ENG 6077

Literary Theory: Forms

Toward an Ethics of the Real:

Reading Lacan with Badiou

Lacan Badiou

Professor Phillip Wegner

Wednesday 6-8 (12:50-3:50 p.m.)

Turlington 4112

Office: Turlington 4012C (Graduate Coordinators Office)

Turlington 4115

Office Hours: by appointment

Phone: 392-6650, ex. 231; ex. 261

pwegner@english.ufl.edu

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pwegner/home.htm

Lorenzo Chiesa concludes his outstanding 2007 book, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, with this claim: “At the risk of oversimplifying an intricate issue which is only introduced here, I would go so far as to suggest that any possible political elaboration of the extreme ethics of the ex nihilo should rely on the equation between what is new and what is good.” The concept of the “ethics of the ex nihilo,” what Lacan first formulated as an “ethics of the Real,” is also at the center of the immense ongoing project of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou’s project has major implications for both an understanding of the past cultures of modernism and the development in the future of any original radical political culture. In our seminar, we will thus use this concept as the starting point for an investigation of some of the work of these two thinkers, much of which has only very recently been made available in translation. After reading Lacan’s introductory text, My Teaching, we will focus in the first half of the semester on three of Lacan’s seminars: Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60); Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-70); and Seminar XXIII, Le Sinthome (1976-77). With this framework in hand, we will then turn to a reading of some of the central texts of Badiou from the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of our new century.

Texts

Jacques Lacan, My Teaching

Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60)

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-70)

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII, Le Sinthome (1976-77)

Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (in Ecrits); “Joyce the Symptom I”

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject

Alain Badiou, Being and Event

Alain Badiou, The Century

All of these texts, except Seminar XXIII and the Lacan essays, are available at Goerings Book Store (1717 NW 1st Avenue, 372-3975; goerings@bellsouth.net). Other readings will be made available, at various spaces and places, as the semester progresses.

Aims and Methods

1. Full presence in every spatial, ontological, existential, and intellectual sense of the word, as well as active and engaged participation in the seminar discussions. Given your presence here, I assume that all of you are looking forward as much as I am to having the opportunity for a serious and careful engagement with these texts. Thus, the most general expectation that I have for this semester is that all of you intend to read these works, and to do so in a responsible and rigorous fashion, and in a spirit of good faith and intellectual camaraderie. I would ask then that you make every effort to engage in, to use a much abused term, a dialogue with these works, being attentive to their respective voices, acknowledging their particular historical and otherwise contingent beings in the world, and finally working to imagine how we today might best retool the insights and modes of analysis of their various “unfinished projects.” In this way, I hope that we will develop a much more complex and profitable understanding of both the power and originality of these arguments and traditions.

2. In order to facilitate and enrich our discussion of these works, I want to ask each of you to be responsible for introducing and situating each week’s readings. As I imagine all of our work fundamentally to be a collective project, you will do this in groups of three, with each group being responsible for the readings on two different occasions. Each group will be asked both to provide a brief introduction to the material and to serve as general “experts” on the readings for that week. Your group can take a variety of approaches to this task: you may want to highlight some of the central issues the readings address; briefly outline their main arguments; note the ways they engage with what has come before; place them in historical, intellectual, and political contexts; note connections to other models and practices; give overviews of some of the secondary readings on these works; offer some questions for discussion; and so forth. I only ask that you keep the opening comments brief (15 minutes maximum total) so that we can begin our general discussion as soon as possible. I also hope that your groups will continue to work together throughout the semester, sharing ideas, giving support, discussing research projects, drinking beer, and other important tasks. I will be very happy to meet with your group beforehand to suggest some secondary readings and discuss approaches and tactics.

3. For the major written component of the course, I will ask each of you to develop an independent research program, which will take one of two forms: either a) two shorter essays of 10-15 pages in length examining the questions or issues raised by the material in more depth, or drawing connections between these works and other areas of interest; or, b) a major critical research project of some 25-30 pages in length. The aim of the longer project will be one of the following: 1) a sustained engagement with some of the works we discuss in class; 2) a further independent examination of the issues raised by the work we have looked at; 3) a discussion drawing upon some of the recommended secondary or additional readings; or 4) an original reading of some other texts of interest –be they literary, theoretical, filmic, architectural, cultural, or otherwise— deploying the concepts and models we elaborate during the course of the semester. I would also like to ask that all Ph.D students plan to pursue option b, with the goal of producing an essay that will serve either as the basis of a dissertation chapter or a publishable essay (or even both). I ask each of you who choose this second option to turn in a detailed paper proposal, complete with bibliography, about a month before the paper is due. If you require additional time to work on this project, I am happy to allow you to do so. However, in order to avoid extending the course indefinitely, I expect that the project will be completed by the end of the spring term; work turned in after that time should not expect to receive extensive comments.

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