OxTalks is Changing
OxTalks will soon be transitioning to Oxford Events (full details are available on the Staff Gateway). A two-week publishing freeze is expected in early Hilary to allow all events to be migrated to the new platform. During this period, you will not be able to submit or edit events on OxTalks. The exact freeze dates will be confirmed as soon as possible.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The Maternal Body: philosophy and psychoanalysis
More information at www.wollheimcentenary.org. Venue details will be sent to registrants.
Abstracts: Charlie Gere “Human Technicity and Maternal Presence and Absence”: Freud’s FORT/DA game, its development in Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ and in Lacan’s ‘objet petit a’ connect to the latter’s emphasis on the primordial biological discord between us and our environment, arising out of the premature birth necessitated by human bipedality, from which language and culture emerge. Further linked to the fundamental relation between bipedality and technicity (Leroi Gourhan, Derrida, Stiegler) and to Heidegger’s tool analysis from Being and Time. human technicity is understood as a response to maternal presence and absence.
Louise Braddock “‘It’s the body, stupid’; where else can projection be?” Wollheim writes, we are at home in our mind ‘somewhat as in a body’. His remark points to the mother’s body as total environment for the infant’s nascent consciousness. I argue that, from a position of naturalism, there is nowhere else for its mind to ‘be’ and no other reference point from which to understand itself. Phantasy alone can’t do the job; it is a placeholder for what really goes on.
Jarrad Felgenhauer “Hegel and Feminist Metaphysics” I examine positive resonances of two philosophies rarely put together: Hegelian and contemporary feminist metaphysics. I focus on Hegel’s famous thesis that we must understand the true “not only as substance, but equally as subject,”, to explore a shared fundamental goal between the two approaches. Binary metaphysical approaches are undermined in favor of understanding reality as a non-reductive and entangled intra-activity of nature-culture, materiality-language, subjectivity-objectivity, providing ground for further exploration.
David Collins and Susanne Herrmann-Sinai will respond.
Date:
21 February 2026, 14:00
Venue:
St John's College
Speakers:
Charlie Gere (Lancaster University),
Louise Braddock (Independent scholar),
Jarrad Felgenhauer (University of Seattle),
David Collins (University of Cambridge),
Susanne Hermann-Sinai (MCS)
Organisers:
Louise Braddock (Independent scholar),
Paul Tod (St John's College)
Organiser contact email address:
wollheimcentenary@gmail.com
Part of:
Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis
Booking required?:
Required
Booking email:
wollheimcentenary@gmail.com
Cost:
Free
Audience:
Members of academic institutions or professional bodies; give academic or professional affiliation when registering.
Editor:
Paul Tod
