Events and Seminars
| Event | : | The Sphinx as Figure |
|---|---|---|
| Venue | : | Online |
| Date | : | 24/04/2025 |
| Duration | : | 6 - 7:30pm BST |
| Extra Info | : | A paper delivered by Sophia Rohwetter as part of the Freudian Research Seminar Series. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ painting Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808–1827) marks the beginning of the modern interpretation of Oedipus as philosopher who, by solving the riddle with a single word – the “first word of philosophy” (Lacoue-Labarthe) – secured his tragic fate and cast the Sphinx into the abyss. This seminal image inaugurated a series of artistic interpretations throughout the 19th century and into the present, exploring the intricate relation between knowledge, desire, and sexuality. This talk turns to psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist readings of the Oedipus myth in modern and contemporary art and film, focusing on selected works from the 1960s to the 1990s, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s feature film Edipo Re (1967), Laura Mulvey’s and Peter Wollen’s feminist experimental film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), and Mike Kelley’s installation Riddle of the Sphinx (1991). By placing the riddle of the Sphinx – what Freud identified as the primal scene of the instinct for knowledge – at the center of their Oedipus adaptations, these artists reformulate the relation between knowledge and desire within the frameworks of capitalist relations of production and feminist critiques of psychoanalysis. If Oedipus is a philosopher, what role does the Sphinx play in these works? As Jean-Joseph Goux argues in Oedipus, Philosopher, the Sphinx – like Echidna, the mother of the monsters – remains “the unthought element” of the Freudian movement, a riddle unresolved by psychoanalysis. What, then, is the place of the Sphinx in art? Drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay “Oedipus as Figure,” the talk positions the Sphinx in relation to two other figures: Oedipus (as the subject of desire) and the worker (both as the ‘male’ subject of production and the ‘female’ subject of reproduction). How do Pasolini, Mulvey/Wollen, and Kelley configure this triangular constellation – Oedipus, Sphinx, worker – in their work, and thereby define the relations between myth and modernity, desire, knowledge, and production, the instinct for knowledge and the scopic drive, and artistic form and commodity form? Finally, what might these works reveal about the continuing relevance of the Oedipus myth and the role of psychoanalysis in art and art history? |
| Organised By | : | Freud Museum London |
| Web Link | : | https://www.freud.org.uk/event/freudian-research-seminar-the-sphinx-as-figure/ |