Wednesday, 14 June 2017, 07 pm

The lecture examines the history of hysteria against the background of two long-term cultural developments that both had a strong impact on the gender order and were closely tied to the emergence of the “gynecological disorder.” The first is the alphabet, this system of writing that wrested language from the body—to which hysteria reacted with its language converted into a symptom. The second is the sister of writing, money: a sign system that with its excarnation had an increasingly stronger impact on reality. When this sign system itself began taking on hysterical traits—by developing “symptoms without an organic cause”—the “disorder of the counter-will” had no other choice but to fall back on other forms of refusal.