Living and Dying Between Psychoanalysis and Biological Science

The relationships between psychoanalysis and biology as well as the life sciences including medicine have always been very complicated, and they have been shaped differently at various historical moments. We might just now enter a new configuration of these relationships. There is currently an abundance of scientific "knowledge" and an unprecedented power of biotechnological "knowhow." The "Anthropocene" does not only indicate the period in which the planet might become unlivable for most humans and many species but also refers to the moment in which the decoupling of sexuality as mode of enjoyment and as reproduction takes an extreme form-while speech seems to move from mouth to machine.
In this constellation, psychoanalysis is just a miniscule element. A "young science," born already at the end of modernity but perhaps dependent on the classical modern paradigm of science, it is certainly very special research into the conditions and possibilities of "human life." It does not per se constitute or produce any knowledge about what life is or what the living-and-dying entities are. It traces ways of enjoyment. It knows the latter to be depended on the living body, but it shows it to be determined as well by the realm of signifying elements showing that the body, speech and enjoyment are linked in multiple enigmatic ways.
Does psychoanalysis live (and die?) like a parasite in the body of biological science? Probably not, but it has used the figure of the parasite to understand the relation of speech and language to the living body as well as that of the fetus to the mother. And it traces what is lost in the parasitic relation for both sides.
We will take the parasite as our guide into a constellation of knowledge, speculation, and critique bringing together classics of psychoanalysis, contributions of biology and analyses of contemporary philosophy and anthropology.