ENG 470: Topics in Literary Theory and Criticism • Spring 2010
English Department • University of Maine
Dr. Steven R. Evans

The Master-Slave Dialectic: Theorizing Domination, Desire, Recognition, and Knowledge after Hegel

Reading Syllabus: Subject to change, especially with regard to secondary readings; check back frequently. Required texts are listed below. Click here for current week.

WEEK ONE

1. Monday, January 11
Introduction

Log | Remarks on the genesis of the course. Objectives and expectations. Brief introductions by students. • Remarks on Roland Barthes, his election to the College de France, the lectures he gave under the heading of "The Neutral," and the role he'll play in our work. • Hegel's project in the Phenomenology. The shapes of consciousness, from the most idiotic to the most sublime, in one coherent presentation. • Reading and remarks on the first few sentences of ¶29 of the "Preface" (17). Science (Die Wissenschaft), formative process (bildende Bewegung), Spirit (Geist). On the operation of aufhebung (often translated as "sublation"): to lift up or elevate, to cancel or negate, to save or preserve.

2. Wednesday, January 13
Hegel, IV.A: “The Truth of Self-Certainty” (104-38)

I. Three supplements: (1) diagram of the "transitions" in the "master-slave dialectic" as envisioned in John O'Neill's book Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentaries (SUNY 1996). (2) Glossary accompanying Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, trans. and ed. Robert R. Williams (Oxford). (3) Hegel chronology accompanying Stephen Houlgate's An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edition. Two recommendations: Michael Inwood's A Hegel Dictionary and The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, both available for four-hour in-library use via the Fogler reserve desk. And an homage, to my first guide through the Phenomenology Robert Pippin.

II. Remarks on Hegel's reputation as a lecturer. Review of German terms from Monday: Geist, Aufhebung, Wissenschaft, Bildung.

III. A "reading" of the table of contents (xxxiii). Hegel's penchant for triplicity. The first three "movements": sense-certainty, perception, force. Shapes of consciousness partaking in certainty and truth, but only partially, and in manners prone to self-contradiction and cognitive stagnation. "Diremption" and the long path to reconciliation. Aside on Kant's "limitation" of knowledge and Hegel's audacious trespassing of that limit. Binaries structuring Hegel's presentation:

  certainty truth
  intuition conception
  immediacy mediation
  subject substance
  denken (think) dinge (things)
  epistemology ontology
  knowing being

IV. Remarks on ¶186. The troubled emergence of "self-consciousness." The ego's initial state of self-certain, self-identity. The tantrum occasioned by the appearance of a living human "other." O'Neill diagram. Resistance to the idea of "reciprocal recognition." Aside on Proust's narrator and Hegel's: commenting on the action from the finish line. One non-solution to the problem of recognition: reduce the other, or oneself, to a corpse. The more interesting "solution": both ego and alter retain their lives, now transformed into Herr (Lord, master) and Knecht (Bondsman, slave). The terms: Being "in itself," "for itself" and "in and for itself" (more about which on Friday).

3. Friday, January 15
Hegel, IV.A: “The Truth of Self-Certainty” (104-38). Recommended: Robert Pippin's "You Can't Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit" (available as a pdf here; link triggers download).

I. Questions concerning Hegel's life and historical period (cf. Houlgate chronology). The landlady incident. Left and Right Hegelianisms, secular and theological Hegelianisms. Questions of religion, of freedom, and of religious freedom. Importance of Protestant tradition, esp. Lutheranism.

II. Reading and commentary of ¶¶187-89. Remarks on Vorstellung (representation, in both its political and aesthetic meanings) and Darstellung (presentation). The terms an sich, für sich, an und für sich (cf. Inwood 133-36 on reserve).

III. Diagramming the initial encounter and consequent "struggle to the death for recogntion." Whiteboard. Mind and body. Seeking the other's death, staking one's own life. The division of enjoyment and labor in the master and slave relationship. Dialectical reversal of initial outcome: the slave's position proves the more productive one, in several senses.

WEEK TWO

4. Monday, January 18 — Martin Luther King Day — No Class
Sade, begin reading Justine (finish by February 3)

5. Wednesday, January 20
Hegel, IV.B: "Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness" (119-38). Recommended: Inwood, "Scepticism and Stoicism" (A Hegel Dictionary 262-65).

I. Birthday whiteboard (thanks!). Inwood on Hegel's dual objective in the master-slave dialectic discussion: to explain the genesis of self-consciousness and the origin of social relations. This fusion raises some serious difficulties. Remarks on Hobbes and Rousseau.

II. To the "shapes of consciousness" introduced last week—namely the Herr (Lord/Master) and the Knecht (Bondsman/Slave)—we now add the Stoic, the Sceptic, and the Unhappy Consciousness. Whiteboard. The shifting configuration of two basic terms, conceived here (somewhat reductively) as the dialectic of the "I" and the "It."

II.a. The Stoic ideal of apatheia, the "imperturbality" of pure thinking and freedom relative to the realms of necessity, determinacy, life. An "I" indifferent to the "it." Problem: stagnates in "abstract" rejection of a world this form of self-consciousness never bothers to know. Parallel to Herr.

II.b. The skeptical project is more active (Hegel says the Sceptic "actualizes" what the Stoic merely conceives). The idea of undogmatic inquiry (skepsis) and the bracketing or suspension of belief (epoche). An "I" that challenges, questions, and negates the "It." Problem: cannot discern valid from invalid beliefs. Parallel to Knecht (e.g. inquiry and experiment as forms of "working" on the world).

II.c The Unhappy Consciousness (das Unglückliche Bewußtsein): an "I" that recognizes the "it" within itself and is inwardly agitated by the uneasy fusion of mastery and slavery it discerns. This form of self-consciously vacillates between feeling "like shit" (viz. ¶225) and being certain of its share in the Unchangeable (Unwandelbaren). Simultaneously immutable and transient, sublime and abject, holy and defiled. This "I" is lacerated by the "It" it undeniably is—and practices mortification and self-chastisement to drive out the accursed share.

III. Remarks on Sade and his Justine. The "fantasy" of a world in which only sexualized power relations matter. The Marquis's "criminal" career. Nature made us so, and no "morality" will change that. Looking ahead to Nietzsche and his "genealogy of morals," but with some echoes already in Hegel.

IV. Is human "happiness" compatible with the condition of slavery? In other words, can a slave be happy? Is the slave conscious of the freedom deprived it?

6. Friday, January 22
Hegel, IV.B: "Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness" (119-38). Barthes, “Session of February 18, 1978” (1-19)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

I. In answer to the question, why did Miller's become the translation of record in English? Comparison to Strachey's Freud. Hyppolyte's French translation of the Phenomenology, and the extensive commentary that grew out of it to become Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

II. Greimasian "semiotic square." Whiteboard. Wikipedia. Adding a dimension to the "binary" oppositions that enabled structuralist analysis. Using "gender" as our example. Exercise: work through the positions and relations of the semiotic square using "master" as S1 and "slave" as S2.

III. The "argument" of Barthes's The Neutral (handout, cf. pp6-7 of the printed text). What precedes it: list of thirty "readings." The four epigraphs: Maistre, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Lao-Tzu. • "Argument" read aloud, with "pauses" for remarks. The paradigm (familiar to some from discussions of Saussure and Jakobson in English 271). Syntagm as forced choice from "closet" of compossibles (paradigm). • RB's interest in questioning the superimposition of "master" and "slave" upon the "teacher" and "student" relationship; his disavowal of—or attempt to neutralize—the master's position in his late pedagogy.

IV. Comments and questions arising from the experience of reading the Phenomenology so far: Ambiguous use of the term "negative." • The phrase "the way of the world" (¶¶388-89), and the opposition of virtuous consciousness and actually existing reality. "Surprised from behind." • The predicament of the unhappy consciousness, and the way it gives rise to a "mediating" or third term (Tertium). • The historical realization of the "shapes of consciousness." Sade's firstborn son fighting in the battle of Jena, outside Hegel's window. Napoleon's project of universalizing freedom, accomplished by armies as well as ideas. "The real is rational." Hegel impatient with the whining of the "ought" in the face of the "is." Whiteboard.

WEEK THREE

7. Monday, January 25
Hegel, V.B-C: “The actualization of rational self-consciousness though its own activity” (211-262)
Recommended: Kojève, “Summary of the First Six Chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit” (31-71)

Forecast: My remarks will focus on ¶¶ 347-393 (pp 211-235); that is, the prelude to the section (V.B) and the three subsections, (a.) "Pleasure and Necessity," (b.) "The law of the heart and the frenzy of self-conceit," and (c.) "Virtue and the Way of the World."

A soundfile of this class session is available.

I. Remarks on Alexandre Kojève and the series of lectures he devoted to Hegel between 1933-39. More here.

II. The transition in V.B, from the problematics of I/It and I/I to one of I/We (individual self-consciousness and universal self-consciousness). Sittlichkeit, ethical order as manifest in customary practices: how we do things, in my family, in my city, in my state....

III. Glimpse of instant in which individuality and universality are reconciled in their mutually conditioning activity: ¶¶350-51. Greek democracy, leaving to one side the patriarchy and slavery? But such a moment is either already gone or not yet arrived (¶353-55). Utopic thinking itself a "shape of consciousness"? A breach of "trust" between the "I" and the "We" defines the more familiar scenario. The "I" cannot actualize itself without coming into conflict with the "We."

IV. Three new "shapes" of consciousness:

V. A little lesson in dialectical method: an assertion, its negation, the negation of that negation. Examples from ethical realm: assertion that human = male, its negation (femininity as produced within patriarchy), and the negation of that negation (in active struggle against patriarchy, i.e. feminism). Aimé Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Hegel's struggle against the limits of language. His "speculative proposition," in which the terms are simultaneously held in a relation of identity and non-identity. The "Subject" is and is not its "Predicate."

8. Wednesday, January 27
Hegel, VI.A: “The true Spirit. The ethical order” (263-94)
Recommended: Butler, “Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection: Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness” (31-61). The on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good entry on Hegel, within which you'll find a cogent synopsis of the Phenomenology.

Forecast: My remarks will focus on V.C (pp236-62; ¶¶394-437).

A soundfile of this class session is available.

I. Sociologist Erving Goffman on "character contests" (handout). Quite a different "tone" than Hegel's, but the concept is not irrelevant to our investigations.

II. Surpassing the many forms of ineffectual self-consciousness that we've traced up to now: at last, an "individuality which takes itself to be real in and for itself" (V.C.a), and which, moreover, "can experience only joy in itself" (¶404). (Very blurry) Whiteboard. Phenomenology as "comedy," rather than "tragedy." The unity of Being and Doing: a self-consciousness capable of carrying through the projects it freely conceives. "I made this." The Work, which makes manifest without exhausting one's free action. Perishability and durability of the Work. The "matter-in-hand" (Die Sache). What is "the case" or "situation," because "I" have taken an interest in it. Contrasts to the "Thing" encountered in the I/It phases. To undertake a project entails a circular process of positing an End or Goal (Zweck), then working to realize that End: in this sense, origin is goal. Putting into practice the "talents" and "capacities" one cannot be sure of having before realizing them. One must choose: this project, at this moment, alienating other possibilities. The I/We problematic returns in the judgment of others: deception (presentation of particular interest as general interest), ressentiment (the other's displeasure in the I's accomplishment).

III. The dialectic of real individuality and "the law" (V.C.b-c). Antigone's predicament. The diremption of law and ethical substance.

IV: Remembering Gillian Rose. Remarks on Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and other women who broke the masculine monopoly on Hegel commentary.

9. Friday, January 29
Barthes, “Session of February 25, 1978” (20-31)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

I. To return to an earlier topic, the Hegel scholar Terry Pinkard has generously made his new translation of Hegel's Phenomenology available to the intellectual community in advance of its forthcoming publication by Cambridge UP. Visit this page for the details and for free downloadable pdfs. You may also find his Hegel-related "portrait gallery" of interest.

II. The Neutral. Seminar format, rather than lecture.

III. The week ahead: Hegel on "Spirit."

WEEK FOUR

10. Monday, February 1
Hegel, VI.A: “The true Spirit. The ethical order” (263-94)
Benjamin, “Introduction,” “The First Bond” and “Master and Slave” (3-84)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

I. Shapes of consciousness —> shapes of historically realized consciousness: the realm of Spirit (Geist). Whiteboard.

II. The family and the state; masculine and feminine; brother and sister. Whiteboard.

11. Wednesday, February 3
Hegel, VI.B: “Self-alienated Spirit. Culture” (294-364) & VI.C: “Spirit that is certain of itself. Morality” (364-409)

A soundfile of this class session is available. Image (before & after the Revolution).

I. Remarks on Hyppolite and his Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (viz. above). A valuable, paragraph by paragraph commentary. Its publication in 1946, along with Kojève's lectures (published in 1947), create the conditions of possibility for the French reception of Hegel.

II. Preliminary remarks on § VI.B., "Culture" (die Bildung). Just before, and just after, the French Revolution. Vanity that knows itself as such (¶526 ff). Empty chatter at the court. The struggle between Enlightenment and Superstition. But once "false" beliefs are eradicated, Enlightenment goes after the substance of belief (faith) itself. Liquidation of ethical and spiritual foundations upon which the social order formerly rested: princes, priests, and piety.

III. The terror (der Schrecken). Close reading of ¶589. Pure freedom's flipside in total death. The guillotine. Robespierre, "the sea-green incorruptible." Remaining "pure" while slaughtering thousands. The dialectic of ideological purity and its other: the "suspicion" that the harbors toward its own citizens. The succession of "factions" that seize power and are later toppled from it by other factions (and coalitions of factions: negative solidarity). The terror is directed against one's own people (unlike most previous wars). Cultural revolution: in France, in Russia, in China. After you've chopped off sixteen thousand heads of lettuce, who cares about sixteen thousand and one. Robespierre's end.

III-bis. The Terror as blueprint for genocide. Looking ahead to Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia (week ten).

IV. The "return" of earlier shapes in later one: e.g. the "Beautiful Soul" (VI.C.c) as a recapitulation of "Unhappy Consciousness." Repetition with a difference. Hegel's "hedonist" and Sade's libertines; the latter, also often "men of science" (Enlightenment). Jekyll & Hyde.

V. Movie recommendations. Marie Antoinette (dir. Sofia Coppola, 2006); for Milena Canonero's costume design, and as companion to VI.B.I.a. And the 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring Spency Tracy (rather against type and relishing it) opposite Lana Turner (also against type as the "good" girl) and Ingrid Bergman as "Ivy Peterson" (the bad). With a hallucination scene straight out of David Lynch (if not Sade himself).

12. Friday, February 5
Barthes, “Session of March 4, 1978” (32-46)

Due to a technical difficulty, no sound file was made for this class.

WEEK FIVE

13. Monday, February 8
Sade, Justine (449-743), with “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans” (296-339)
Marx, “The Early Marx” (1-164)

A soundfile of this class session is available (49MB).

I. Remarks on where we've gotten to in terms of the syllabus. Phase of "primitive accumulation" ending. Now, the long series of commentaries and interpretations that constitute the "left Hegelian" tradition, starting with Marx & Engels.

II. The Marquis de Sade. As interpreted by Bataille, by Paulhan. By de Beauvoir in her "Must We Burn Sade." By Adorno & Horkheimer in the chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment devoted to "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality." In Lacan's essay, "Kant avec Sade." And in Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman.

III. Remarks on "On More Effort, Frenchmen...." and the amendment Sade sought to make to the Declarations of the Right of Man: the right to jouissance. All citizens enjoying one another. A tone that contrasts somewhat to the statements of the mostly misogynist libertines encountered in the pages of Justine.

IV. The hapless Justine—or is she the supreme libertine? Her most characteristic trait: the tears she shed in such abundance. According to Angela Carter, these tears are themselves a "sexual fluid." A cautionary tale: Charles Swann as a cure for jealousy; Justine as a cure for "virtue"? Are there any admirable characters in this story? Is Justine's sister, Juliette, perhaps not more admirable? The path of prostitution. The Sadeian fantasy: sexualized violence is "the truth." Do the Masters enjoy without restriction? After all, even they submit to the rationalization of their pursuits: the "Four Articles" at the Saint-Mary-in-the-Woods monastery.

V. Sade's critique of "virtuous consciousness." The argument from Nature: all human practices are sanctioned by nature, even if only some of them are legitimized as "virtuous" by specific cultures at specific times. Which leads to the argument from Cultural Relativism: not all human groups taboo the same practices. Which connects to the argument from Historical Relativism: certain groups comes to taboo pleasures their forebearers once enjoyed. Greek homosexuality, e.g. See also Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757).

VI. Passage at 570 beginning "'Yes,' Thérèse,' Monsieur de Corville put in..." (on the "veil of decency" Justine drapes over her account; and on the project of perfecting our understanding of "enigmatic man"). Passage at 611 beginning "'Yes,' my companion responded, 'it is the very barbarity of the idea....'" (on "perverse writers" whose "accursed" pages act as a continuation of their sexual exploits: the immortality of immorality). And in general, Brother Clément's disquisition circa 597-611.

Whiteboard. Man Ray's "Imaginary Portrait" of Sade.

14. Wednesday, February 10
Marx, “The Early Marx” (1-164)

A soundfile of this class session is available (49MB).

I. Show and tell. The new book by Robert Pippin, on Hegel's Practical Philosophy. Notice of a conference on the book scheduled for later this month. And the book by Angela Carter mentioned last class, The Sadeian Woman. Remarks on Beauvoir's Must We Burn Sade? And the annotations in the Fogler copy I'm reading. Clarification on 2nd edition of The Marx-Engels Reader.

II. Sade, encore. Angela Carter's point about Justine's inability to frame the project of allowing Roland to die (in the "cut-the-cord" scene). • Justine as "Virtue" embodied/personified. On The Misfortunes of Virtue (the book preceding Justine). Close reading of last paragraph of Justine (743). "Too heavy brushstrokes": written marks = whip scars. "True happiness is found nowhere but in Virtue's womb..." Sade's minimal concessions to the reigning discourse. Sade's homage to the God he doesn't believe in: blasphemy as perverse form of prayer. Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals as a slightly less burnable version of Sade's arguments. • Sade's "scandalous" presentation: the blend of pornography and philosophy. Why adopt this form? Analogy to horror film genre. Stephen on Pandorum. • Voltaire's Candide and other "idea-driven" narratives. Nothing in Sade that's original within the genre of pornography. Sade as "brand." • Amidst all this profanity, odd instances of delicacy and euphemism. Incense and altars. Making the reader complicit with Sade's "crimes." • Remarks on the terms sadism and masochism (Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs). Looking ahead to Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten." • And behind to Hegel's hedonist (become Libertine) and "virtuous consciousness."

III. (29'00"). Marx as reader of Hegel. Chronology to Tucker edition. Hegelianism as the dominant philosophical system of the day. Hegel, a modern Aristotle. Marx's project of "overcoming" Hegel. Compare your own experience of reading Hegel: the value of ambivalence. Marx is to Hegel as Sade is to God? The "young" Marx, his friends (the "Young Hegelians"). Parallel to Hegel's (and his generation's) experience of reading Kant: proliferation of attempts at resolving the problems Kant left as a legacy. • Marx's letter to his father (Tucker 7). "The grotesque, craggy melody of which did not appeal to me." Young, and ill: the best condition in which to read a demanding text? Marx as Justine, Hegel as the demonic monastery: succumbing to an inescapable destiny. • Marx before Marxism, resistance and transference onto the Hegelian system.

IV. (40'00") Scanning table of contents: The extensive commentary on Hegel's Philosophy of Right. The "Theses on Feuerbach" (Tucker 143-45).

V. (41'00") Remarks on Hegel's "idealism" and Marx's "materialism." Whiteboard. Abstract idealism: I=I, an empty abstraction. Hegel's idealism: I - It - I. Identity's long passage through non-identity; upon "returning," the "I" is rich with content. Hegel's idealism contrasted to Plato's. Hegel as Plato (form) + Aristotle (content). • Marx's objection: Hegel's enthrones "theory" (the Concept) at the expense of material reality and actual practice (objectivity). The "It" is prior and irreducible to the manifestation of the "I." Hegel's "absolute knowedge" is, according to Marx, a monstrous self-delusion. Matter and practice will not be thought away. • Thesis Eleven: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it" (Tucker 145).

15. Friday, February 12
Barthes, “Session of March 11, 1978” (47-61)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

I. Listening together to five minutes of RB's telling his anecdote of an encounter with an ink called "neutral" (English translation on the back of Columbia UP translation and at pp48-49). Listen again here. Handout of French text (in class).

II. Barthes on Sade, on Marx (in-class handout). From a 1975 interview in Le magazine litteraire, collected and translated in The Grain of the Voice. Connection to Sade / Fourier / Loyola (1971).

III. Hieronymous Bosch's painting, known to us as "The Garden of Earthly Delights." Exterior view (when closed). Interior view (when open, high res).

IV. "Glimmer" and moiré—the pattern, the fabric. Colors as distinct, opposable (red ~ green), and as existing along a spectrum permitting of many subtle gradations (dark grey on black). The nuance.

V. RB's life-long allergy to "the adjective," whether denigrating or laudatory. Sending the adjective "on vacation." The suspense of adjectivization in the lover's discourse. And the apophatic gestures of negative theology.

WEEK SIX

16. Monday, February 15
Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (331-62), “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”(594-617)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

I. Assignment: adopting as a loose model Marx's early letter to his father regarding the effects of his earliest encounters with Hegel, write a two- to three-page letter to someone you care for, recounting your own first attempts to read Hegel's Phenomenology. Letters should be submitted electronically before Friday, February 26.

II. Was Marx a Hegelian? A discussion, based mostly on our reading of the Communist Manifesto. Centrality of "struggle" in both mens' accounts. Whiteboard. What shapes consciousness in Marx = modes, forces, and relations of production. Whiteboard. Review discussion of last Wednesday.

17. Wednesday, February 17
Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (594-617)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

18. Friday, February 19
Barthes, “Session of March 18, 1978” (62-77)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

WEEK SEVEN

19. Monday, February 22
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

20. Wednesday, February 24
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

A soundfile of this class session is available.

21. Friday, February 26
Barthes, “Session of March 25, 1978” (78-93)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

—SPRING BREAK—

WEEK EIGHT

22. Monday, March 15
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (451-599)

23. Wednesday, March 17
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (451-599)
Butler, “Circuits of Bad Conscience: Nietzsche and Freud” (63-82)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

24. Friday, March 19
Barthes, “Session of April 1, 1978” (94-106)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

WEEK NINE

25. Monday, March 22
Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten” and “The Economic Problem in Masochism” (handouts)

A soundfile of this class session is available.

26. Wednesday March 24
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

27. Friday, March 26
Barthes, “Session of April 29, 1978” (107-121)

WEEK TEN

28. Monday, March 29
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Benjamin, “Women’s Desire” and “The Oedipal Riddle” (85-181)

29. Wednesday, March 31
Adorno, Minima Moralia, part one (21-81)

30. Friday, April 2
Barthes, “Session of May 6, 1978” (122-35)

WEEK ELEVEN

31. Monday, April 5
Adorno, Minima Moralia, part two (85-157)

32. Wednesday, April 7
Adorno, Minima Moralia, part three (161-247)

33. Friday, April 9
Barthes, “Session of May 13, 1978” (136-151)

WEEK TWELVE

34. Monday, April 12
Foucault, “Truth and Power” and “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (51-100)

35. Wednesday, April 14
Foucault, “Disciplines and Sciences of the Individual” (169-256)
Butler, “Subjection, Resistance, Resignation: Between Freud and Foucault” (83-105)

36. Friday, April 16
Barthes, “Session of May 20, 1978” (152-65)

WEEK THIRTEEN

37. Monday, April 19
Foucault, “Bio-Power” (257-290) and “Sex and Truth” (291-330)

38. Wednesday, April 21
Remarks on Lacan’s “four discourses” as articulated in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (specific readings TBA)

39. Friday, April 23
Barthes, “Session of May 27, 1978” (166-181)

WEEK FOURTEEN

40. Monday, April 26
Remarks on Lacan’s “four discourses” as articulated in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (specific readings TBA)

41. Wednesday, April 28 — Maine Day
No class

42. Friday, April 30
Barthes, “Session of June 3, 1978” and “Annex” (182-209)

Required Texts

Adorno, Minima Moralia
Barthes, The Neutral
Benjamin, The Bonds of Love
Butler, The Psychic Life of Power
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Kojève, An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Sem. 17)
Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche
Rabinow, ed. The Foucault Reader
Sade, Justine, Philosopy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader