FREN 6920 - Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6779)

Fall. 4 credits.

Conducted in English.

T. McNulty.

This course will serve as a theoretical introduction to psychoanalytic treatments of sexual difference, especially in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and their successors. Distinct from both biological sex and social gender, masculinity and femininity are understood psychoanalytically as two positions that the subject of the unconscious may take up with respect to castration, each of which involves a particular ethical response to the death drive and to the signifier or law that seeks to limit its insistence. The first half of the course will examine the logics of femininity and masculinity in their cultural contexts; the second half will explore their implications for contemporary discussions of politics, aesthetics, and logic.