"13 Ways of Looking at a Crocodile"
Starting from one of the more obscure and often overlooked literary references in Freud’s Das Unheimliche– a tale about haunted houses and reptilian ghosts – my talk will engage with a series of texts that feature a strange theoretical animal: the crocodile. In a trajectory that leads from Freud’s Viennese home to Max Ernst’s collages from 19th century illustrated journals, I will explore some of the curious literary apparitions of ‘the beast in whose mouth we all are’- to paraphrase a well-known formulation by Jacques Lacan.