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Kathy Acker was one of the most original, subversive and
influential writers of the late 20th century. Known variously, and
notoriously, as a consummate postmodernist, feminist, post-punk and
plagiarist, her oeuvreover a dozen novels and novellashas inspired
a generation of writers and artists. Lust for Life is the
definitive collection of essays on Acker's inimitable work,
including Peter Wollen's elegiac primer, widely considered the best
introduction to Acker, and Avital Ronell's erudite meditation on
friendship and mourning. Together these essays by scholars and
writers reveal Acker's profound and innovative project, and the
ways in which fiction can penetrate the heart of political and
cultural life.
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.
"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.
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."
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 simply 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 --
embeddedin vampirism and gothic literature.
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.
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 Cinematheque
francaise, 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
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