PULSE Book event with Nathan Gorelick on The Unwritten Enlightenment

The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious traces key points of relation between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse, where the period’s efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism are most apparent. Gorelick shows how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase. Troubling the idea of the Enlightenment on its own terms, subverting its supposed authority from within, Gorelick thus reveals the workings of unconscious fantasy at the foundations of our contemporary political realities. The Unwritten Enlightenment makes clear that to criticize the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.

Bio

Nathan Gorelick is a term assistant professor of English at Barnard College, where he teaches courses on the intersections of literature and psychoanalysis from the eighteenth century to the present. His research focuses on the politics of the unconscious, and has appeared in numerous journals and periodicals, including CR: The New Centennial Review, Continental Thought and Theory, Cultural Critique, Parapraxis, Penumbr(a): Journal of Psychoanalysis and Modernity, The Psychoanalytic Review, and Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious. His clinical formation includes the six-year Training Seminar in Psychoanalysis with Gifric in Québec City and he is a member of the New York Circle of the Freudian School of Quebec. He is also a Candidate in the Post-Graduate Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis at the Pulsion Institute in New York.

Host or Publisher Pulsion - IIPPP