McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Department of Philosophy
Fall 2017

JACQUES LACAN
Professor Tom Eyers (eyerst@duq.edu; 412-396-6499; 303-C College Hall)
Graduate Course PHIL 658-01

324 College Hall, F 11-1.40

Office Hours R 2-3.30

Since the height of his fame in 1960s France, the ideas of the French psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan have had an enduring influence on disciplines ranging from philosophy and
cultural studies to anthropology and literary criticism, to say nothing of his continued
impact upon psychoanalytic practice. Despite his importance, the status of Lacan’s
published texts remains ambiguous. What became Lacan’s magnum opus, his ‘Écrits’
published in French in 1966, found its inception largely in spoken presentations,
rendering its title self-consciously ironic. His weekly seminar, running from 1953 until
just prior to his death in 1981, saw Lacan dazzle his audience with provocative
commentary on more or less the entirety of the Western intellectual tradition, from Greek
mythology, to German idealism, to contemporary developments in theoretical
mathematics, all with the aim of providing Freudianism with a firm theoretical
foundation. And yet, the seminars as we have them today have been significantly
standardized and edited by Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, raising questions of
authorship, of textual (in)stability and of the limits of translation that Lacan himself often
posed.

In this course, we will return to the often-labyrinthine texts of Lacan, with the aim of
holding open rather than precipitously burying these multiple ambiguities. We will
explore Lacan’s conflicted relation to philosophy, his complicated engagement with Freud,
and his innovative practice of reading, with the aim of getting a sense of how his project
evolved over time in response to questions returned to with an obsessive urgency: how are
we to characterize the relation of language to the real? How did Freud’s theorization of the
unconscious both disrupt and incorporate the philosophical tradition? What is the
relationship between the unconscious and broader social and political pressures? Is there
such a thing as a stable sexual identity?

Required Books (all in paperback):

J. Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006)
J. Lacan, Seminar X: Anxiety, (Cambridge: Polity, 2014)
J. Lacan, Seminar XX: Encore, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999)