Faculty: Daniel Tutt, Ph.D., is a philosopher, psychoanalytic theorist and his research and writing concern the intersection of Marxism, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He has taught philosophy at George Washington University, the Washington, DC jail and Marymount University. Tutt is a podcaster at Jouissance Vampires and Zer0 Books and he is the founder of Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics an extra-academic community that offers affordable seminars and study groups for students and the wider public. Tutt’s first book, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family is published with the Palgrave Lacan Series and has been hailed by philosopher Isabel Millar as “essential reading.” He has degrees in philosophy from American University and the European Graduate School and he completed his Ph.D. with the French philosopher Alain Badiou. He is currently writing a book on Nietzsche and contemporary socialism and left-wing politics with Repeater Books.

Schedule: Saturdays in February 4, 11, 18, 25 (Saturdays) at 10am New York time.

Format: Live online discussion sessions recorded for those cannot make the live sessions.

Description: This seminar will probe into the revolutionary core of Freud's group psychology by looking specifically at the theory of the revolutionary social bond Freud develops, a discovery which was a rebuke to the bourgeois social science of his time. We will examine how the most canonical and important Freudian-Marxists incorporated Freud's insight of the social bond into their work. We will propose a new way to read the project of "Freudian-Marxism" from this perspective, namely, as a theory of the revolutionary subject. After squaring a clear grasp on the revolutionary basis of Freud's theory of the subject, we will turn to a consideration of the revolutionary subject in our contemporary historical conjecture. Is Freud's revolutionary theory of the social bond still applicable to us today?

Texts:

Rozitchner, Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism (excerpts)

Marcuse, Herbert Eros and Civilization (excerpts)

Badiou, Alain Theory of the Subject (excerpts Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death (excerpts)

Steigler, Bernard The Lost Spirit of Capitalism (excerpts) Freud, Sigmund Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (excerpts)

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix Anti-Oedipus (excerpts)

Intended Learning Outcomes:

Improve critical reasoning via oral and written communication.