“In the course of writing a book on inertia, indifference and lassitude in psychic and cultural life, I find myself associating insistently to a number of lives and works, Warhol’s first of all. Whether I’m addressing pop cultural obsessions with the undead, the aesthetics of opiate drugs or the radically devitalized patients that come to my psychoanalytic consulting room, Warhol has become a kind of de facto presiding spirit over the project. Exploring the complex, often contradictory place of affects, violence and the ‘humanoid’ in his life and work, this talk will be an attempt to start making sense of Warhol’s place in our culture and my own mind.”

Dr. Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice, and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author ofSpectacular Allegories (1998), Interrupting Auschwitz (2003) and How to Read Freud (2005), as well as numerous reviews and articles on modern literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis, appearing regularly in the TLS, Guardian and New Statesman. His latest book, The Private Life, was published by Granta in 2013, and addresses our current raging anxieties about privacy through explorations in psychoanalysis, literature and contemporary life.