On the Interpretation of an Annotated Version of Lacan's Schema R
The Lozenge of the Mathème for Fantasy (1):
The Vel in the Lozenge
The diamond-shaped lozenge character/symbol found in Lacan's mathème for fantasy is clearly not the same thing as schema R or a semiosic square. This is partially because the lozenge's characteristic ability is to elide participating in either a symbolization or a semiosic square, because these are structures that intrinsically incorporate an arrangement of four given terms into two distinct contraries. The lozenge, on the other hand, while it does possess for itself two contraries, just like a semiosic square has, it also only (apparently) supports two terms, not four. So, while the ultimate agenda is to integrate the Oedipal+preOedipal+Real (S+I+R) quadrangle (schema R) into what Lacan refers to as the vel in his eleventh seminar, they are not genuinely the same structure. The annotations would have the vel moving from E to M on schema R by way of the object of privation x, the symbolic father P, and the ideal-ego I(A). This is not what is going on with a lozenge at all. So, there is either a dialectical progression required to reach the point where a lozenge-structure can modify the schema R so that a direct vel movement is possible whenever signification may occur, or these speculations and suspicions turn out to be incorrect, and the lozenge-structure should be kept separate from any quadrangular semiosic schemas for the rest of human history.
In any case, here is the (my) annotated version:
The Lozenge of the Mathème for Fantasy (2):
The Hegelian Lure, and the “Master-Servant Dialectic” in the Oedipal Square/Schema R
In an article titled “Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology”, written by Chris Arthur, and published in the New Left Review for their November-December 1983 issue (this is an article that I read online a few years ago that profoundly influenced me), there was a discussion on the appropriation of Hegel's philosophy by both Karl Marx himself versus the French Marxists of the 20th century, the latter citing Alexandre Kojève as their primary influence: figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Hyppolite, and Hérbert Marcuse.
At stake was the definition and use of the French word aliénation in French Marxist philosophy, since it could be translated for two different words in German, words which were used by the philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. These two words were, namely, Entäußerung (“en-toy-sare-oong”, alienation) and Entfremdung (“ent-frem-doong”; estrangement, or alienation), respectively.
Hegel's Entäusserung was used more in reference to a spiritual (pertaining to Spirit) or essential (pertaining to essence) connotation of the meaning of the word "alienation", whereas the word Entfremdung connoted through "estrangement”, for Marx more specifically, something maybe closer to the English word "separation", i.e., the proletariat's alienation from the product of his/her/their labor, indicating that the worker has the product of his labor taken away from him once he is finished making it. This is because it is intended, by the capitalist who owns the business, to be sold to someone else (obviously). Marx's point in developing this idea of alienation wasn't exactly that the finished product ought to belong to the worker instead (as I once foolishly misunderstood to a large degree), but rather that the financial math involved in capitalist business operations ends up cheating the worker of a full compensation for what he/she/they did to produce wealth for their employer that day. Alienation, in Marxian economics, thereby implemented a more spiritual or abstract register of Hegel's philosophy in this manner, which it always only ever was; mostly, this was in the context of Marx's polemic against a sort of poetic injustice at the societal level, and not a serious call for any violent destruction of the established order.
But wait… Is Marx ever really talking about political economy itself when he writes about the workers who are forced to participate in it, (that is, if they want food to eat and a place to sleep)? Was his writing just an example of literary self-stylization through polemic? Or is labor itself not truly productive, but rather something fundamentally cognitive and philosophical by means of the historical mechanisms internal to thought itself? And why is it important that French intellectuals of the 20th century were claiming that these connections now established between Marx and Hegel ought to be attributed to the teachings of Alexandre Kojève, instead of getting de-bunked altogether?
This tendency in French Marxism, broadly speaking, and according to Chris Arthur, is significant because Alexandre Kojève is practically the father of French existentialism, French psychoanalysis, French political philosophy, and 20th century French Marxism; the study of any philosophy of history or Heidegger's ontology in France, as well, could never do without his influence either. As a result, even French president Emmanuel Macron can be presumed to have a familiarity with the prestige of the French Hegelian tradition. Alexandre Kojève was a profound influence on Jacques Lacan as well, serving as Lacan's "master-signifier". He really is the most influential thinker, teacher, and politician of all time, even though he is not by any means the most essential one.
However, this confusion about so-called "alienation" persisted in Western European philosophy for quite a long time as a result of his teaching. But… what if Kojève had anticipated, prior to the consequences of this confusion about "alienation", what he was doing with the eventual historical effects of his teaching? His calculated dissemination of Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophical wisdom is rather Christ-like for that reason. (But I'll discuss this way further down in the post.)
Back to main topic: The vel in Jacques Lacan's diamond-shaped lozenge is located at the bottom-half of the lozenge. This part of it, a V-shaped movement from left to right, is also referred to by Lacan as "the Hegelian lure". Why?
So, the Hegelian lure is… what?
“Spirit grasps the sphere of estrangement as the product of its own self-alienation.” This is the essential thrust of fantasy in general, even though it is an activity that remains largely unconscious. And that very fact is because of its interactions with what is non-conscious.
This interplay which constitutes the
thrust of fantasy is between:
[1] the formations of the unconscious,
[2] unconscious mechanisms (e.g. natural metaphor), and
[3] non-conscious, or undiscovered, scientific/factual knowledge.
This thrust of fantasy, then, is a conglomerate formation facing towards Hegel's idea of Absolute Knowing. There is a gap between the present-day, or present-moment, and the final end of knowledge itself, which marks the location of a present-moment's abstract finish-line. This situation bears stark similarities to Kant's antinomies of Pure Reason, but as Hegel famously criticizes, Kant's idea of the concept is too flimsy, because a concept is something which ought to be grasped properly if it is to be the attainment of the thing itself. In this vein, what I personally like to think of as the noumenal justice of imaginational (visual) logic relies too heavily on the metaphysical escapability of the Kantian thing-in-itself. This innate slipperiness, which generally characterizes Kant's understanding of objects, avoids Hegel's notion of Absolute Knowing for the most part, deferring instead to its respectively absent uncaused cause, rather than making itself graspable by way of self-knowing.
The relationship to knowledge on the part of the Lacanian (or psychoanalytic) subject is one which must necessarily pass through the dialectics of need, demand, and desire in order to be capable of "producing" a signifying chain. This is distinctly marked by the appearance of a', which shows up on the Schema L. (You can find a pretty good explanation of that here, although I would like to take a closer look at it and emphasize the emergence of this a' as the very condition to which desire itself is subjected.)
In any case, this conception of "desire itself" as something subjected to the a' is analogous to a thematic element of the mathème for fantasy found in Chris Arthur's exposition of the philosophical relationship between Marx and Hegel. So, what does Marx say, potentially pertaining to fantasy, and alluding to Hegel, according to Chris Arthur?
(“Bildungsroman”, according to Oxford Languages/Google Search Engine, is “a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education.”)
“Abstract mental labor” as the “labor of spirit” is the final objective of fantasy in general, and this is what Lacan's mathème expresses. On the annotated version of Schema R, however, there is a part of the vel (if this schema is indeed mimicking the lozenge) which is a gap in both figurative and literal space, there to denote how the dialectic of desire must play out before a linear process of signification may ever occur in the first place. To get to this abstract mental labor, then, reality must become an object, one which is both ordered and organized by the trapezoid-symbolizations which are the projective surfaces of psychoses: poiesis/delusion, genesis/hallucination, and sinthome/elision. This is what the convoluted-looking annotation basically signifies.
The Lozenge of the Mathème for Fantasy (3):
The Gap between the Split-Subject and the Object of Privation
The split-subject is produced by a variable stimulus Δ interacting with the variables S and S’, illustrated above on Graph I of the graph of desire, which is also known as the “button-tie” or “quilting-point” (point de capiton). This interaction between the variables is called metonymic sliding (glissement), or slippage. Two vertices of the pre-Oedipal triangle (i and m) may then interact with this metonymic slippage in tandem with its already-produced product, the split-subject, $. To re-iterate the basics, the Other, A, is a destination at which the subject never arrives, however (it is a place that exists, but not a space where one may be). Rather, the approach is one of anticipation for what Lacan repeatedly called “the treasure trove of signifiers”, the Other, which I mistook (for a long time) for a lexicon. Looking at the schema for poiesis will show, however, that there is also the sonic resonance of the imaginary phallus, -φ, which vibrates all around the image of the object i(a), objet petit a.
Poiesis here is the failure of frustration to relate to castration in a way that germinates the very possibility of fantasy. The subject’s approach to a relationship with demand is knocked off course by a metonymic slippage which flees from the Other in the form of the Voice, and this consequent alienation causes the subject to “fall under” the phallic function of the mother's beyond (Jouissance → Castration) and land at the locus of the signified of the Other. It does not reach the upper level of the complete graph of desire because it was not launched up by desire, d, with enough thrust. This is Hegel and Marx’s Entfremdung, which was described above. The estrangement of spirit finds its home in self-alienation, and picks up the Signifier as the substitution for its lost relationship to desire. This is a properly-constituted instance of cognition, which in addition to the signified also picks up more of -φ’s sonic resonances on the way down to I(A), and arms itself with the ego (m, “le moi”). The ideal-ego, I(A), is a space where one may arrive at occasionally, but the resonances of the imaginary phallus which are functionally reflected (reflection here functions as a metaphor for re-semiotization, since the vectors $→A and s(A)→I(A) are not moving in the same direction) in i(a) continuously interfere with the apperception of any final tension. This is to say that the graph of desire is best understood as a structure that is constantly pulsing with the colorful, multiplicitous vibrations of plucked strings.
Poiesis corresponds to the elementary cell, Graph II of the graph of desire, as a projective surface of psychosis, the one which fosters the (psychotic) structure of delusion. It is something that you peel off of it, like a sticker, or an article of clothing, a cloak for a desire-device whose existence would have otherwise gone undetected. But what it also uncovered for us above was the falling-under of the subject to a place below the phallic function at the signified of the Other s(A), which is a place both added to and subtracted from by the sonic resonances of the imaginary phallus in an Icarus-like enactment of Entfremdung.
What emerges for the subject from this falling-under, in conjunction with both poietic uncovering and Entfremdung, is the object of privation, which I denote as x. This kind of object is of a symbolic lack. But this observation of the poietic uncovering of a desire-device (Graph II of the graph of desire) as the foundation for the approach to phenomenological method is both schematically and architectonically deceptive. However, The relationship between the subject and the object of privation is certainly an exceptional one, and poiesis may approach this object from the greatest distance possible, as a trapezoidal-symbolization, and as a projective surface without a symbolic object. The aforementioned deception of this approach lies in how the other two trapezoidal-symbolizations have identical capacities to uncover similar dimensional objects for the subject (i.e., objects of frustration and castration), therefore, they are neither objectively nor metaphysically outranked by the primal cloak of poiesis.
Beginning with poiesis makes the exposition of the gap between $ and x less difficult to explain, though. This is because for the cloak, or projective surface, of sinthome, the object of privation moves right into the place of the signified of the Other once the dialectic of demand has recapitulated, whereat the subject may readily collect it (x) upon the occurrence of its Entfremdung after having fallen under the phallic function; the subject then may bring it (x) back to where it formerly just was, to the space of the ideal-ego.
This process of re-linking the signified of the Other to the ideal-ego without interference from the resonances of the imaginary phallus by means of the object of privation is called the abject. Counter-resonances from the symbolic father at P on the Oedipal square vibrate in tandem with the momentum of the ego (m), causing elisions of the resonances of the imaginary phallus by de-longitudinalizing its sound waves, sending them off in a transverse direction. If sound waves are always physically longitudinal, and this fact is in tandem with the imaginary phallus because these waves may only follow the law, then the sound waves which resonate from P are longitudinal as well, because they may only stop the law from being followed. The relationship between P and m is an odd one that can therefore only be uncovered by putting on the cloak of sinthome. The unconscious mechanism at work in this cloak of sinthome placed over Graph II is reification. The subject may get sucked over to the left side of the graph by the resonances of P in tandem with m, and identify directly with x in such a way that the ideal-ego and the subject take on a relationship to one another similar to that of the abject. This close-knit triangulation leaves the Other in a state of being held at the greatest possible distance, however; this is to the extent that the real father must have some rugged object for its substitute within the treasure-trove of signifiers (A). In this way, as a distracting ploy to the subject, it is also the key to the lock, which allows for the object of privation to invade the subject’s rightful place.
The final cloak, then, is the cloak of genesis, whereby the subject substitutes itself for the object of privation directly in order to displace itself, and pre-configures the left side of Graph II as wholly imaginary. Thereby, the subject may be returned to the Father most purely at I(A), and the signified may also be returned rightfully to the treasure-trove of the Other at A, both of these functions occurring mutually without disturbing one another. This is also the foundation for the projective surface of hallucination, however, a sort of antagonistic undoing of the phenomenology that the cloaks, up until now, gave a semblance of.
In conclusion, the gap (béance) between the split-subject and the object of privation is a three-sided relationship between two terms: E-x, E’-x, and $-x. This is illustrated by the button-tie, Graph I, and results in the formation of a lozenge-structure. You can also find it on the symbolic (lower) triangle of the annotated schema R, adjacent to E. Thus, the lozenge is derived from a semiosic square, that of schema R, after all, rather than the synchrony and diachrony at odds with one another which merely form a semblance of the real through their empty resonance. (Whether or not this is ontological or metaphysical is decidedly beyond the scope of the topic.)
Alexandre Kojève and Jacques Lacan's Christ-Like Riddle for Human History
So: back to the speculation about Alexandre Kojève, and his Christ-like plan for the fate of our species’ philosophical institutions: did he intentionally plant seeds which might give the answer to the Lacanian problematic of the “Hegelian lure”, and furthermore in advance of the completion of the psychoanalytic sphere (in 20th century France)? The labor which is grasped as the “essence of man” that Marx alluded to, and which Kojève emphasized in his lecture, is clearly a philosophical labor, and not a materially productive labor. This kind of labor is ultimately far more time-consuming, and the relation of the mathème for fantasy to schema R is one of philosophical (maybe Kantian?) transcendence. The mathème itself represents what our human species may finally aspire to, if it finds the capacity, the excellence, and the strength to do so. And this process is fundamentally historical, by a (Kantian) form of necessity.
The Christ-like riddle for human history mentioned earlier, then, is about the ambiguity and the eternal struggle happening between [a.] the master-signifier, S1 and [b.] the Name(s) of the Father, S(A), both of which serve a master's discourse, and function to prohibit the mother as a fundamental consequence of language-acquisition (schema L). What is so Christ-like about it is that this dual antagonism appears to have been left behind by the two men, Kojève and Lacan, very intentionally. Even though Chris Arthur seemingly criticizes the French intellectuals in his article, those who make false claims because they are too broad about the link between Marx and Hegel according to Kojève, Arthur doesn't seem completely indignant about it if he is also undoubtedly aware of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He expertly enacts the cyclical process of the rotations of the four discourses in a way that doesn't escape one's attention. He is a very cerebral and witty guy, in this regard.
— (5/10/2022)
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Crisis and Critique
What is critical theory, and whence the notion of critique as a practical stance towards the world? Using these questions as a point of departure, this course takes critical theory as its field of inquiry. Part of the course will be devoted to investigating what critique is, starting with the etymological and conceptual affinity it shares with crisis: since the Enlightenment, so one line of argument goes, all grounds for knowledge are subject to criticism, which is understood to generate a sense of escalating historical crisis culminating in a radical renewal of the intellectual and social order. We will explore the efficacy of modern critical thought, and the concept of critique’s efficacy, by examining a series of attempts to narrate and amplify states of crisis – and correspondingly transform key concepts such as self, will, time, and world – in order to provoke a transformation of society. The other part of the course will be oriented towards understanding current critical movements as part of the Enlightenment legacy of critique, and therefore as studies in the practical implications of critical readings. Key positions in critical discourse will be discussed with reference to the socio-political conditions of their formation and in the context of their provenance in the history of philosophy, literature, and cultural theory. Required readings will include works by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Benjamin and others, with suggested readings and references drawn from a variety of source materials ranging from literary and philosophical texts to visual images, film, and architecture. You are invited to work on your individual interests with respect to the readings.
Week 1
Critique, krinein, crisis (Koselleck, Adorno)
Required Reading
Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67.2 (2006), 357-400.
—, Chapters 7 and 8, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988 [German original, 1959].
Adorno and Horkheimer, "The Concept of Enlightenment," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), pp. 3-42.
Recommended Reading
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984: 32-50.
—, The Politics of Truth. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997.
Friedrich Hölderlin, “Nature and Art or Saturn and Jupiter,” in Hyperion and Selected Poems. Ed. by Eric Santner. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York: Continuum, 1990: 150-151.
Week 2
Judgment and Imagination (Kant)
Required Reading
Immanuel Kant, “Preface [A and B],” in Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 99-124.
—, “Preface” and “Introduction,” in Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 139-149.
—, §§1-5, 59-60 of Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 89-96, 225-230.
—, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant: Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 (2nd ed.): 41-53, 273.
—, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? [1784],” in Practical Philosophy. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 11-22.
Recommended Reading
Immanuel Kant, "Analytic of the Sublime," in Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith; revised, edited, and introduced by Nicholas Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007: 75-164.
Theodor Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2001 [1959])
Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (2004)
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1992)
Geoffrey Bennington, “Kant’s Open Secret”, Theory, Culture and Society 28.7-8(2011): 26-40.
J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992)
Graham Bird, The Revolutionary Kant (2006)
Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (1990, 2003)
Howard Caygill, The Kant Dictionary (2000)
Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought (1981)
Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy (1984)
Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard (eds.) Immanuel Kant: Key Concepts (2010)
Paul Guyer, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays (2003)
Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1997)
Laura Hengehold, The BODY Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault (2007)
Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant (1994)
Jean-François Lyotard, L’Enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire. Paris: L’Éditions Galilée, 1986.
Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermaneutic Import of the Critique of Judgment (1990)
Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (2003)
Andrea Rehberg and Rachel Jones (eds.), The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant’s Philosophy (2000)
Philip Rothfield (ed.), Kant after Derrida (2003)
Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (2009)
Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (1989)
Week 3
Recognition and the Other (Hegel)
Required Reading
G.W.F. Hegel, “The Truth of Self-Certainty” and “Lordship and Bondage,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018: 102-116.
—, “The Art-Religion,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018: 403-430.
Recommended Reading
G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction [§§1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8], in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975: 1-14; 22-55; 69-90.
Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida (2001)
Frederick Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (1993)
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009)
Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (2011)
Rebecca Comay and John McCumber (eds.), Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger (1999)
Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Werner Hamacher, “(The End of Art with the Mask),” in Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida. London and New York: Routledge, 1998: 105-130.
Werner Hamacher, “The Reader’s Supper: A Piece of Hegel,” trans. Timothy Bahti, diacritics 11.2 (1981): 52-67.
H.S. Harris, Hegel: Phenomenology and System (1995)
Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (2005)
Stephen Houlgate, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2013)
Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (2010)
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (2001)
Week 4
Revolution … (Marx)
Required Reading
Karl Marx, “I: Feuerbach,” The German Ideology, in Collected Works vol. 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976: 27-93.
Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," available online (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm)
Week 5
... and Repetition (Marx)
Required Reading
Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859], in Collected Works vol. 29. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976: 261-165.
—, “Postface to the Second Edition” and “Chapter 1: The Commodity,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. by B. Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990: 95-103 and 125-177.
Recommended Reading
Louis Althusser, For Marx (1969)
Hannah Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought”, Social Research 69.2 (2002): 273-319.
Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (1995, 2007)
Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (1971)
Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor (eds.), Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy (2009)
Simon Choat, Marx Through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (2010)
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
Werner Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx” (1999)
Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel (1969)
Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology (1998)
Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction (1980)
Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1999, 2008)
Moishe Postone, History and Heteronomy: Critical Essays (2009)
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (1993)
Jacques Rancière, “The Concept of ‘Critique’ and the ‘Critique of Political Economy’ (from the 1844 Manuscript to Capital)”, Economy and Society 5.3 (1976): 352-376.
Tom Rockmore, Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (2002)
Gareth Stedman-Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)
Week 6
Tutorial Week
Week 7
Will to Becoming Otherwise (Nietzsche)
Required Reading
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Preface" and "First Treatise," in On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianopolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1998: 1-33.
Week 8
Ascetic Ideal and Eternal Return (Nietzsche)
Required Reading
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Second Treatise" and "Third Treatise," in On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianopolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1998: 35-118.
Recommended Reading
Friedrich Nietzsche, §§341-342 of The Gay Science
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Vision and Riddle” and “The Convalescent,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra III
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in: The Birth of Tragedy and other writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life,” in: Untimely Meditations. Trans. by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. by D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977: 139-164.
R. Kevin Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought (2003)
Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. by Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Trans. by Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (2003)
Week 9
Repetition Compulsion (Freud)
Required Reading
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” [excerpts], in Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader. London: Vintage, 1995: 594-625.
Recommended Reading
Theodor Adorno, “Revisionist Psychoanalysis,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 40.3 (2014): 326-338.
Louis Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan (1996)
Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (2012)
Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986)
Rebecca Comay, “Resistance and Repetition: Freud and Hegel,” Research in Phenomenology 45 (2015): 237-266.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995)
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987)
Mladen Dolar, “Freud and the Political,” Unbound 4.15 (2008): 15-29.
Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction (1991)
Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious; or Reason after Freud”, in Écrits: A Selection. Trans. by A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977: 146-175.
Catherine Malabou, “Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Diacritics 37.4 (2007): 78-85.
Jean-Luc Nancy, "System of (Kantian) Pleasure (With a Freudian Postscript)," in Kant after Derrida. Ed. by Phil Rothfield. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003: 127-141.
Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (eds.), Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought (2010)
Charles Sheperdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (2000)
Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. London: Verso, 2012 [reprint].
Week 10
Crisis of European Humankind (Husserl)
Required Reading
Edmund Husserl, §§1-7 and §§10-21, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970: 2-18; 60-84.
Recommended Reading
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity [Vienna Lecture],” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970: 269-299.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. by Pascale Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992: 4-83.
Paul de Man, “Criticism and Crisis,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971: 3-19.
James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (2004)
Burt C. Hopkins, The Philosophy of Husserl (2011)
David Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Science and the Life-World: Essays on Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences (2010)
Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (2002)
Dermot Moran, The Husserl Dictionary (2012)
Paul Valéry, "Notes on the Greatness and Decline of Europe” and “The European,” in History and Politics. Trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews. New York: Bollingen, 1962: 228; 311-12.
David Woodruff Smith, Husserl (2007)
Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (1995)
Week 11
Crisis-Proof Experience (Benjamin)
Required Reading
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings vol. 4. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003: 313-355.
Recommended Reading
Walter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty"
—, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”
—, “Theses on the Concept of History”
—, “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. by John Osborne. London and New York: Verso, 2003: 27-56.
—, “Convolute J,” The Arcades Project
—, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006)
Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings vol. 4 (1999).
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil; The Painter of Modern Life
Ian Balfour, “Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History)”, Modern Language Notes 106.3 (1991): 622-647.
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (1997)
Tom Gunning, “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective,” boundary 2 30.1 (2003).
Werner Hamacher, “Now: Benjamin on Historical Time” (2001; 2005)
General Background
Julian Wolfreys (ed.), Modern European Criticism and Theory: A Critical Guide (2006)
Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001)
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (2002)
Andrew Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (2003)
Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (2002)
Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (2001)
Eric Matthews, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (1996)
Jonathan Simons (ed.), From Kant to Lévi-Strauss: The Background to Contemporary Critical Theory (2002)
Learning Outcomes
- You will have a grasp of the broad trends in the development of critical theory.
- You will have a good understanding of how different modern philosophical traditions from German Idealism to Phenomenology inform the different strains of critical theory.
- You will be able to expound and analyse the ways in which a range of different writers and tendencies in the history of modern thought conceive of the specificity of critique.
- You will have a sound grasp of the primary and secondary literatures in critical theory, both on general issues and specific thinkers or schools.
- You will be able to use the ideas and texts explored in the module to inform your readings in critical theoretical texts.
Assessment Criteria
- Students should show a clear command of how their chosen thinker(s) and texts relate to the broader trajectories of critical theory.
- Students should show a detailed critical knowledge of at least two of the module’s key thinkers or theoretical tendencies.
- Students should show a knowledge and capacity to use a good range of secondary literature on both general issues in the field and on the specific thinkers and texts they address.
- Students should be able to read the relevant texts from both critical and genealogical perspectives.
- Students should demonstrate their capacity to develop a distinctive and coherent interpretative and analytical perspective on their chosen subject.
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