PHL 316: Hegel’s Phenomenology

These lectures, which were all delivered during the pandemic and recorded over Zoom, will also be found uploaded under “videos.”

I have taught this course many times. Here’s a sample syllabus from 2021.

PHL 319: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis not only puts pressure on core philosophical ideas about personal identity, self-knowledge, human freedom, and the very status of the human. It also introduces some fundamental hermeneutic questions about how we interpret and analyze texts. We’ll look at the beginnings of psychoanalysis in Freud’s early work on hysteria and try to understand what was at stake in his invention of the “talking cure.” We will explore core concepts produced in the course of Freud’s career — the dream work and the method of dream interpretation, the so-called “fundamental rule” of free association, the unconscious, repression, castration, transference, melancholia, fetishism, resistance, repetition, the death drive, interminable analysis, and the limits of analysis. We will consider the relation between psychoanalysis as a theory and psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice (this will also involve thinking about the status of Freud’s case histories as evidence, as investigations, and as narrative experiments). Finally, we will examine the idea of “applied” psychoanalysis, and particularly the relevance of psychoanalysis to the understanding of culture and politics. This will inevitably lead us to think about the relevance of psychoanalysis today. While this course will focus mainly on Freud’s own theoretical and clinical writings (including some of his most controversial texts on the family, gender, and sexuality), we will also consider contemporary engagements with Freudian thought, in particular feminism, trauma studies, and queer theory.

Readings will include “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (Dora case history), Interpretation of Dreams (selections), “Infantile Sexual Theories,” Mourning and Melancholia,” “The Uncanny,” “Wolfman” case history; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”

PHL 410: Psychoanalysis and Politics

Born at a time of social and political crisis and within a parochial European context, psychoanalysis was split from the outset between a seemingly conservative and a politically radical and even revolutionary tendency. These two tendencies cannot be easily disentangled, and the split itself may turn out to be constitutive of psychoanalysis as both a theory and a clinical practice. This course will explore some of the political challenges and opportunities of psychoanalysis in the century after Freud, as psychoanalysis is increasingly confronted with the urgent and interconnected pressures of Marxism, feminism, queer theory, decolonial and critical race theory — broadly speaking, the conjuncture of race/class/gender. These challenges take on a particular intensity in the contemporary context of “late” or neoliberal capitalism. Can psychoanalysis provide a critical lens and emancipatory lever in the present? We’ll be considering the political resources of psychoanalytic concepts of repression, desire, transference, identification, mourning and melancholia, fetishism, disavowal, trauma, resistance, and the death drive. We’ll obviously also have to engage with some of Freud’s most contentious and misunderstood formulations around gender, sexuality, and castration — along with Oedipus and his family (a dysfunctional family if there ever was one).

Alongside some core Freudian texts (Three Essays on Sexuality, Mourning and Melancholia, The Ego and the Id, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Totem and Taboo), authors will include: Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Anne Cheng, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Patricia Gherovici, Ranjana Khanna, Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, and Slavoj Žižek. There is no specific prerequisite for this course, although a basic familiarity with basic psychoanalytic concepts will be helpful --it would be great if everyone could read or reread beforehand Freud’s (extremely readable) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

PHL 388: Philosophy and Theatre (syllabus)

“Theory” and “theater” share a common root (“to see”) but their conjunction is far from simple.  Ever since Plato decided to banish the tragic poets from the city, the relations between philosophy and theater have been fraught.  This course will explore some of these frictions, starting with the question: why is philosophy so obsessed with tragedy, while philosophers themselves usually get to appear on stage only as comic characters?   As well as reading philosophical writings on theater — and reading (and “seeing,” to the extent possible) some actual plays — we will also think about the theatrical dimensions of philosophy itself.  Despite or because of the diversity of its genres (dialogue, meditation, instruction, satire, fable, manifesto, etc.), philosophy has always entertained an uneasy relationship with its own dramaturgical conditions– its stagecraft, its protocols, its (actual or imaginary) audience.  This will inevitably invite us to reflect on the institutional aspects of philosophy as an academic practice and its relationship to other social practices.

VIC 410: Translations, Transmission, Transference

What is at stake when we translate a text from one language to another, transpose a work from one medium to another, or transport a cultural object from one location to another? This course will consider the theory and practice of translation in a number of contexts – religious, political, literary, psychoanalytic – and try to think about how the idea of translation connects to ideas about transmission, tradition, travel, transportation, transference (desire), transcendence (divine authority), and power (in particular, the politics and economics of empire and the various post-colonial critiques of this). We will be reading a variety of both theoretical and literary texts (mostly in translation), including: Virgil, Aeneid; Otto of Freising, Two Cities; Luther, “Letter on Translation”; Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation; Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”; Adorno, “On the Use of Foreign Words”; Derrida, “Monolingualism of the Other”; Freud, “The Dynamics of the Transference”; Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”; Homi Babha, The Location of Culture.  

PHL 322: Memory and Forgetting

This course will address the problematic of memory and its various blockages as this has been obsessively theorized in recent years in a variety of intellectual contexts: political, psychoanalytic, philosophical — the relationship between these different registers will also be explored. Drawing on Nietzsche's analysis of the “illness” arising from an over-saturated historical sense, we will examine a number of texts that explore the numerous pressures and paradoxes involved in recollecting or representing the past. Key authors will include: Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Blanchot, Levinas. (Students might wish to consider supplementing this course with VIC 410Y, a companion course in the Literature and Critical Theory Program, focusing on nineteenth and twentieth-century literary, visual, and cinematic representations of memory and its failures. Writers and authors will include Baudelaire, Rilke, Shelley, Flaubert, Beckett, Melville, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker. Consult the Literary Studies program for details).

VIC 410Y:  Memory and its Discontents (year-long course)

This course will explore various conceptions of memory - in particular, its aesthetic, institutional, and historical dimensions - as expressed in a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth-century literary texts and visual artifacts.  This course will explore some of the specifically modern anxieties arising from an experience of loss which would seem to preclude the possibility of a unified representation of either history or the self.  What are the pressures and opportunities for writing about the past — whether personal or collective (familial, ethnic, national, cosmopolitan or otherwise) — once the belief in a coherent narrative trajectory has been shattered?  Is memory the solution to a fragmented modernity or part of the problem?  Can there be a surfeit, even an illness of memory?  Where is the line to be drawn between memory and forgetting?  Our investigation will include key works in philosophy (Nietzsche, Benjamin), literature (Shelley, Baudelaire, Rilke, Flaubert, Beckett,  Melville),  visual art (Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter) and film (Alain Resnais,  Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, Christopher Nolan).