GSH seminar series: "The Mother" - Genoa, 24th-29th April 2017

GSH

GENOA SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES

24th-29th APRIL 2017

THE MOTHER

Organised by Lorenzo Chiesa and Raffaello Palumbo Mosca

SPEAKERS AND SEMINAR LEADERS:

LUISELLA BRUSA (psychoanalyst)

LORENZO CHIESA (philosopher)

LUISA LORENZA CORNA (critical theorist, art and architectural historian)

TIZIANA DE ROGATIS (literary critic)

IDA DOMINIJANNI (philosopher and political theorist)

ALINA MARAZZI (filmmaker)

RAFFAELLO PALUMBO MOSCA (literary critic)

Established in 2013 and directed by Lorenzo Chiesa and Raffaello Palumbo Mosca, the Genoa School of Humanities (GSH) offers weekly series of seminars in English held by scholars of philosophy, literature, and other subjects, as well as by psychoanalysts, filmmakers, poets, and novelists.

The topic of our seminars of Spring 2017 is the mother, which we will approach in our consolidated interdisciplinary way from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminism, cinema, literary criticism, and philosophy.

Producing a straightforward and consistent definition of maternity, motherhood, and mothering is unexpectedly difficult. What is a mother? Who is one’s mother? It is clearly not sufficient to understand her as the “female parent of a child” or “a woman in relation to her child or children”. Does woman become a mother at the moment of conception, gestation, or parturition? Or, conversely, is the mother primarily a product of complex – socially and ideologically – discursive practices that evade any strictly biological concept, or at least structurally supplement it?

Feminism in its various expressions has both contested motherhood, if not rejected it, as an oppressive apparatus of patriarchy, and saluted it as the irresistible cipher of a fundamental sexual difference to be championed. What are the philosophical, political, and aesthetical implications of these contrasting stances? How does the more and more evident decline of paternal authority influence all this?

Lacanian psychoanalysis has insisted on overcoming the alleged dichotomy between the mother as the real locus of a natural drive and the father as the symbolic site of culture and the Law. But then, quite bluntly, why is a mother irreducibly not a father, and vice versa? What is the basic symbolic function of motherhood? In what sense can we talk of a specific maternal desire that is neither masculine nor feminine and rather evokes an overwhelming and quasi-cannibalistic drive?

Like feminism and psychoanalysis, literature and cinema have long explored the love and conflicts that accompany the mother-child relationship. Can this ambivalence give rise to a specifically maternal discontent, guilt, shame, and even repulsion? How and when does a parent “fail” to be a mother? And, on the other hand, how and when is a child not “worthy” of a mother’s care? Does the representation of such tensions require particular narrative approaches that inevitably rely on an autobiographical dimension?

The GSH proposes itself as a venue where young scholars have a real possibility to deepen their knowledge, not only by attending seminars, but also by actively discussing in an informal context their own research projects with highly qualified teachers and among themselves. One of the basic ideas of the GSH is that learning is enhanced by the suspension of formalisms, hierarchies, and the principle of authority that usually define traditional academic contexts. Each day revolves around one or two presentations by an invited speaker and is enriched by roundtables, small study groups, and debates that are always attended by one or more seminar leaders. The exchange of knowledge and ideas is facilitated by the limited number of students (max 15), and by the interdisciplinary nature of the seminars.

Speakers/seminar leaders at the GSH are leading international figures in their academic and extra-academic fields. They are based both in Italy and abroad. Participants are thus exposed to different cultures, teaching methods, and disciplinary perspectives. They are also enabled to establish new research networks and acquire practical information on how to access PhD and post-doctoral programmes. The GSH has welcomed students from several countries, including Italy, the UK, Russia, Iran, Israel, and Ukraine.

PROGRAMME OF SEMINARS

 

Monday 24 April:

10:00

Welcome and introduction to the Spring 2017 seminar series (Lorenzo Chiesa & Raffaello Palumbo Mosca)

10:30

“Why the Mother?” (Ida Dominijanni)

12:00

Q&A / Discussion

15:00

Roundtable on Ida Dominijanni’s seminar (chair: Lorenzo Chiesa)

17:00

Drinks and nibbles

Tuesday 25 April:

10:30

“On Why a Mother Is Not a Father, and Vice Versa” (Luisella Brusa)

12:00

Q&A / Discussion

15:00

Roundtable on Luisella Brusa’s seminar  (chair: Lorenzo Chiesa)

Wednesday 26 April:

10:30

“The Desire of the Mother: Psychoanalysis and Beyond” (Lorenzo Chiesa)

12:00

Q&A /Discussion

15:00

Roundtable on Lorenzo Chiesa’s seminar (chair: Raffaello Palumbo Mosca)

Thursday 27 April:

10:30

“Carla Lonzi: From Dualism to the Group” (Luisa Lorenza Corna)

12:00

Q&A / Discussion

15:00

Roundtable on Luisa Lorenza Corna’s seminar (chair: Lorenzo Chiesa)

Friday 28 April:

10:30

“Maternity in Elena Ferrante’s Fiction” (Tiziana de Rogatis)

12:00

Q&A / Discussion

15:00

Roundtable on Tiziana de Rogatis’s seminar (chair: Raffaello Palumbo Mosca)

Saturday 29 April:

10:30

“You who are looking at me; I who tell about you. Bringing the mother into the world again” (Alina Marazzi)

12:00

Q&A / Discussion

15:00

Roundtable on Alina Marazzi’s seminar (chair: Tiziana de Rogatis)

17:00

Drinks and nibbles

  

REGISTRATION FEES

 

6 days of seminars: €300

5 days of seminars: €250

4 days of seminars: €200

3 days of seminars: €150

HOW TO REACH US

Seminars are held in Genoa, Via Parini 10, in a nineteenth century villa. From Genova Brignole railway station take bus number 43 toward Nervi. Get off in Via Albaro; cross Piazza Leopardi and you reach Via Parini.

SEMINAR LEADERS

 

Luisella Brusa works and lives in Milan. She is a psychoanalyst and a member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis and of the Scuola Lacaniana di Psicoanalisi. She teaches at the Scuola di specializzazione in psicoterapia di orientamento lacaniano of the Istituto Freudiano. She has collaborated with the Università Cattolica of Milan and with the University of Bergamo. Her publications include: Mi vedevo riflessa nel suo specchio. Psicoanalisi del rapporto tra madre e figlia [I Was Seeing Myself Reflected in Her Mirror. Psychoanalysis of the Mother-Daughter Relation] (Franco Angeli, 2004); “Psicoanalisi del trauma”, in D. Cosenza, M. Recalcati, A. Villa (a cura di), Introduzione alla psicoanalisi contemporanea (Bruno Mondadori, 2003). She has edited the Italian edition of Paul Federn’s Fatherless Society (Paparo, 2013).

 

Lorenzo Chiesa is Director of the GSH and Visiting Professor at the European University at St Petersburg and at the Freud’s Dream Museum of the same city. He was previously Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent, where he founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He held visiting positions at the University of New Mexico, the Istituto di Scienze Umane (SUM) of Naples, the Institute of Philosophy of Ljubljana, and the Jnanapravaha Institute of Mumbai. He published books and edited collections on Lacan (Subjectivity and Otherness, MIT Press, 2007; Lacan and Philosophy, Re.press, 2014) and on biopolitical thought (The Italian Difference, Re.press, 2009 – with Alberto Toscano; Italian Thought Today, Routledge, 2014). Recently, he published two new books: The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (MIT Press, 2016) and The Virtual Point of Freedom (Northwestern UP, 2016). He edited and translated books by Agamben and Virno into English and by Žižek into Italian. His work has been translated into more than ten languages.

Luisa Lorenza Corna teaches in the faculty of Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies of the University of Leeds. Her main research interests are Marxism and aesthetics, post-war Italian art and architecture and theories of the metropolis. She has written about art and architecture for various journals, amongst which, more recently, Domus and Mute. At the moment she is editing and translating, with Jamila Mascat and Matthew Hyland, an anthology of Carla Lonzi’s art historical and feminist writings for Seagull Books. She is also a co-organiser of the research seminar Marxism in Culture (www. marxisminculture.org) at the Institute of Historical Research, London.

Tiziana De Rogatis (Ph.D. University of Perugia 1999) is Associate Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature at the Università per Stranieri di Siena, where she teaches Eugenio Montale and other European poets from the 1920s to the 1940s, was published as Montale e il classicismo moderno in 2002. In 2011, she published an edition of Montale’s Le occasioni and, in 2012, Mappe del tempo: Eugenio Montale e T. S. Eliot. The present focus of her research is on feminine identity and the mother/daughter bond, examined through the lens of a comparison between classical mythology and twenty-first century Italian and English literature. As part of the comparison between classical and modern, she has also proposed a contemporary rewrite of Aeneid for two plays (Segesta Aeneid, Greek Theater of Segesta; Aeneas: fate and feelings, Bolzano’s City Theatre).

Ida Dominijanni is a philosopher, political theorist, essayist and journalist. Her most recent book is Il Trucco. Sessualità e biopolitica nella fine di Berlusconi [Make- Up/The Trick. Sexuality and Biopolitics in Berlusconi’s Fall] (Ediesse, 2014). She has been for decades an editor and columnist of the newspaper il manifesto. Dominijanni is also a member of the Diotima community of women philosophers in Verona and a member of the Centre for the Reform of the State (Crs) in Rome. She has been teaching political theory at Roma Tre University in Rome, the Universities of Siena and Verona, and Cornell University (as a fellow of the Society for the Humanities). Her writings on politics, populism, feminism, and psychoanalysis have been published in national and international scholarly journals and volumes. Her essay “L’impronta indecidibile” [“The Undecidable Mark”] (published in Diotima, L’ombra della madre [The Shadow of the Mother], Liguori, Napoli 2007) will be included in C. Casarino and A. Righi (eds.), An Other Mother, (Minnesota Univ. Press, forthcoming).

Alina Marazzi has been recognized as one of the most innovative of Italian documentarists within a new generation of directors, having directed several award-winning documentaries presented at national and international film festivals. She teaches courses and workshops on documentary filmmaking in a number of Italian film and art schools as well as guest lecturing at the School of Media Design and Multimedia Arts (Milan). Her work posits home movies as a collective mise-en-scène of memory, where not only personal experience but also social, cultural and aesthetic codes are inscribed. Marazzi’s most critically acclaimed work is her trilogy on female subjectivity, motherhood, and memory: Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More Hourwith You, 2002); Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, 2007); Tutto parla di te (2012), starring Charlotte Rampling. Tutto parla di te portrays the ambivalence of maternity through intermingling visual languages such as fiction, documentary, photography, stop motion. Four recent academic volumes published in the UK and the US address her work.

Raffaello Palumbo Mosca is Director of the GSH and a literary critic. He holds a PhD with honors in Romance Languages from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Italian literature from the University of Turin. He has taught Italian literature in the US (University of Chicago) and the UK (University of Kent). He is the author of a number of essays on modern and contemporary European literature and history of literary criticism published in American and European journals (“Lettere Italiane”, “Modern Language Notes”, “Raison Publique”, “Nuovi argomenti”, “Studi Novecenteschi”, and others). His book L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea won the International Tarquinia-Cardarelli prize in 2014. He is also a reviewer for Books In Italy and an author for the publishing house Zanichelli.

 

MORE INFORMATION

[email protected]

Lorenzo Chiesa: [email protected]

Raffaello Palumbo Mosca: [email protected]

www.gsh-education.com