Once in London, in the close quarters of the countdown to or deferral of his assisted death, Freud concluded the final parts of Moses and Monotheism in order to appease, as he put it, an unquiet ghost. At the tail end of his life and work, Freud returned not only to the primal fantasy but also to the connection between waking fantasy and cultural production. In some sense he was catching up with a trajectory of research he initiated in 1908, and which in the interim Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs had been carrying forward. By skewering the three research projects and profiles upon Marie Bonaparte’s memoir of her beloved chow’s illness and recovery, her transference gift to Freud which he translated in exchange at the time of composition of the first parts of Moses and Monotheism, we recognize in the psychoanalytic excavation of the fantasy contents of religion and art Freud’s last will and interspecial testament.
After thirty years teaching at the University of California, Laurence A. Rickels accepted the professorship in art and theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe as successor to Klaus Theweleit. He is also the Sigmund Freud Professor of Media and Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. Rickels is the author of Aberrations of Mourning, The Case of California, Nazi Psychoanalysis, The Vampire Lectures, The Devil Notebooks, Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, and SPECTRE. A new study, Germany: A Science Fiction, is scheduled to appear by the end of 2014. He has also published numerous essays and edited and co-edited several collections and special issues on unmourning, as he terms it, as well as on the cultural study of occult and technical media. For more information please visit the website: www.larickels.com
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The keynote was part of the International Conference ABANDON, a collaboration between World Picture and the ICI Berlin. The conference fed into the ICI’s Core Project ERRANS and was supported by the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and the Department of Italian at the University of Cambridge.
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