MA S. Performance/Culture/Media (Summer School) - The Nerve Bible: Between Psychosis, the Sacred and National Socialism

Dozent:innen: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Friedrich Michael Bachmann; Dr. Stefanie Husel
Kurzname: Perf/Cult/Media
Kurs-Nr.: 05.155.635
Kurstyp: Seminar

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches

A. Read
Bitte beachten Sie, dass dieses Seminar sich mit den Workshops "Acolyte - Revolutioary - Ascetic", "Theaterkrtiki" und "arist-in-Residence programs" überschneidet.

Inhalt

One of the most widely discussed texts in psychiatric literature, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), first published in 1903, was written during the latter’s stay at Castle Sonnenstein, near Dresden, at the time a Royal Public Asylum for the mentally ill. Only a few decades later, that same site would be turned into an NS-Tötungsanstalt, an extermination center to carry out the National Socialist euthanasia program in what historian Raul Hilberg has called the “conceptual as well as technological and administrative prefiguration of the ‘Final Solution.’” When the euthanasia program was stopped in 1941, shortly before the death camps were set into operation, 15,000 people had already been gassed in Sonnenstein alone.
Through a series of three case studies dealing with National Socialism, the seminar will discuss the relation between psychoanalytic concepts (such as trauma, psychosis, and working-through) on the one hand, and practices of sacralisation on the other: First, we will examine how Schreber shares with Fascism a modern crisis of the symbolic that, while hinting at “the theological dimension of political and social authority” (Eric Santner), interrupts the “performative magic” of investiture (i.e., of assuming one’s identity). Then we will turn to the film Our Hitler (1977) by German film and theatre director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, who undertakes a highly problematical “work of mourning” to work through the history of Germany. While the first two case studies return us to the sometimes conflicting histories accumulating in “actual” sites, the third case study displaces a site and its traumatic history onto the stage: Hotel Modern’s KAMP (premiered 2007) rebuilds the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a theatrical model through which 3000 puppets are being moved.
Starting from the relationship between psychosis, the sacred, and National Socialism, we will move towards a broader discussion of issues such as site-specificity, “investments” in identity, and performance.

Termine

Datum (Wochentag)	Zeit	Ort
11.07.2014 (Freitag)	09:30 - 18:30	Senatssaal
12.07.2014 (Samstag)	09:30 - 17:00	00 491 P15 1141 - Philosophisches Seminargebäude