After the Symptom (The Deluge)

As part of the 2026 Melbourne Critical Theory Winter School on Structure and Action: Psychoanalytic Theory Now, Associate Professor Sigi Jöttkandt will deliver a public lecture titled "After the Symptom (The Deluge)".

Abstract

In a recent essay in The New Republic, Eric Reinhart remarks on the peculiar feature of contemporary American politics which is that “shame no longer works”. Formerly a mechanism for regulating behaviours and binding societies through shared understandings of what is acceptable, shame today seems to have lost its power. What Reinhart is implicitly referring to is a shift in the social fabric over the course of the 20th century that Lacanian psychoanalysts have theorised in terms of the waning of the Symbolic. The older Symbolic order, which was presided over by the paternal Law and governed through the collective renunciation of enjoyment by repression, has been overtaken by a new socio-cultural contract. In this talk, I explore some of the features of this new psychic economy. In this era of unbridled jouissance, what comes after the symptom? And under these extreme conditions, are other modes of connection and collective action becoming possible?

Bio

Sigi Jöttkandt is Associate Professor in English at UNSW and Director of Open Humanities Press. She is the author of many articles and books working at the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame (2024).

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This lecture will be delivered in person only. All are welcome, but registration is essential.

Please also join us on Tuesday 23 June for our first public lecture of the week, delivered by Professor Justin Clemens, on the possibility of ethical action in apocalypse times.