GERST 6860 - Althusser and Lacan

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6860, FREN 6230, GOVT 6795)

Spring. 4 credits.

Reading knowledge of French not required.

G. Waite.

This seminar takes up the old “dialogue” or “confrontation” between Marxism and psychoanalysis as it continues in our “postmodern” or “post-communist” era, based on close readings of selected works by Louis Althusser and by Jacques Lacan. Specific topics include: the significance of their personal relationship; the role of “anti-philosophical” Lacanian concepts in Althusser’s philosophy or “aleatory materialism;” writers of common interest (from Spinoza to Freud); the homology between the “return to Marx” and the “return to Freud”; their modes of interpretation and argumentation; the technique of “symptomatic reading”; differing concepts of “structure,” “overdetermination,” and “contradiction”; the question whether “ideology is (the) unconscious”; and their critiques of Marxism, Stalinism, and capitalism. Other writers include: Badiou, Balibar, Butler, Copjec, Freud, Gramsci, Machiavelli, Marx, Mao, Negri, Spinoza, Zizek.