the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Brigid Doherty

Rilke’s Magic Lantern

This lecture took place on April 29th, 2011 at 6:30 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

In October 1905, while employed as private secretary to Auguste Rodin in residence at the sculptor’s home in Meudon just outside Paris, the Prague-born German-speaking poet Rainer Maria Rilke composed a lecture on Rodin’s work that he delivered over the following months on tour in Dresden, Prague, Hamburg, and Berlin, sometimes to audiences of as many as 600 listeners. Rilke revised the lecture for inclusion in the third edition of his Rodin monograph (1907), and the 1905 text also survives in its original manuscript form. This presentation explores the metaphors employed by Rilke in his Rodin lecture to frame relationships between human beings and works of art (and between persons and things more broadly conceived) and argues for the significance of those metaphors for our understanding of matters of ongoing interest and concern in the history of art, media, and psychoanalysis. Crucial within the larger structure of Rilke’s figurally complex text are his invocation of the image-projection technology of the magic lantern and his suggestion that the lecture’s effect on its audience should be virtually hypnotic.

About Brigid Doherty

Brigid Doherty is Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology and the Department of German at Princeton University, where she is also a member of the core faculty of the Program in Media + Modernity and the Program in European Cultural Studies. Her main areas of scholarly interest are modern and contemporary art, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. Recent publications include a co-edited volume of Walter Benjamin’s writings, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Harvard, 2008), as well as essays on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne; Sándor Ferenczi’s psychoanalytic theories of introjection and imitation; the work of contemporary artist Rosemarie Trockel; and early twentieth-century accounts of the potential pedagogical value of kitsch.

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.