MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | PERSONHOOD | FALL 2023

The Unconcious Otherwise 

Stefania Pandolfo • University of California at Berkeley

October 2nd @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons   

A man paints mural frescos during an episode of his illness of the psyche/soul. Later he reinterprets his visions in the mode of what in Arabic he calls ta`bir: an unconscious work of form born in the midst of crisis­–psychical, mystical, political–as a force of expression, and of the painful/creative imagination. His visions are at once intimately personal and participate in a Quranic liturgy. In the loneliness of his state, they disclose a vocabulary of agentive forms, which bear witness to the forms born of crisis in the dream of a suspended collectivity.

Taking the lead from this and other stories in Stefania Pandolfo’s ethnography of madness and liturgical healing in Morocco, her presentation will reflect on the implications of engaging with a Quranic imagination of the nafs (soul/psyche), of expression and manifestation, in the discussion of personhood, the unconscious, violence, coloniality, and desire. She will argue for practicing an alchemy of concepts beyond the frames of cultural representation, with and against psychoanalysis, as an opening to the unknown, and as a risking of the subject, and the anthropologist.

Personhood
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