Scrivener's Monthly: Dr. Paul Verhaeghe Speaking About the Diaries of Louise Bourgeois

Description:

Presented in conjunction with the 2013 La Conference, Scrivener’s Monthly hosted an evening with scholar Paul Verhaeghe in which he presented his paper “Beyond the Return of the Repressed: Louise Bourgeois's Chthonic Art” (2012), co-authored with Julie De Ganck. 

Of his paper, Verhaeghe writes:

“Last year, I received an email from New York asking if I would be interested in producing a paper for a book that would be edited in function of a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois. I emailed back that I felt flattered, that I knew the work of Louise Bourgeois, but that I did not feel very knowledgeable in the field of art and psychoanalysis. And then I received an even more flattering email, telling me that Louise Bourgeois had read two of my books, and that she had explicitly asked that I would write a contribution for that volume. At that point, my narcissism made it impossible to refuse, so I said yes. Two months later I received a third email, with the sad news that Louise had died, and with the question if I would be interested to come to New York to study her diaries, and that I would be granted full access to them. At that moment, I did not hesitate, and during the summer I was immersed for a week in her diaries. This resulted in a paper that has been published in the meantime in Portuguese, because the retrospective was first of all put on stage in the Sao Paulo Guggenheim, and later this year or next year, an English version will be published as well.”

Scrivener’s Monthly was a series of public presentations that explored the space between material practices and spoken words. Set alongside exhibitions at Western Front, this experiment in “not publishing” involved readings, performances, and other articulations.

Video documentation of this event is available upon request.