August Ruhs
August Ruhs, Vienna, 9 May 2023
“Transition to an Era of Arbitrariness”
Psychoanalyst, cultural critic, cinephile: as a co-founder of the “Neue Wiener Gruppe”, August Ruhs made a significant contribution to anchoring the theories and methods of Jacques Lacan in Austria—indeed, in the German-speaking region at large—and to placing it in fruitful dialogue with Freudian analysis. His essays on the (projection) machine that is cinema number among the essential texts on film and media. At his practice in Vienna’s first district, Ruhs recalls his first attendance of a lecture by Lacan, lays out his thesis according to which new, contemporary forms of narcissism require new forms of analysis, and points to cancel culture’s exclusionary mechanisms as the source of an increasingly aggressive tendency toward linguistic impoverishment.
“Transition to an Era of Arbitrariness”
Psychoanalyst, cultural critic, cinephile: as a co-founder of the “Neue Wiener Gruppe”, August Ruhs made a significant contribution to anchoring the theories and methods of Jacques Lacan in Austria—indeed, in the German-speaking region at large—and to placing it in fruitful dialogue with Freudian analysis. His essays on the (projection) machine that is cinema number among the essential texts on film and media. At his practice in Vienna’s first district, Ruhs recalls his first attendance of a lecture by Lacan, lays out his thesis according to which new, contemporary forms of narcissism require new forms of analysis, and points to cancel culture’s exclusionary mechanisms as the source of an increasingly aggressive tendency toward linguistic impoverishment.