Discourse on Art: Lacan, Deleuze and Agamben
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Prof. Dr. Marcus Coelen,
Dr. Thomas Kisser
The seminar offers intense analysis and discussion of three of today’s major discourses on art and thought, namely Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and Gilles Deleuze’s and Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. The works of these thinkers do not only present powerful elaborations of the questions pertinent to any aesthetics, they also represent three of the main discourses or modes of thinking by which aesthetic thinking operates today: In the case of Lacan, a theoretical and practical analysis of the necessarily hidden and unconscious body of thought working within the symbolic structures of subjects and societies; for Deleuze, the attempt to think the world and its experience philosophically without recourse to any transcendent agent and transcendental premises; and in Agamben, a thinking that takes into account the socio-philosophical analyses by Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt. The seminar will treat major texts by these thinkers both individually and by confronting them to each other. The work of the seminar will proceed by in-class reading and commentary, as well as student presentations. A number of conferences and lectures by scholars who have either worked on or contributed to the aforementioned positions will also contribute to the seminar.
Texts Readings will include sections from the following titles:
Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, Albany / New York, State University of New York Pess, 1995.
---, The End ot the Poem, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999.
---, Stanzas, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I /II, London, Routledge, 1986.
---, The Logic of Sense, New York, Columbia University Press, 1990.
---, The Logic of Sensation, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book XX, New York, Norton, 2007.
---, Ecrits, New York, Norton, 2007.
