Objectives and competences

The establishment of psychoanalysis represented a revolution in ways of thinking and ethics, as well as in attitudes towards religion, politics, and science. This course shows that, for the majority of contemporary philosophical currents, the encounter with Freud’s (and later Lacan’s) psychoanalysis was an opportunity for their renewal and critical assessment of their own history. Moreover, it shows that for philosophy the encounter with psychoanalysis was also productive because it was forced to find its own place and subject matter in relation to other practices of thought foreign to and outside philosophy. The lecture classes analyse how, from the Frankfurt School and especially contemporary French philosophy onwards, contemporary philosophy has been taking up the task of reconsidering the issues of the subject, thought, and norm in light of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Students learn how philosophy had to face the problem of reconsidering its own basic concepts (i.e., the truth, subject, Being, language, and so on), which psychoanalysis borrowed from it and at the same time already thoroughly remodelled. The lecture classes show students how psychoanalysis and its concepts or remodelled philosophical concepts enabled philosophy to reconsider the concept of the universal in science, ethics, and politics. Based on these lecture classes, students analyse the problems caused by contemporary depolitization and the accompanying strengthening of political power of religious movements. Students can find evidence of the lost importance of the common in contemporary forms of cultural and communitarian exclusion, and analyse various identity policies of exclusion and the rejection of contemporary manifestations of otherness on the basis of the psychoanalytical concept of identification. By attending lecture classes, students learn to understand the increasing recours to ethics as an ultimate arbitrator, be this in human conflicts, the environment and human rights protection, or in judging scientific progress.

Prerequisites

None required.

Content (Syllabus outline)

• Ontology and psychoanalysis: 

• • Being, reality, the real 
  • Being, lack, the symbolic 
  • The real, semblance 
  • Being and desire 

• Subjectivization in psychoanalysis and philosophy: 

• • The subject and the Other 
  • The subject and event 
  • The subject and the truth 
  • Desire and will 
  • The subject and gender difference 

• Philosophy, psychoanalysis, science: 

• • Knowledge and truth 
  • The issue of demonstration in philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis 
  • Various theorizations of the universal 
  • Mathematics in philosophy and psychoanalysis 

• Ethics and law: 

• • Kant’s moral law and the ethics of desire 
  • Law and transgression 
  • Psychoanalytic subversion of the philosophical ethics 
  • Ethics and the infinite 
  • Ethics between desire and drive 

• Modern ethics mutations: 

• • The return to Kant 
  • Ethics of the universal, ethics of the particular 
  • The place of the body in ethics 
  • Finitude, infinity 

Readings

• Agamben, G. 2005. Kar ostaja od Auschwitza. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.
• Badiou, A. 2004. Manifest za filozofijo. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.
• Badiou, A. 2006. Pogoji. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.
• Deleuze, G. 1998. Logika smisla. Ljubljana: Krtina.
• Deleuze, G. 1968. Différence et Répétition. Pariz: PUF.
• Deleuze, G. in F. Guattari. 1999. Kaj je filozofija. Ljubljana: Študentska založba.
• Foucault, M. 1998. Zgodovina seksualnosti. Ljubljana: Založba ŠKUC.
• Foucault, M. 2001. Arheologija vednosti. Ljubljana: SH.
• Freud, S. 2001. Nelagodje v kulturi. Ljubljana: Gyrus.
• Heidegger, M. Bit in čas. SM.
• Kant, I. 2006. Utemeljitev metafizike nravi. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.
• Lacan, J. 1980. Seminar XI, Štirje temeljni koncepti psihoanalize. CZ.
• Lacan, J. 1988. Seminar VII, Etika psihoanalize. CZ.
• Lyotard, J.-F. 2002. Navzkrižje. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.
• Lyotard, J.-F. 1974. Economie libidinale. Pariz: Minuit.
• Milner, J.-C. 2005. Jasno delo. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.
• Milner, J.-C. 2003. Strukturalizem. Ljubljana: Krt.
• Ranciere, J. 2005. Nerazumevanje. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.

Assessment

• Active participation in lecture and discussion classes.
• Short written presentation of issues selected from the course content as a precondition for writing a term paper. – Term paper (15–20 pages) addressing a topic from the overall course content.
• Assessing learning outcomes: 
  • Students are to demonstrate thorough knowledge of the relevant literature, mastery of writing, and the ability to think analytically and provide good arguments through short presentation of selected issues; 
  • The oral exam together with the term paper assesses whether students have mastered the topics addressed in the lecture classes, can write papers including citations and a bibliography, can apply, analyse, and build upon the professional literature used, can present a topic with good argumentation, can think analytically, and whether they are creative.