“The Politics and Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory: From Subject of Desire to Subject of the Drive”
This course is designed to introduce students to psychoanalytic theory, specifically to the work of psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. As a starting point we will consider the feasibility and effectiveness of framing the project of articulating psychoanalysis with politics as Tim Dean recommends in Beyond Sexuality according to both the losses that have to do with the unequal distribution of social resources, including dignity and visibility and the losses that are constitutive of subjectivity as such, that Lacan teaches have to do with the privative but generative effects of language as structure on the speaking organism. The question of the ethics of psychoanalysis is one that Lacan raises himself in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and one that is clearly present throughout his teaching. What is the role of the psychoanalyst? Is the analyst supposed to help adapt the subject to the demands of “reality”? At the end of Seminar VII Lacan announces, “There is absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream”(303). The title of the course makes a distinction between the subject of desire and the subject of the drive as a way of keying the early versus the later Lacan and this is more or less how we will proceed. We will begin with the first seminars in order to understand Lacan’s trenchant critique of ego psychology in the context of his “return to Freud.” The debates that figure in the early Lacan will provide us with the tools for understanding the important and to this day still mostly ignored differences in the U.S. between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. These debates will also shed light on how a pre-analytical notion of the ego continues to plague different critical theories and political practices. Throughout, we will explore the relationship in psychoanalysis between theory and practice as well as the possibility that the theories based on clinical practice might have some applicability for grappling with questions concerning power, politics, generally conceived, and what Michel Foucault referred to in his later work as the “care of the self.” In addition to reading a selection of Lacan’s seminars and writings, we will also consult with Lacanian commentators and practicing Lacanian analysts such as: Paul Verhaeghe, Bruce Fink, Slavoj Zizek, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Alenka Zupancic, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Tim Dean. We are banking on the hope that by the end of this course we will have a firmer grasp of psychoanalytic theory and practice and how psychoanalytic insights might be extended beyond the space of the clinic in order to help us make sense of, among other things, social and material disequilibriums in the world. We are also hoping that we will come to this material from various different intellectual backgrounds since we will be curious to see the relevancies and irrelevancies that these psychoanalytic insights announce to us in relation to the myriad kinds of work we do. |
