2010
All activities are on the opening page of this website
DH
2009
This year I want to continue the research on what one should consider as the basic psychoanalytic thesis: a subject originates in and lives by fantasy. In order to distinguish this ‘fantasy' from more traditional definitions and connotations like ‘faculty of imagination' or ‘creative force', the term ‘phantasm' was introduced. Questioning the status, meaning and implications of the phantasm also implies a (re)thinking of object, subject and desire.
In the course of elaborating the notion of phantasm Lacan introduced the notorious object a, 'his sole invention' as he put it in Les non-dupes errent. Despite the fact it has proven to be a useful tool to analyze politics, art, love and literature, the philosophical meaning remains obscure. It is time to address this question. In order to do so, there will be three sessions in which the Lacanian theory is confronted with some of his (implicit) interlocutors like Bataille, Derrida and Deleuze. After these preparatory steps one session will be devoted to the notion of semblance, which will allow us to question the limitations pertaining to the category of the Real. Before summer we end this philosophical investigation with a day on object a, during which, a.o. things, the relation between Lacan's subject ‘not without object' and Badiou's objectless subject will be explored.
After the summer recess we take a step back, at least historically, and discuss selected fragments from Freud's work, ranging from the pre-analytical to the later writings.
Dominiek Hoens
Friday 6 November 2009
Getting Knotted with Lacan
Lecture by Stijn Vanheule
followed by a discussion with Lieven Jonckheere
Tuesday 16 June 2009
Passion for the Real
Video-seminar with Robrecht Vanderbeeken
The audiovisual screen puts us face to face with images of facts and fiction. Rather then just being a window to the world, however, the screen produces a double vision that conflicts, eclipses and expands our personal perception. Eventually, disruptions and overexposure paradoxically result in a loss of reality which, in its turn, evokes a true passion for the real. This seminar discusses the impact of the screen as a mediator and generator of reality, based on an analysis of contemporary video art and media art experiments. Is the screen a virtual invader that produces a truth without reality or a reality without a truth?
Dr. Robrecht Vanderbeeken wrote a thesis (University of Ghent) on the subject in Social Sciences and Philosophy of Science (i.e. the explanation of actions). He is also a former researcher of the Jan van Eyck Academy (2004-05). Besides his 'What are you doing ? Essays on Video Art', his publications concern a variety of topics (metaphysics, philosophy of technology and aesthetics). Since 2007 he teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University College Ghent (KASK) and at the Art Department of Ghent University. His current research concerns video art, media art and the philosophical implications of technological innovations in art and culture.
2008
Thursday 7 February
Introduction to the Seminar's general topic, followed by a discussion of: Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes' (New Left Review, 14, 2002)
Friday 8 February
Lecture
Malcolm Quinn – On Liberty and Art: Aesthetics and the Social Bond in Schiller and Lacan
What are the social ends of aesthetic autonomy? In this paper, I will pursue this question as it pertains to contemporary art, through an analysis of Friedrich Schiller's model of aesthetic autonomy, as set out in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). My account includes discussion of speech, truth and temporality in Schiller's model of aesthetic autonomy, as this relates to the possibilities of ‘ autonomy speech ' in contemporary art. I focus particularly on Schiller's account of aesthetic education as producing a denatured, intangible space in which social subjects encounter each other solely as the malleable figures of a Spieltrieb, that is, as an object of free play. This is not a leisure activity or a virtual space beyond quotidian concerns, but the surest route through which autonomous subjects can assume a social and collective character without being subsumed within forms of general will. For Schiller, the route to political emancipation is achieved by cutting into the social bond to produce a domain of radical artifice. I will also show how Habermas's account of Schiller and a recent attempt to revive a waning debate on aesthetic autonomy on Habermasian lines, miss what is most valuable in Schillerian analysis of the social condition of aesthetics. I argue that Schiller's non-philosophical account of aesthetics and the Spieltrieb can be adequately approached using Lacanian models of the social bond.
Dr. Malcolm Quinn is Reader and Research Co-ordinator at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London. He co-authored with Dany Nobus, Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (Routledge, 2005). See also: http://www.wimbledon.arts.ac.uk/35135.htm
Wednesday 5 March
Fascination
Maurice Blanchot, The Two Versions of the Imaginary
in collaboration with Tom Van Imschoot.
Wednesday 2 April
screening
R.W. Fassbinder, Angst essen Seele auf [Fear Eats the Soul], 1974
Thursday 3 April
The Active Gift of Love: Kaja Silverman's Ethics of Vision
Kaja Silverman, ‘Fassbinder and Lacan', Chapter 3 from Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Routledge, 1992, pp. 125-156.
Kaja Silverman, ‘The Screen', Chapter 6 from The Threshold of the Visible World, Routledge, 1996, pp. 195-227.
Wednesday 7 May
Screening
Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Granger, 1972
Thursday 8 May
This Impossibility to Love: Marguerite Duras
Joan Copjec, ‘India Song/Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert': The Compulsion to Repeat (October, 17, 1981)
Wednesday 4 June
Lecture
Helena De Preester – Images aren't in the Head: On the Phenomenology of Imagination
Although every philosopher is inevitably confronted with it, philosophers have never liked very much the phenomenon of imagination. Imagination was considered deceptive, inferior and sometimes dangerous in comparison to pure thought. Early in the 20th century, however, imagination is being studied from a more neutral point of view, i.e. not in order to warn people for its illegitimate use, or in a effort to restore imagination's glory. Instead, phenomenology's godfather Edmund Husserl tried to see clear into the complex structure of imagination, while at the same time resisting the classical view that imagination is a matter of 'little pictures' in the head. In this lecture, we will present the above context, and Husserl's fascinating thoughts about imagination, and how he considered imagination in terms of 'making something present' while at the same time 'neutralising' its existence.
Dr. Helena De Preester is Visiting Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, and Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, University College Ghent. See also: http://webs.hogent.be/~hpre610 and http://www.criticalphilosophy.ugent.be
Thursday 5 June
Workshop with Helena De Preester on:
Evan Thompson, Look again: Consciousness and Mental Imagery, chapter 10 of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard UP, 2007)
Tuesday 1 July
Lecture
Andrew Cutrofello - Hamlet and the History of Nihilism
Dr. Andrew Cutrofello is a Professor at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of numerous essays on Kant, Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze. His most recent book publication is Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2005). See also: http://www.luc.edu/philosophy/faculty_cutrofello.shtml
Wednesday 2 July
Workshop
Discussion of 'The Ontological Status of Lacan's Mathematical Paradigms' (Reading Seminar XX, SUNY, 2002) in the presence of its author, Andrew Cutrofello
Monday 8 September
The Scene of Two
Discussion of Alain Badiou's 'What is Love ?' and ' The Scene of Two'
Friday 3 October
Lecture by Yannis Stavrakakis on The Consumerist Politics of Jouissance
respondent: Jan De Vos (Ghent University)
Dr. Yannis Stavrakakis studied political science at Panteion University (Athens) and discourse analysis at Essex and has worked at the Universities of Essex and Nottingham. He is currently Associate Professor at the School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Theoretical Studies, University of Essex. He is the author of Lacan and the Political (Routledge 1999) and The Lacanian Left (Edinburgh University Press/SUNY Press 2007) and co-editor of Discourse Theory and Political Analysis (Manchester University Press 2000) and Lacan & Science (Karnac 2002).
Jan De Vos worked for several years as a clinical psychologist. He is currently a researcher at the Center for Ethics and Value Inquiry (CEVI, Ghent University) and prepares a PhD in philosophy on “Psychological Subjectivity in Late Modernity. A Critical Analysis of Psychologization under Globalization” Most of his published articles deal with the phenomenon of psychologization.
Thursday 6 November
Seminar
Discussion of Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (Verso: 1999), 'The Deadlock of Transcendental Imagination, or, Martin Heidegger as a Reader of Kant', pp. 9-69.
Wednesday 3
December
Seminar
Alenka Zupancic, 'Enthusiasm, Anxiety and the Event', Parallax,
vol. 11, no. 4, 2005, pp. 31-45.
2007
Thursday 8 February
Figures of Exception: Bartleby and Deleuze's 'Original'
Thursday 8 March
What is an Encounter ?
Lacan on choice, necessity and contingency
Thursday 3 May
Love beyond the Law: Pauline universalism
On chapters 6-8 from Badiou's Saint Paul
Thursday 7 June
From Singularity to Universality: Saint Paul
Justice, State, Politics. On Badiou's Of an obscure disaster chapter 3
Intervention by Ozren Pupovac
Thursday 8 November
Discussion of Thomas Brockelman's text: Zizek and Heidegger: The Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism
Thursday 6 December
You Never Know Your Luck: Lacan and Pascal's Wager
interventions by Thomas Brockelman and Dominiek Hoens