Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Reflections and Refractions on the Schizophrenic Nomadism of Hamlet - Shakespeare Week I

"The schizophrenic is a person who, for whatever reason, has been touched off by a desiring flow which threatens the social order.  There's an immediate intervention to ward off such a menance." - Guattari, Chaosophy

What if Hamlet is a play within the mind of one character?  Explorations of Lacan's mirror stage, schizophrenia and "madness", and Deleuze and Guattari through Hamlet will unfold during the afternoon's presentation.  Arguably central to the canon of Western tragedy, Hamlet offers a key opening to questioning our own supposed sanity and will display the possibilities of rethinking our relation(s) to our "selves", space(s) and the natural world, a three-part distinction made only for the purposes of building the overall investigation.

This afternoon's presentation will include excerpts from narratives written by those who have been clinically classified as schizophrenics, a basic introduction to Lacan's mirror stage as found within Ecrits, notions of "madness" as seen through the works of Foucault, and an introduction to the possibilites that schizophrenia opens up according to Deleuze and Guattari.  All of these explorations will be weaved in and through the play of Hamlet for what will be an enjoyable collective journey.

Joshua K. (J.K.) Fowler is an adjunct professor at Rutgers University Newark, Founder and Editor of nomadic sojourns journal, a Brooklyn-based writer and audio engineer and a doctoral candidate at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where he has so far studied with Slajov Ziznek, Simon Critchley, Lev Manovich, Peter Singer and Michael Hardt.

After this lecture, twenty members of the audience (drawn by lot) are invited to view the Shakespearen holdings, including the First Folio, in the Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

For more lectures from the writers in the Wertheim Study, click here