Psychoanalysis and its Limits

Talk by Omnia El Shakry, professor of history at Yale University.

Abstract

This talk will attend to the work of translation inherent within psychoanalytic theory and practice by staging three distinct scenes of reading. The first is linguistic – moving not simply from Sigmund Freud’s German writings into Arabic, but more significantly from the vector of adaptation back to the source. Specifically, I think about the implications that psychoanalysis in Arabic might have on German, or more properly, European Freud. The second scene thinks through the question of translation from clinical practice into theoretical discourse. How might we understand the “irreducible work of translation, not from language to language, but from the body to ethical semiosis” (Spivak)? Finally, I conclude with a meditation on the question of ethical semiosis as one inherent to the work of translation from the individual to the group, particularly in the times of “war and death” that constitutes a “surpassing disaster” (Freud/Toufic).

Bio

Omnia El Shakry is a professor of history at Yale University. She specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East, with a particular emphasis on the history of the human and religious sciences in modern Egypt. She maintains additional research interests in gender and sexuality and visual cultures in the modern Middle East