Video Lectures

Nazi Psychoanalysis: Mourning, Memory, and Antisemitism

USC Shoah Foundation, The Daniel and Marisa Klass Lecture Series on Antisemitism (2026). In conversation with Dr. Brian Hughes.

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