“Madness” in Tragedy: Friedrich Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles — a Talk by Jeffrey S. Librett
Is there a way to acknowledge a poet’s “madness” without reducing their work to a symptom? Drawing on the work of Jean Laplanche and the Freudian School of Quebec’s post-Lacanian approach to psychosis, this lecture takes up Friedrich Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles—the tragic drama he composed at the close of the 18th century—in order to ask how the poetic subject and the poetic text may illuminate one another. We will ask: how does Death of Empedocles manifest the structure of psychosis, both formally and thematically? And where can we detect in the text resistances to certain aspects, effects, or results of the psychotic process?
Jeffrey S. Librett is Emeritus Professor of German and Scandinavian at the University of Oregon, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 2000), and Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew (Fordham University Press, 2015), and co-editor, with Lucie Cantin and Tracy McNulty, of A Psychoanalysis for a Reemergent Humanity: The Metapsychology of Willy Apollon (forthcoming with SUNY Press, December 2025).
This talk is being held in the context of BISR’s Language Learning and Critique program, an innovative approach to classical and modern languages and their ever-changing scenes of reception. RSVPs will receive a link to the Zoom meeting room where the talk will be held.
This talk is now available for viewing on BISR’s Vimeo page; click here to watch.
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