This course introduces the progressive development of Jacques Lacan’s teaching with a focus on what is of interest to philosophical inquiry. We progress from the early work on the imaginary and the symbolic through to the late work on the real. The course is both introductory and synoptic with the aim of grounding an overview of Lacan’s teaching, and the developments within it, by closely reading Lacan’s texts alongside Freud and various commentators.
The key text is J. Lacan, Ecrits, trans. B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg (NY: W. W. Norton, 2006). It can be purchased from the usual sources. Further readings by Lacan and others will be provided at each lecture.
Course Schedule
- The imaginary, the Ego and Méconnaissance
- The Unconscious Is Structured Like a Language
- Your Symptom Is in You More than You
- From the Subject to the Speaking Body
- There Is no Sexual Relation
- The Woman, and Why She Doesn’t Exist
- Semblants and the Real
- The Solitude of Jouissance
- Fantasy
- The Four Discourses
- Psychoanalysis in the Social Order
- Review