PSP 789 - Irigaray & Kristeva

Noëlle McAfee

Mondays 1:00-3:45 pm, Vico Library (Bowden 202)

This graduate seminar will focus on the psychoanalytic writings of two of the leading “French Feminists” of our time: the Belgian feminist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray and the Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva. 

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AAS 385 - 3 / Critical Philosophies of Race, Law, and Violence

Undergraduate course

Linette Park

Mondays & Wednesdays 2:30-3:45pm

This course examines the idea of race and the way in which its development as a social and scientific construction persists in debates not only on its so-called biological validity to preserve power and racial hierarchies (notions of racial superiority and inferiority), but also how its elision functions in discourses of law and, more broadly, in a paradigm of violence. To that extent, the course begins with two primary concerns: how the law has instrumentalized the idea of race into institutional practices and ideologies of racism while also considering how racial theories in pre-modern and modern contexts give rise to material apparati and the psychic life of power including the state and nation-state, empire, and white supremacy. 

AAS 385 - 6 / Fanon, An Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Image, and Poetics

Undergraduate course

Linette Park

Mondays & Wednesdays 1:00-2:15pm

The course serves as an introductory seminar on the work and influence of Frantz Fanon. It will consider a range of viewpoints including aesthetic, existential, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and politics. Engaging with artworks that take cue from the philosophies of Fanon will be our primary way of pursuing analysis of his texts. Likewise, the course will screen films that engage with some of the thematics that run throughout his oeuvre such as (but not limited to): questions of language and representation, anti-blackness and sexism, poetics, alienation, and the psychic life of power and colonial violence.  

WGS 312 - 1 / A User’s Guide to Freud

Undergraduate course

Elizabeth Wilson

Mondays & Wednesdays 10:00-11:15am 

Penis envy? Castration? Narcissism? Super-Ego? Repression? What do all these Freudian terms mean, and what is their relevance for everyday life? The aim of this course is two-fold: (i) to introduce students to the core concepts of psychoanalysis, and (ii) to relate these to feminist theories of gender and sexuality. The course will introduce students to the central theoretical concepts in Freud's metapsychology: instincts, repression, the ego, the unconscious, dream interpretation, the symptom. In the final weeks of the course, we will survey some contemporary feminist, cultural, global responses to psychoanalysis. It is expected that this course will be of value to students in a wide variety of humanities and social science majors where psychological issues, gender, and sexuality are discussed.