FLB home News resources for undergraduates graduates faculty staff graduate assistants flb business office flb graduate student services   staff directory FLB directories UIUC home old browsers March 30, 2005 2004-2005/034 UI lecture to explore worlds of Freud, Kafka, Pinter Beth Hawkins, assistant professor of religious studies and literature department of religious studies at DePauw University, will give a lecture titled “Intimate punishment, or the violence of subjugation: Freud, Kafka, Pinter,” Tuesday, April 5, at 4 p.m., in Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana. The lecture is free and open to the public. Hawkins’ current project starts where her first book, “Reluctant Theologians: Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès,” leaves off, using as its point of departure what Hawkins believes are the potentially dangerous implications of her argument. In “Reluctant Theologians,” she suggests that these three authors reconstruct a covenantal system, despite the fact that they find Nietzsche's death of God hypothesis both legitimate and necessary. In this talk, she will explore what seems to be the inherent violence in the covenant—a relationship between self and Other (where Other is often read as God) that necessitates the subjugation or submission of the self to this Other. Freud theorizes this connection between violence and the covenant in his works “Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and Future of an Illusion.” Freud’s premise is that monotheism grew out of a scenario of primal murder and is kept alive by means of a perpetual vacillation between blood lust and remorse, the opposed fantasies of domination and submission. He raises a fascinating question in “Moses and Monotheism”: "Why the people of Israel adhered to their God all the more devotedly the worse they were treated by him—that is a question which we must leave open for the moment." Using Kafka and Pinter as her foundation, Hawkins will suggest that the landscapes they construct—landscapes where the absurd and comic can slide into the terrifying without any warning—are a response to the dark underbelly of Freud's premise: that the alternative to adhering to such a God is to admit to living in a world without God. Violence, then, becomes preferable to abandonment or absence. And punishment becomes the mark of intimacy, the signal of connectedness when all connection seems to have been broken. The lecture is sponsored by the UIUC Program in Comparative and World Literature.