Description:
Can we build a world where people will no longer hurt each other? No. Can we fail better in trying not to hurt each other? Yes.
Conventional worldviews offer bright possibilities for the society of the future, suggesting that it will exclude social suffering. By this, they articulate an escapist approach keeping a blind eye to the negative and tragic nature of human relationship. Psychoanalysis and existentialism offer a more realistic (which implies more pessimistic) understanding how social bond works, both recognise that it is inseparable from suffering. This course will explore a negative psychoanalytic-existential approach to understanding a social bond, as well as practical implications of such understanding.
Some of the other questions that this course will discuss: Is love possible when the world collides? How do we exist with each other when nothing except anxiety and depression is left in our hearts? Is there love to save us or is it up to us to save love?
Schedule: (Saturdays and Sundays) 8pm Dublin and London time
Lecture 1. Subject and society as death driven (December 3)
The concept of the death drive as central to psychoanalysis. The negative dialectical relationship between subject and society. Romantic and social love as suffering.
Freud (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
McGowan, T. (2013) Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. (provided chapters).
Reshe J. (2022) Negative Psychoanalysis for Anxia Corda. Maska, Volume 36.
Lecture 2. Negative psychoanalysis and the therapeutic society (December 4)
The concept of therapeutic society. The limits of critical psychology. Positively oriented conventional psychology vs negatively oriented psychoanalysis.
Rieff, P. (1966). The triumph of the therapeutic: Uses of faith after Freud.
Jacoby, R. (1972). Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism: Towards an Objective Theory of Subjectivity, Telos, 14.
Parker, I. (2022) Radical Psychoanalysis and Anti-Capitalist Action (provided chapters).
Lecture 3. Uncanny being-with-others (December 10)
Anxiety at the core of the subject and social bond. Uncanny love. Edvard Munch’s paintings. Being-towards-death as a social practice.
Heidegger, M. (1927), Being Time (provided chapters).
Zapffe, P. (2004). 'The Last Messiah'. G. Philosophy Now, 45.
Carel, H. (2006). Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (provided chapters).
Lecture 4. Practical Negative Psychoanalysis for the living dead. (December 11)
Negative psychoanalysis as a social practice. Negative ways of forming social bonds: ways to be together while being dead inside. Depressive revolution and anxious solidarity. Sharing suffering.
No readings.