Video Lectures
Vampire Professor_Laurence Rickels
By Laurence Rickels, 2022
The Princeton-trained academic Laurence Rickels was transferred by the vicissitudes of the job market to California in 1981. Several years into his work at the University of California, Santa Barbara he conceived a new course offering involving a shift from
background to foreground. He advanced Freud’s passing reference (in Totem and Taboo) to the vampire as the model for the mourner’s experience of the ambivalence-enriched deceased at the outset of the mourning process to the front of the class. Through the
switch from example in theorization to plain text of what the theory is about he conceived the lecture class Vampirism in German Literature and Beyond. While maintaining the level of instruction as encounter with psychoanalysis, Rickels was taken by surprise
when several years into this pedagogical experiment his class became the big curricular highlight on campus. The reputation of the lecture class made Rickels a local celebrity, a standing potentiated beyond the campus when The Vampire Lectures, the document
of the class, based on student tape recordings, appeared in 1999. The Vampire Professor is a memoir of this period in which Rickels, the memoirist, recalls his initiation into the popular culture of B-genres, which became a focus in much of his published work.
What's the Answer? What's the Question?
Based on Robert Wilson: Lecture at Schloss Wiepersdorf, my What's the Answer; What's the Question was edited by Christopher Alvarez
Photograph by Pietro Pellini: "Frau Freitag", Cinema Kurbel, Karlsruhe, 2012
Selected Videos
https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/redux-time-out-of-joint/
Dreaming Collectives | Erich Hörl & Laurence A. Rickels 2015
The Whole Earth / Panel with Avery F.Gordon, Lars Bang Larsen and Laurence A. Rickels.
Theoretical discourses on the contemporary shift in the digital moving image. Zagreb. 2012
Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Laurence A. Rickels. Psychoanalysis. European Graduate School. 2006
Laurence A. Rickels. Psychoanalysis and Torture. European Graduate School. 2006
Professor Laurence A. Rickels, Visualization and Disappearance in H. G. Clouzot's Le Mystère Picasso
The Sirens Go Silent - Friedrich Kittler Part 5: Laurence A. Rickels
Spectre. On the politics of mourning in James Bond
SPECTRE on Ian Fleming's James Bond, Hamlet, and Melanie Klein's theory of mourning as haunting.