A Lecture by Kaja Silverman - "Orpheus Rex"

Thursday, December 4, 2008
5 p.m. - 7 p.m.

Location: Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts, 715 Broadway (entrance at 1 Washington Place)
Ticket contact info: nicole.derise@nyu.edu
Phone: 212.992.7766
In the period between 1882 and 1939, Western writers and artists began asking some important questions:
What is a woman? What is a man? How do they and how should they relate to each other? Surprising
and profoundly enabling answers were given to these questions by figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche,
Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland, Wilhelm Jensen, Lou-Andreas Salom, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and
Rainer Maria Rilke. They found these answers by returning to Ovids version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.
The Orpheus and Eurydice myth was ubiquitous in Western culture until the psychoanalytic legitimization of the
Oedipus complex, and although we have forgotten how the story goes, we have continued to live it; indeed, as
Silverman argues, it rather than the Oedipus myth is the master myth of Western subjectivity. The turn away
from Eurydice is not just a turn away from woman; it is a turn away from relationality, and the basis of history
as we know it. Ovids coda opens the door to a different kind of history, one that was partially realized in the
period between 1882 and 1939, and that still has the power to save us.