Laura Gonzalez

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A depraved epistemology

Being embodied is a mixed fate for the hysteric, who does not want to be excluded by anyone from anything, and yet, given the shocking secrets of sexuality – revealed by the self’s won developing body knowledge experiences this body and what it knows as a depraved epistemology. This fact is a vital constituent in [...]

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Hysteria, Dora and perversion

Here is a little more of my current jumbled thinking on hysteria and perversion, influenced by what I have been reading. Sharon Kivland’s work A Case of Hysteria is a feminine detective story telling of a dependence to Freud’s case history (which I also suffer from, and I have been trying to avoid speaking of [...]

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Charcot and the Salpetrière

In the Nineteenth Century, Doctor Charcot worked at the Salpetrière in Paris, a hospital dedicated to treat hysteric women through hypnosis and other like treatments. Charcot’s Tuesday lectures were very famous and well attended and Brouillet’s painting shows what was then named ‘La Grande Hysterique’ (believed to be a patient called Blanche Wittmann). Watch her [...]

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The hysteric’s question and her knowledge

The hysteric asks a question to the Other: Che vuoi? (What do you want from me?). And even though hysteria seems to be a condition impairing the mind’s judgment, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses, developed in his seventeenth seminar of 1969–1970. The hysteric knows [...]

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Two forthcoming films about hysteria

Hysteria, by Tanya Wexler and A Dangerous Method, by David Cronenberg.

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Adult love and its roots in infancy

This looks so interesting. Love. Love, that eternal question. How do we chose our love objects? Where does adult love come from?

This conference investigates adult love by bringing together the worlds of psychoanalysis, literature, and performance. The most sublime, exhilarating and painful of emotions, love puzzles the intellect and almost defies description. It motivates the best and worst of us, overwhelming us with the ferocity of its demands, while thwarted love and perverse love are at the heart of much violent behaviour and neurotic suffering.

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The material sensuousness of a hysteric’s performance

I will be presenting a performative paper at the Sensuous Object conference on the 29th September 2011 at Medical Museion, Copenhagen. For my object, I have chosen a restraining belt. What is even better is that I will be allowed to use it. The pervert in me cannot wait, the hysteric is a little more [...]

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The Scene of a Crime

2HB Vol. 10 is in my hands. Lovely as always and the black cover is a nice touch given the mysteriousness of the texts. It fits well with my contribution, The Scene of a Crime. Thank you to Francis McKee and Louise Shelley.

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Next: hysteria

So, with the clues I have been giving you, through my recents texts, works and my PhD, you probably have figured out that what my current project is about is hysteria. Forgive me if my writing is inarticulate. This is something that started forming in my head barely three months ago, and I have not [...]

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Les Paris sont ouverts

The Freud Museum presents ‘Les paris sont ouverts’, curated by Caroline May, a group exhibition which brings together eight international artists, some of whom are showing for the first time in the UK. All the artists explore sexuality and desire, inclusion and exclusion, repression and trauma in a way that challenges normative thinking and proposes alternative modes of thinking about the self and ‘the other’. The title can be literally translated as ‘the bets are open’, while a looser translation suggests that ‘everything is possible, anything can happen’. The exhibition addresses the idea of openness and possibility in gender and sexuality.

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About Me

Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.

Her doctoral project, completed in 2010, investigated psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction, including an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik’s shoes as objects of desire, a disturbing encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s last work, and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks.

She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric.