General Information
Course Description
9675 - The Psychoanalysis of Philosophy - This course explores the development of psychoanalysis from philosophy. The topic is potentially vast, and so we will focus specifically on the emergence of the unconscious as an object of study in empiricist (Locke and Hume) and (post-) idealist philosophy (from Kant, Schelling, and Hegel to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche). This emergence creates a certain urgency in philosophical discourse and method through which philosophy must turn to confront its self-identity, what Robert Smith calls its "autobiography." Out of this confrontation psychoanalysis emerges as a force of speculative and theoretical power within philosophy to expose the philosophical cogito to its own contingency. We will focus, then, both on how the unconscious emerges as a theme in works from Locke to Nietzsche, and how it is thus economized within philosophy; but we will also examine where philosophy constitutes itself as a missed encounter with the psychoanalysis it helps to invent. We will also explore the constitution of a disciplinary cogito of psychoanalysis that leads such theorists as Baudrillard and Foucault to critique psychoanalysis. We will further examine the breaching of this disciplinary cogito from within psychoanalysis in the work of Lacan and Kristeva and the hybridization of psychoanalysis with other theoretical modes such as Marxism (Althusser, Jameson) and post-Marxist cultural psychoanalysis (Žižek).
