Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Culture
Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Culture
The present omnicrisis manifests at the personal scale in abject psychic misery: depression, anxiety, fascistic rage, narcissist wound, and deaths of despair. Its extent is prompting what many have chronicled as a “renaissance” of psychoanalysis in clinical therapy. Is there any attendant change in the psychoanalytic valence of contemporary cultural production? What are the contemporary aesthetic repertoires of lack, anxiety, and enjoyment? Do 21st century aesthetics demand psychoanalytic interpretation? How is psychoanalytic cultural criticism advancing? What critical approaches can explain our current intolerance for mediation? What critical approaches can amplify the marginal mediums for joy, pleasure, and the desire called utopia? Why might scholars of modern aesthetics need to engage psychoanalytic concepts, methods, and insights? To explore these questions, this course juxtaposes classic works of psychoanalytic theory and highlights of psychoanalytic cultural criticism with contemporary aesthetic objects and emergent popular critical approaches. We will try to formulate psychoanalytic contributions to the critique of omnicrisis, and to practice cultural criticism that metabolizes psychoanalytic theory dynamically.
Requirements
- active seminar participation: careful reading, thoughtful contribution to discussion
- discussion facilitation, one session
- discussion wrap-up, one session (informal summation of that day’s discussion)
- seminar paper
Guidelines
Readings and Discussion Preparation: This is an intensive seminar, with a heavy reading load of complex texts. We will approach the seminar space as a laboratory for experimenting with collective reading and discovering as much as we can about psychoanalytic approaches to cultural criticism. Seminar sessions will often commence by asking every student to indicate ideas or forms or phenomena in the readings that call for unpacking, and to supply page numbers where possible. Discussion participation is key to a strong seminar and an important basis for your evaluation.
Discussion Facilitation: Lead a chunk of discussion time in a given session. Take pedagogical liberties as far as activities, discussion plan, etc, but be sure to include at least 3 of the days text and at least these 3 steps: First step: substantive paraphrase aimed at educing the value of the critical arguments or the ideas in the creative works. Second step: highlight at least 1 passage of interest / vexation for further unpacking. Third step: pose 3 questions for discussion pertaining to theoretical questions in the course, aesthetic examples in the course, or other avenues of inquiry that strike you.
Discussion Wrap-up: At the end of a seminar session, spend 5 minutes extemporaneously reviewing what emerged as key themes during that session’s discussion. No advance preparation is necessary; simply attend to the flow of that session’s conversation and select a few central points for recapitulation and carry-over to the next discussion.
Seminar Paper: 12-15 page essays should respond to and elaborate the theoretical issues raised by the seminar, and will most likely do so by way of readings of cultural objects not on our syllabus (see, for starters, the Optional Objects list). Papers should reflect / incorporate research conducted using the MLA database.
Required Texts for Purchase:
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire
Peter Gay, The Freud Reader
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book 11
Lydia Kiesling, Mobility
Additional Required Texts available in our dropbox:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/nl7xlc0qiib77jws77q23/h?rlkey=0gpizwhg1mlu68yinrcmd0oro&dl=0
Reading Schedule
PART ONE: NOW
Week 1 (9 JAN)
What is Psychoanalysis and Why Is It Now
Parapraxis, “A Tragedy of Errors, A Comedy of Terrors”
Joseph Bernstein, “Not Your Daddy’s Freud”
Jamieson Webster, “Teenagers Are Telling Us That Something Is Wrong With America”
Hannah Zeavin, “What’s Behind The Freud Resurgence?”
Freud Museum, “What is Psychoanalysis: Is It Weird?” (8 mins video)
Alenka Zupančič, “Why Psychoanalysis”
Byung Chul Han, Psychopolitics
optional: Kornbluh, “Imaginary”
Week 2 (16 JAN)
Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism Now
Nathan Gorelick, “Psychoanalysis At The End of the World”
Rithika Ramamurthy, “The Climate Anxiety Novel”
Lily Scherlis, “Boundary Issues”
Mitch Therieau, “Vibe, Mood, Energy”
Russell Sbriglia, “Enjoy Your Trump”
Eugenia Brinkema, Forms of the Affects: “Ten Points to Begin”;“Film Theory’s Absent Center”
Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: “The Economics of the Drive”
Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things intro
Eric Santner, Untying Things “On Some Causes For Excitement”
PART TWO: FOUNDATIONS
Week 3 (23 JAN)
Freud
Sigmund Freud
“The Wolf Man” Reader 400-428
“The Sexual Aberrations” Reader 240-258
Interpretation of Dreams (excerpt) Reader 129-171
Week 4 (30 JAN)
still Freud
Freud
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (excerpt: Chapter 1; Chapter 5 53-67)
“The Unconscious” Reader 572-583
“The Uncanny”
Civilization and Its Discontents (excerpt) Reader 722-771
Week 5 (6 FEB)
Lacan
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (1-34)
Jacques Lacan
Seminar 11 “The Unconscious and Repetition” (17-53)
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire intro
Fredric Jameson, Lacan and the Dialectic
Week 6 (13 FEB)
Sex
Copjec, “Sex and The Euthanasia of Reason;” “The Sexual Compact”
Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant, “Sex Without Optimism”
Avgi Saketopoulou, “To Suffer Pleasure”
Patricia Gherovici, Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexuality: From Feminism to Trans intro
Christopher Breu, In Defense of Sex intro
PART THREE: INTERPRETING CULTURE
Week 7 (20 FEB)
das unbehagen
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry”
Herbert Marcuse, “The Dialectic of Civilization”
Jameson, “Pleasure: A Political Issue”
Slavoj Žižek, “How Did Marx Invent The Symptom?”
Mladen Dolar, “Of Drives and Culture”
Berlant, “Affect in the Present”
Week 8 (27 FEB)
aesthetics
Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets” Reader 514-521
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”
Lacan, Seminar on The Purloined Letter
Shoshana Felman, “To Open The Question”
Eve Sedgwick, Between Men intro
Tracy McNulty, “Enabling Constraints”
Week 9 (5 MAR)
still aesthetics
Mary Ann Doane, “Sublimation and the Psychoanalysis of the Aesthetic”
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings intro
Copjec, “Imagine There’s No Woman”; “Narcissism, Approached Obliquely”
Berlant, “Slow Death”
Lauren Michelle Jackson, “The Invention of the Male Gaze”
PART FOUR: FANTASY AND THE POLITICAL
Week 10 (12 MAR)
surplus
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (excerpt tucker 65-80ish)
“The Labor Process, Or, The Production of Use Values”
“Productive and Unproductive Labor”
Yahya Madra and Ceren Ozselcuk, “Economy/Oikonomia”
Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan”
Kiarina Kordela, “Political Metaphysics: God in Global Capitalism”
Samo Tomsic, “Labor/Work”
Sarah Brouillette, “Creative Labor”
SPRING BREAK (18 MAR)
Week 11 (26 MAR)
cultural difference
Franz Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders”
Edward Said, “Freud and the Non European”
Hortense Spillers, “All The Things You Could Be By Now”
Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of The Neighbor”
Sheldon George, “The Lacanian Subject of Race”
David Marriott, “Slave and Signifier”
Week 12 (2 APR)
utopia
Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” Reader 436-442
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” excerpt
Robin D.G. Kelley, “Freedom Dreams”
Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (excerpt)
ME OBrien, Family Abolition “Toward the Commune”
Seth Brodsky, “Drive: Stay High”
PART FIVE: MEDIA
Week 13 (9 APR)
mediatic
Jodi Dean, “Blog Settings”
Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine excerpt
Clint Burnham, “Does the Internet Have An Unconscious?”
Brouillette, “Wattpad, Platform Capitalism, and the Feminization of Publishing Work”
Jacob Johanssen, “For The Moment I Am Not F*cking, I Am Tweeting”
Marshall Armintor, “Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, and Digital
Life”
Joshua Gunn, “The Psychoses of Speed”
Week 14 (16 APR)
Novel
Lydia Kiesling, Mobility
Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplots”
Jameson, The Political Unconscious intro excerpt
Week 15 (23 APR)
Film
Jordan Peele, Get Out
McGowan, Psychoanalytic Film Theory (intro and chapter one); “The Singularity of the
Cinematic Object”
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror “Something To Be Scared Of”