On February 8th at 3pm National Library of Latvia (Kr. Barona Street 14, 1st floor) hosts a talk by philosopher Aaron Schuster with an introduction by philosopher Ainars Kamolins.
Spinoza and Freud, these two great atheist Jewish intellectuals, separated by about two and a half centuries, articulated remarkably similar systems for understanding humanity’s ‘bondage to the passions’, and in Enlightenment fashion, to liberate the mind from this bondage, the obscure dependencies and ambiguous desires from which people suffer. For one this takes the form of an Ethics, for the other Psychoanalysis. In this lecture, I will focus on the one point that seems definitely to divide these two thinkers: the death drive. How to bring together Freud’s sombre dictum that the “everything living dies for internal reasons… the aim of all life is death” with the Ethics’ liberatory conclusion that “a free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation on life”? This will require both a re-thinking of Freud’s death drive, w hich I will argue should not be understood as an ‘aim’ or ‘goal’ but precisely as that which disrupts all aims and goals, and a revision of Spinozism, in which substance becomes the name of a kind of negativity, an imbalance or disruption or discord that defines ‘God or Nature’ (Deus sive Natura). One could call this the ‘intellectual complaint of God’.
Aaron Schuster
Krauss Ruth “There’s a little ambiguity over there among the bluebells”. Marylin Harris illustration, New York, Something Else Press, 1968.
The project is based upon actualization, visualization, and decomposition of one of the most significant philosophical work nowadays – Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s “Ethics”.
The event will be accompanied by the opening of the publication “Diaries: Spinoza’s Poetics” and by the exhibition of Ola Vasiljeva’s post ers in the windows of the National Library of Latvia. (February 7th – March 8th)
Forthcoming exhibition within the project – “Zoon in A Zoot-Suit” by Aditya Mandayam – will be on view at kim? Contemporary Art Centre from February 7th till March 16th.
Aaron Schuster received his BA from Amherst College (USA), and MA and PhD in Philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). His doctoral dissertation examined the concept of pleasure in the history of philosophy, concluding with Freud and Lacan. He was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2005-2006, and has taught at PARTS (Performing Arts Research Training Studios) in Brussels. He is currently the theory instructor at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. He has written on contemporary art and culture for Cabinet, Metropolis M, Frieze, and others, and has collaborated as a writer with artists on a number of projects and performances. His book, “The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis”, is forthcoming with MIT Press.
Live stream of the event will be available www.riga2014.org
The event will be held in Latvian and English.
The event is realized within the European Capital of Culture 2014 project “Waiting for… (Archeology of an Idea)”
The European Capital of Culture project at kim? entails at least six expert visits from various disciplines – curators, philosophers, writers, artists and musicians – from all over the world. They will visit Riga for research and inspiration, as well as interaction with the local cultural scene. Each of the visits will manifest differently – there will be creative visits featuring studio visits, and specific theoretical presentations as well as performance and exhibition projects.
