October 2nd, 2018  8:00 pm

Donald Moss, MD • presenter
Stathis Gourgouris, PhD • discussant

Dr. Moss explores, theoretically as well as clinically, the distinction between ‘love speech’ and ‘hate speech:’ love speech aiming to unite with what it otherwise cannot have, hate speech aiming to destroy what it otherwise cannot stand. Each wants to obliterate the separateness of its object, love speech by uniting with it; hate speech by eliminating it.  Moss asks, when faced with these pressures within and without, what does it mean for the clinician to be neutral? Dr Gourgouris will discuss this presentation from his background in psychoanalysis, politics and literature.

Unaffiliated with any institute, Donald Moss is a founding member of Green Gang, a collective of scientists and analysts working on the relations between the human and non-human environments. n his works, Moss focuses on the elemental problem sites of masculinity–mind/body, inside/outside, heterosexual/homosexual, love/hate, singular/plural.  He edited the book Hating in the First Person Plural (Other Press, 2003), has authored Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man (Routledge, 2012) and written more than fifty articles linking basic Freudian concepts to contemporary social and clinical problems.  In his most recent book, At War with the Obvious, Moss argues that in order for psychoanalysis to retain its original vitality, it must continuously work against becoming “common sensical.”

Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham).