rickels’ unique interdisciplinary approach.

In The Block of Fame, Edmund Bergler, like the thirteenth fairy in the "Sleeping Beauty," uninvited because there wasn't an extra place setting, crashes the psychoanalytic poetics of daydreaming with a curse. He charges that the overview, according to which art making rarefies daydreaming and delivers omnipotence, overlooks the underlying defense contract. We are hooked to creativity, because it offers the best defense against acknowledging the ultimate and untenable masochistic wish to be refused. Bergler's bleak view, which Gilles Deleuze alone acknowledged in his study of Sacher-Masoch, doesn't make any overall contribution to the aesthetics of fantasying that this critique addresses. However, it is a good fit with the centerpiece of the final volume: the wish for fame or, rather, the recoil of the wish in the wreckage that success brings.Following the opening season of mourning and the experience of phantoms, there is the second death, which is murder. In addition to the deadening end that can only be postponed - the killing off of the dead until dead dead - there is another second death that concludes the wish for fame with a ritual stripping of badges and insignia. Not only are the medals thrown to the ground and the sword broken, but a life's work passes review. At the close of his career, Freud returned to the environs of the wish, the cornerstone of his science. While his disciples Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs carried out his 1907 insights regarding the poetics of daydreaming to illuminate, respectively, the mythic origin of the hero and the evolution of art out of the mutual daydream, Freud battened down for the end of his world by revisiting the so-called primal fantasy, the myth of the primal father, in Moses and Monotheism. The animal setting that was a given of its premier articulation in Totem and Taboo was a wrap this time around with Freud's translation of Marie Bonaparte's transference gift, a memoir recounting her premature mourning for her sick chow and the dog's recovery from cancer of the jaw.In Bergler's unconscious system, plagiarism is the conscious variation on the block basic to authorship. Theodor Adorno interpreted the ascendancy of the culture industry leading to and through the Third Reich in terms of the theft of modernism's critical strategies for promoting the transformation of wish fantasy into the social relation of art. In the course of writing his essay "Notes on Kafka" between 1942 and 1952, Adorno was able to reclaim for aesthetic theory after Auschwitz the "constellation" that he and Benjamin had originally developed to outlast the culture industry's depravation of the hopefulness of wishing. Adorno gives the sense or direction of the constellation's recovery when he argues that Kafka's work stages the final round of the contest between fantasy and science fiction by extrapolating doubling and d j vu as the portals to a collective future.The wish for fame or to be refused it and the wish to steal this book or undo the delinquency demarcate the final movement of the third volume, which follows out, beginning with Susan Sontag and Gidget, a veritable Bildungsroman of the post-war era's star, the teenager. Fantasying to make it big time means to be in training for big ideas and big feelings. The romance of fantasying was also reconfigured out of a station break. The Nazi elevation of youth to superego in the Heimat of the Teen Age neutralized adolescent innovation by forgoing the Hamletian stage of metabolization of the death wish. Switching to the other patient, the other teenager at heart, no longer the German but now the American or Californian, this study enters the termination phase of the analysis in the environs of a reach for the stars that is legend. It is the legend to the final volume's mapping of our second nature as daydreamer believers.

In The Contest between B-Genres, the "Space Trilogy" by J.R.R. Tolkien's friend and colleague C.S. Lewis and the roster of American science fictions that Gotthard G nther selected and glossed for the German readership in 1952 demarcate the ring in which the contestants face off. In carrying out in fiction the joust that Tolkien proclaimed in his manifesto essay "On Fairy-Stories," Lewis challenged the visions of travel through time and space that were the mainstays of modern science fiction. In the facing corner, G nther recognized in American science fiction the first stirrings of a new mythic storytelling that would supplant the staple of an expiring metaphysics, the fairy-story basic to Tolkien and Lewis's fantasy genre.The B-genres science fiction and fantasy were contemporaries of cinema's emergence out of the scientific and experimental study and recording of motion made visible. In an early work like H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, which Tolkien credited as work of fantasy, the transport through time - the ununderstood crux of this literary experiment - is conveyed through a cinematic-fantastic component in the narrative, reflecting optical innovations and forecasting the movies to come. Although the historical onset of the rivalry between the B-genres is packed with literary examples, adaptation (acknowledged or not) followed out the rebound of wish fantasy between literary descriptions of the ununderstood and their cinematic counterparts, visual and special effects.The arrival of the digital relation out of the crucible of the unknown and the special effect seemed at last to award the fantasy genre the trophy in its contest with science fiction. And yet, although science fiction indeed failed to predict the digital future, fantasy did not so much succeed as draw benefit from the mere resemblance of fantasying to the new relation. While it follows that digitization is the fantasy that is true (and not, as Tolkien had hoped, the Christian Gospel), the newly renewed B-genre without borders found support in another revaluation that was underway in the other B-genre. Once its future orientation was "history," science fiction began indwelling the ruins of its faulty forecasts. By its new allegorical momentum, science fiction supplied captions of legibility and history to the reconfigured borderlands it cohabited with fantasy. The second volume also attends, then, to the hybrids that owed their formation to these changes, both anticipated and realized. Extending through the topography of the borderlands, works by J.G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, and John Boorman, among others, occupy and cathect a context of speculative fiction that suspended and blended the strict contest requirements constitutive of the separate B-genres.After thirty years teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2011 Laurence A. Rickels accepted a professorship in art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden K nste, Karlsruhe and taught there as successor to Klaus Theweleit until 2017. During 2018 Rickels was Eberhard Berent Visiting Professor and Distinguished Writer at New York University, and he continues to offer seminars in media and philosophy at the European Graduate School (Saas Fee, Switzerland and Malta) where he holds the Sigmund Freud Chair. Rickels is the author of Aberrations of Mourning (Minnesota, 1988), The Case of California (Minnesota, 1991), The Vampire Lectures (Minnesota, 1999), Nazi Psychoanalysis (Minnesota, 2002), The Devil Notebooks (Minnesota, 2008), Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (Minnesota, 2008), I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (Minnesota, 2010), SPECTRE (Anti-Oedipus, 2013), Germany: A Science Fiction (Anti-Oedipus, 2014), and The Psycho Records (Columbia, 2016).

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 1: Between a Crypt and a Date Mark addresses both the style or genre of fantasy and the mental faculty, long the hot property of philosophical ethics. Freud passed it along in his 1907 essay on the poetics of daydreaming when he addressed omnipotent wish fantasy as the source and resource of the aspirations and resolutions of art, which, however, the artwork can never look back at or acknowledge. By grounding his genre in the one fantasy that is true, the Gospel, J.R.R. Tolkien obviated and made obvious the ethical mandate of fantasy's restraining order.With George Lucas's Star Wars we entered the borderlands of the fantasy and science fiction genres, a zone resulting from and staggering a contest, which Tolkien inaugurated in the 1930s. The history of this contested borderland marks changes that arose in expectation of what the new media held in store, changes realized (but outside the box of what had been projected) upon the arrival of the unanticipated digital relation, which at last seemed to award the fantasy genre the contest prize.Freud's notion of the Zeitmarke (datemark), the indelible impress of the present moment that triggered the daydream that denies it, already introduced the import of fantasy's historicization. Science fiction won a second prize that keeps it in the running. No longer bound to projecting the future, the former calling which in light of digitization it flunked, science fiction becomes allegorical and reading in the ruins of its failed predictions illuminates all the date marks and crypts hiding out in the borderlands it traverses with fantasy. To motivate the import of an evolving science fiction genre, Critique of Fantasy makes Gotthard G nther's reflections in the 1950s on American science fiction - as heralding a new metaphysics and a new planetary going on interstellar civilization - a mainstay of its cultural anthropology with B-genres.===After thirty years teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2011 Laurence A. Rickels accepted a professorship in art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden K nste, Karlsruhe and taught there as successor to Klaus Theweleit until 2017. During 2018 Rickels was Eberhard Berent Visiting Professor and Distinguished Writer at New York University, and he continues to offer seminars in media and philosophy at the European Graduate School (Saas Fee, Switzerland and Malta) where he holds the Sigmund Freud Chair. Rickels is the author of Aberrations of Mourning (Minnesota, 1988), The Case of California (Minnesota, 1991), The Vampire Lectures (Minnesota, 1999), Nazi Psychoanalysis (Minnesota, 2002), The Devil Notebooks (Minnesota, 2008), Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (Minnesota, 2008), I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (Minnesota, 2010), SPECTRE (Anti-Oedipus, 2013), Germany: A Science Fiction (Anti-Oedipus, 2014), and The Psycho Records (Columbia, 2016).

In Paris Calligrammes the filmmaker, photographer and collector of worlds Ulrike Ottinger links historical archival material with her own art and film works to create a sociogram of the era in which she came of age as an artist. In the grip of political upheavals, Paris of the 1960s attracted artists from all over the world and was a pulsating stream of energy hovering between trauma management and the utopia of Europe. From the Librairie Calligrammes, a meeting place of exiled German intellectuals, to the Cinémathèque française, which sparked her love of film, Ulrike Ottinger charts a city and its utopias. They live on in her collaged landscape of memories in a workshop exhibition complimenting her film Paris Calligrammes (2019).Ulrike Ottinger's (*1942 Konstanz, Germany) films were shown at the most important international festivals and honored at various major museums, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. With her photographs she was represented at the documenta and the Biennale di Venezia. Exhibition: HKW, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 23.8—13.10.2019

Aberrations of Mourning, originally published in 1988, is the long unavailable first book in Laurence A. Rickels’s “unmourning” trilogy, followed by The Case of California and Nazi Psychoanalysis.Rickels studies mourning and melancholia within and around psychoanalysis, analyzing the writings of such thinkers as Freud, Nietzsche, Lessing, Heinse, Artaud, Keller, Stifter, Kafka, and Kraus. Rickels maintains that we must shift the way we read literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to go beyond traditional Oedipal structures.Aberrations of Mourning argues that the idea of the crypt has had a surprisingly potent influence on psychoanalysis, and Rickels shows how society’s disturbed relationship with death and dying, our inability to let go of loved ones, has resulted in technology to form more and more crypts for the dead by preserving them-both physically and psychologically-in new ways.

For years, noted writer Laurence A. Rickels often found himself compared to novelist Philip K. Dick-though in fact Rickels had never read any of the science fiction writer’s work. When he finally read his first Philip K. Dick novel, while researching for his recent book The Devil Notebooks, it prompted a prolonged immersion in Dick’s writing as well as a recognition of Rickels’s own long-documented intellectual pursuits. The result of this engagement is I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, a profound thought experiment that charts the wide relevance of the pulp sci-fi author and paranoid visionary. I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick explores the science fiction author’s meditations on psychic reality and psychosis, Christian mysticism, Eastern religion, and modern spiritualism. Covering all of Dick’s science fiction, Rickels corrects the lack of scholarly interest in the legendary Californian author and, ultimately, makes a compelling case for the philosophical and psychoanalytic significance of Philip K. Dick’s popular and influential science fiction.

This sequel to The Vampire Lectures takes on the DevilMilton’s Paradise Lost. Goethe’s Faust. Aaron Spelling’s Satan’s School for Girls? Laurence A. Rickels scours the canon and pop culture in this all-encompassing study on the Devil. Continuing the work he began in his influential book The Vampire Lectures, Rickels returns with his trademark wit and encyclopedic knowledge to go mano a mano with the Prince of Darkness himself. Revealing our astonishing obsession with Satan in his many forms, Rickels guides us on an entertaining and enlightening journey down the darkest corridors that film, music, folklore, theater, and literature have ever offered. “The Devil represents the father,” Rickels writes in the opening pages, setting the stage to challenge foundational interpretations of Freudian psychology. The Devil presents not the usual fantasy of immortality, he explains, but instead provides victims with a paternal origin. Until their preordained deadline is reached, the Devil’s pitch goes, people will enjoy the pleasure of uninterrupted “quality time” without the threat of random death. Rickels terms it “Dad certainty”: you know where you came from and you know where you are going. Despite the grim outlook, Rickels keeps the proceedings amusing, with extravagant wordplay and buoyant prose.A stunning cultural and psychological analysis, The Devil Notebooks shows how the prince of occult has been used-throughout history and across cultures-to represent people’s primal fear of authority and humanity’s universal suffering. Sharing this cultural moment with the idea of evil being bandied about in our political discourse, the supposed satanic influence of pop music on our children, and a wildly popular book series on the end of the world, The Devil Notebooks is a sweeping and timely work that sheds light on the source of human fear and dread in the world.

Milton’s Paradise Lost. Goethe’s Faust. Aaron Spelling’s Satan’s School for Girls? Laurence A. Rickels scours the canon and pop culture in this all-encompassing study on the Devil. Continuing the work he began in his influential book The Vampire Lectures, Rickels returns with his trademark wit and encyclopedic knowledge to go mano a mano with the Prince of Darkness himself. Revealing our astonishing obsession with Satan in his many forms, Rickels guides us on an entertaining and enlightening journey down the darkest corridors that film, music, folklore, theater, and literature have ever offered. “The Devil represents the father,” Rickels writes in the opening pages, setting the stage to challenge foundational interpretations of Freudian psychology. The Devil presents not the usual fantasy of immortality, he explains, but instead provides victims with a paternal origin. Until their preordained deadline is reached, the Devil’s pitch goes, people will enjoy the pleasure of uninterrupted “quality time” without the threat of random death. Rickels terms it “Dad certainty”: you know where you came from and you know where you are going. Despite the grim outlook, Rickels keeps the proceedings amusing, with extravagant wordplay and buoyant prose.A stunning cultural and psychological analysis, The Devil Notebooks shows how the prince of occult has been used—throughout history and across cultures—to represent people’s primal fear of authority and humanity’s universal suffering. Sharing this cultural moment with the idea of evil being bandied about in our political discourse, the supposed satanic influence of pop music on our children, and a wildly popular book series on the end of the world, The Devil Notebooks is a sweeping and timely work that sheds light on the source of human fear and dread in the world.

A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thoughtPsychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century.Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger; and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component.

A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thoughtPsychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century.Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger; and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component.

A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thoughtPsychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century.Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger, and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component.

Examines outrageous public behavior and what it can tell us about cultural and political change.The International Psychoanalytic Congress gathered in 1967 to define the clinical concept of “acting out.” Thirty years later, our society, which once labeled those who exhibited excessive aggression as delinquent, celebrates outrageous public behavior. In Acting Out in Groups, writers, literary theorists, and cultural critics explore therapeutic descriptions of acting out in relation to the conduct condoned, even encouraged, on daytime TV talk shows, at political rallies, and in performance. Through a deconstruction of “acting out,” this collection seeks a new, performative style of critical discourse that incorporates the exuberance and intensity of acting out for analytical ends. Topics include the Jenny Jones murder trial; the response of psychoanalysts to the acclaimed documentary Crumb; the place of the Berlin Wall and other national symbols in German life; and the roles of aggression and discipline in childhood development.Contributors: Kathy Acker; Peter Canning; Julie Carlson, U of California, Santa Barbara; Susan Derwin, U of California, Santa Barbara; Andrew Hewitt, SUNY Buffalo; Gary Indiana; Rhonda Lieberman; Catherine Liu, U of Minnesota; Fred Moten, NYU; John Mowitt, U of Minnesota; Klaus Theweleit; Elisabeth Weber, U of California, Santa Barbara.

A wild and wide-ranging “psycho-history” of the vampire.A wild and wide-ranging “psycho-history” of the vampire.Bela Lugosi may-as the eighties gothic rock band Bauhaus sang-be dead, but the vampire lives on. A nightmarish figure dwelling somewhere between genuine terror and high camp, a morbid repository for the psychic projections of diverse cultures, an endlessly recyclable mass-media icon, the vampire is an enduring object of fascination, fear, ridicule, and reverence. In The Vampire Lectures, Laurence A. Rickels sifts through the rich mythology of vampirism, from medieval folklore to Marilyn Manson, to explore the profound and unconscious appeal of the undead.Based on the course Rickels has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for several years (a course that is itself a cult phenomenon on campus), The Vampire Lectures reflects Rickels’s unique lecture style and provides a lively history of vampirism in legend, literature, and film. Rickels unearths a trove that includes eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks; burial rituals and sexual taboos devised to keep vampirism at bay; Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory’s use of girls’ blood in her sadistic beauty regimen; Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with its turn-of-the-century media technologies; F. W. Murnau’s haunting Nosferatu; and crude, though intense, straight-to-video horror films such as Subspecies. He makes intuitive, often unexpected connections among these sometimes wildly disparate sources.More than a compilation of vampire lore, however, The Vampire Lectures makes an original and intellectually rigorous contribution to literary and psychoanalytic theory, identifying the subconscious meanings, complex symbolism, and philosophical arguments-particularly those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche-embedded in vampirism and gothic literature.ISBN 0-8166-3391-6Cloth£34.50$49.95xxISBN 0-8166-3392-4Paper£14.00$19.95376 Pages5 7/8 x 9SeptemberTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press