‘Eating shit is all very well, but you can’t always eat the same shit. So, I try to get hold of some new shit.’ —Jacques Lacan

This lecture explores the relation between waste (déchet) and the figure of the saint from a Lacanian perspective. What is this figure, which Lacan relates to the position of the psychoanalyst, and how does it align itself structurally speaking with waste or trash? ‘Trashitas’ is the term chosen to translate ‘décharite’, Lacan’s name for what a saint does, as he explains in his televised address Television (1973): ‘A saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not caritas [charité]. Rather, he acts as trash [déchet]; his business being trashitas [il décharite].’ Trashitas is a particularly suggestive translation (by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson) because it contains the English words ‘trash’ and ‘shit’, as well as a phoneme of ‘ass’, and resounds in the rhythm of that which it is not: caritas. This talk takes up the neologism to structure comments on art, ethics, and the question of waste.

Eleanor Ivory Weber is a doctoral candidate in arts and philosophy at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. This year her work was exhibited at Kunsthalle Wien and Kunsthal Mechelen. She studies Lacanian psychoanalysis at Section Clinique, Brussels, and is co-director of Divided Publishing with Camilla Wills. Eleanor is the author of notable essays on art published in Afterall, Collateral, Flash Art, Meanjin and The Renaissance Society. She lives in Brussels

In the context of the KuPhi seminar "Theories of Waste"

The lecture will be held in English.

Moderation: Prof. Dr. Nadine Hartmann

Location: Room 112