Kafka's Before The Law : "Law of The Father"

Judith Butler, Avital Ronell and Laurence Rickels. 

Kafka's Before The Law: Law of The Father. 2011

http://www.egs.edu/ 

Judith Butler, Avital Ronell and Laurence Rickels 

talking about paternal authority and 

psychoanalysis in Kafka's writings. 

In this lecture, Laurence Rickels, psychoanalyst and author, discusses the role of libido in judgment, the impossibility of writing, the Oedipus complex and the imperative to enjoy in relationship to Franz Kafka, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Martin Luther, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari focusing on parables, paradoxes, commandments, desire, death drive, sexual difference, the superego, performativity and minor literature. 

Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Judith Butler, Avital Ronell and Laurence Rickels.

Judith Butler, Ph.D., Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2012 she will join Columbia University's English and Comparative Literature departments. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (Verso Press, 2004), Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005), Frames of War (Verso, 2009) and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Laurence Arthur Rickels, Ph.D., holds the 

Sigmund Freud Chair at the European Graduate School. 

Since 1990 Professor Rickels has been teaching Comparative Literature and German at University of California, Santa Barbara. 

There he is also an adjunct professor in the Art Department, as well as in the Film and Media Studies Department. 

Laurence Rickels is the author of numerous books in both German and English, including: Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (1988), Der unbetrauerbare Tod (1990), The Vampire Lectures (1999), Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (2008), The Devil Notebooks (2008), Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002), and I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (2010).

Avital Ronell, Ph.D., holds the Jacques Derrida Chair at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She is also University Professor of the Humanities and a professor of German, English, and comparative literature at New York University, where she codirects the Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies program. 

She is the author of Dictations: On Haunted Writing; The Telephone Book; Crack Wars; Finitude's Score; Stupidity; The Test Drive; Fighting Theory (with Anne Dufourmantelle); and most recently, Loser Sons (released February 2012).