Our proposed session, “Freud’s Ecology,” unearths Freud’s strange naturalism through a multidisciplinary discussion involving four outstanding scholars—Eugenie Brinkema, Ellen McCallum, McNeil Taylor, and Mario Telò—whose expertise in the areas of film studies, comparative literature, and critical theory intersects with Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. These scholars have been assembled under the banner of “Freud’s Ecology” because of their innovative work in and on film-philosophy, affect theory, queer undoing, and eco-aesthetics; because their respective scholarship engages explicitly and creatively with psychoanalysis, often taking it on board to challenge or reframe it; and because their diverse methods, orientations, and theoretical interventions offer striking new approaches to eco-psychoanalysis, both what it is, and what it can become.
Questioning psychoanalytic orthodoxy while also perturbing ecocriticism, this panel invites speculation into well-known and little-known psychoanalytic texts and intertexts. Eugenie Brinkema’s paper, “Swallow/Spit,” explores the interplay between bodies and environments through a reading of spit in Freud. Saliva, itself a slurry of water and mucus, proteins and salts, also, as it circulates in the mouth, incorporates food particles and bacteria, which is to say, takes into the body the exterior world, which is then marked twice in relation to possible modes of refusal: one either introjects what is foreign or expels twice over that which is from outside the self. Spit is thus neither a mere figure nor an instrumental metaphor in Freudian accounts of negation, repression, and interiorization. Rather, spit, Brinkema argues, demonstrates how a psychoanalytic account of aesthetic judgment is parasitic on a formal distinction between spitting and swallowing.
From the salivary gland, we plunge deeper. Ellen McCallum’s paper, “Wild Ecologies, Lay Ecologies,” tracks the role of unicellular organisms in Freud's theory of the drives to address the question of how they open onto models we have in current biology, such as unicellular slime molds used for studying nonhuman communication. Freud's insistence on the scientificity of psychoanalysis rests on its interlocution with contemporary biology. Tracking these relations through the germ cells on up demonstrates a certain ecological thinking in Freud, one whose lessons merit transfer to the reconsidering of the human within an interspecies web of relations to the natural world.
Freud’s drive theory turns and returns to biology. McNeil Taylor’s paper, “A Philosopher of the Flesh,” turns to Maurice Merleau-Ponty to show how Freud’s celebration of the advance of civilization is not a unilateral forward movement but instead requires a constant recuperation of human and nonhuman pasts. There is a perturbation in both our ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins, Taylor argues, an inexhaustible ambiguity that fuels the development of adult sexuality. Taylor examines Lucile Hadžihalilović’s films Innocence (2004) and Evolution (2015) as cinematic elaborations of this time-straddling temporality, introducing a concept he calls the “respiration-image”: a flickering between past and present, ambiguous depth and immersive surface.
Mario Telò’s paper, “The Colonized Snake,” understands this flickering of surface and depth through the mythological prehistory of the Oedipal complex: a story of ecological violence and settler colonialism, which he approaches through Susan Sontag’s fascination in Regarding the Pain of Others with the Ovidian horrorism of Goltzius’s The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus (1588). The violence in this etching visualizes the pornographic nightmare of a queered Oedipus complex that, instead of throwing the subject into language, into the heteropatriarchal logos, coopts the human animal into the realm of animal murmuring or gagging. Goltzius’s etching depicts a snake’s rebellion—in the form of irrumation—against the settlers (Cadmus and his companions displacing the local fauna to found Thebes), who are the ancestors of Oedipus himself.
These panelists and their papers (of 12-13 minutes each) promise inventive, nondoctrinaire approaches to Freud’s ecology that radically expand what eco-psychoanalysis is and can become. Our panel, composed of diverse scholarly backgrounds, texts, and intertexts, would complement other psychoanalytic program offerings and present something new and adventurous with broad interdisciplinary appeal. As the panel’s presider, I will ensure each of the four papers keeps to 12 or 13 minutes, allowing ample time for audience participation.