Totem & Taboo will be accompanied by a series of salon-style interdisciplinary conversations and performances during monthly Saturday Salons, a platform for cross-disciplinary conversations and collaborations including lectures, performances, concerts, and panels curated by Ella Marder.

Is the image more real than reality, or the epitome of fiction? Is the image politically conservative or subversive? What is the difference between what is imaginary in an image and what is creative imagination? From Rousseau to Freud and Jung, from Guy Debord to Castoriadis and Jacques Lacan, this conversation will engage with the question of the image as it relates to art and other forms of culture.

JAMIESON WEBSTER is a psychoanalyst in New York. She is a founding member of the psychoanalytic collective – Das Unbehagen – and author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and – with Simon Critchley – Stay, Illusion! (Patheon, 2013). Webster has published in Apology, Cabinet, The Guardian, The New York Times, Playboy, and many psychoanalytic publications. She is currently working on a new book, Conversion Disorder to be released by Columbia Press in 2017.

CHIARA BOTTICI is a philosopher and a writer, working in the field of history of philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and political theory. She is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the author of many short stories alongside Imaginal Politics: Images beyond Imagination and The Imaginary (Columbia University Press 2014) A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge University Press 2007) and Men and States (Palgrave 2009). Bottici also co-authored Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (Routledge, 2010).