Back to Life: Reading Reich After Foucault

When Michel Foucault delivered his scathing critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, he had Wilhelm Reich in mind. After Foucault, Reich’s vitalist critique of sexual repression and its relation to authoritarian politics has often been dismissed as naïvely ‘liberationist,’ and based on an untenable positive vital ontology. Cultural theorists, especially in the United States, have often rejected Reich’s vitalism in favour of various kinds of negative ontologies: bodies staged in discourse, Lacanian lack, Derridean deferral.

But does this need to be an either/or? Is it possible that the rejection of the repressive hypothesis is itself a kind of repression? In this seminar, we reconsider the work of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), reading it alongside some of his inspirations, fellow travelers, critics, and successors. Reich was a pioneering sexologist, a member of Freud’s inner circle in the 1920s and of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s (before being ejected from both), an unrelenting critic of the libidinal grounds of the patriarchal family and fascism, and, finally, a bio-scientist and therapist in the field of cosmic ‘orgone energy.’

It is commonplace nowadays to credit Reich’s early work in psychoanalysis and to dismiss his later orgonomic pursuits as – to put it gently – speculative. The aim of this class is to hold open a space for a generously critical engagement with this most idiosyncratic, creative, and exasperating 20th century thinker. In the midst of our climate crisis, our neo-authoritarian politics, and our raging gender backlash, what might we learn from letting Reich take us, at least for a while, back to life?

ANTH 41202 | AASR 41203 | GRMN 41202 | CCCT 41202