The ICI Berlin mourns the loss of its former fellow Annette Bitsch who died on 30 December 2016. Annette was one of the seven fellows with whom the Institute began its work in 2007. At that point, she had already established herself as a brilliant, audacious writer and had influenced an entire generation of students through the legendary seminars she had taught for nearly a decade at the Humboldt-Universität. Just before she joined the newly-founded ICI Berlin, she had finished her habilitation at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft of the Humboldt-Universität Berlin.
During her time at the ICI Berlin, Annette began work on a media history of the migraine, which, much like most of her work, chose psychoanalysis as a methodological starting-point and linked media archeology and the histories of knowledge and technology while suffusing them, in her inimitable fashion, with poetry. Unfortunately, her own health afforded her neither the strength nor the time to finish the project. We will remember Annette as an enthusiastic, original, and generous thinker.
The virtuosity of her writing and the rigor of her commitments, but also a daunting sense of intellectual danger is preserved in her publications, most prominently her two monographs ‘always crashing in the same car’: Jacques Lacans Mathematik des Unbewussten (2001) and Diskrete Gespenster: Die Genealogie des Unbewussten aus der Medientheorie und Philosophie der Zeit (2009).
