Event Date: 2 November 2016
Room B34
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX
Masterclass 3: The Prospect of
the Post-Human
Slavoj Žižek (International
Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities) – The Prospect of the Post-Human
In the entire span of his
teaching, Lacan was engaged in an intense debate with philosophy and
philosophers, from ancient Greek materialists to Plato, from Stoics to Thomas
Acquinas, from Descartes to Spinoza, from Kant to Hegel, from Marx to Kierkegaard,
from Heidegger to Kripke. It is through the reference to philosophers that
Lacan deploys his fundamental concepts: transference through Plato, the
Freudian subject through Descartes’s cogito, surplus-enjoyment through Marx’s
surplus-value, anxiety and repetition through Kierkegaard, the ethics of
psychoanalysis through Kant, etc. Through this continuous engagement, Lacan is
of course distancing himself from philosophy; however, all his desperate
attempts to draw the line of separation again and again re-assert his
commitment to philosophy – as if the only way for him to delineate the basic
concepts of psychoanalysis is through a philosophical detour. Although
psychoanalysis is not philosophy, its subversive dimension is grounded in the
fact that it is not simply a particular science or practice but has radical
consequences for philosophy: psychoanalysis is a “no” to philosophy that is
internal to it, i.e., psychoanalytic theory refers to a gap/antagonism which
philosophy blurs but which simultaneously grounds philosophy (Heidegger called
this gap ontological difference). Without this link to philosophy – more
precisely, to the blind spot of philosophy, to what is “primordially repressed”
in philosophy – psychoanalysis loses its subversive dimension and becomes just
another ontic practice.
Masterclass 3 – The Prospect
of the Post-Human
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