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The Phoenix Complex

A lecture by Michael Marder

23 May 2024

“Forget all you know about love and death! The teachings of a genuine pre-Socrativ, Diotima”:

A lecture by Michael Marder

Thu May 23rd, 2024 at 1 pm – 2 pm

Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art

Oslo Plads 1, 2100 København – DK

 

In Michael Marder’s recent book, The Phoenix Complex, he diagnoses and describes a deep unconscious structure, on a par with the Oedipus complex, the Electra complex, and Gaston Bachelard’s “fire complexes”, which across cultures and historical periods prompts human beings to identify the outside world and themselves with phoenixes, ever ready to spring back to life after death.

The miraculous rebound of the phoenix, ranging from psychic and physical recuperation and resurrection to environmental recovery, is the hope that refuses to die even in the face of utter devastation and extreme loss. This lethal hope persists in numerous guises, affecting our sense of life, love, and death at the individual, species, interpersonal, and cosmic levels.

In the present talk, Michael Marder will explore how this “phoenix complex” puts the other under erasure and, in particular, how it is operationalized in Plato’s Symposium with respect to the teachings Diotima transmits to Socrates.

The lecture is free to join. It takes place in Café Pegasus at Den Frie and will be in English.

The event is organized in collaboration with the artist collective Jennifee-See, as part of their ongoing lecture series at Den Frie. To receive the reading materials for the joint conversation after the lecture, please contact jennifee.see@gmail.com

Michael Marder

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology.