Case Histories:
Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture

AH800

This graduate seminar serves as a theoretical introduction to key concepts in psychoanalysis relating to the strange workings of memory and its screens, vision and the drives, power and the gaze, and colonization and the formation of the self that have and continue to influence critical study of visual culture. Readings and discussion will focus particularly on the tensions between psychoanalysis and historicizing criticism. The course takes up the challenge psychoanalysis presents developmental narratives of progress based on assumptions that cultural memory acts along a timeline of unidirectional, linear flow. At the same time, however, we will also look at what historical narratives may be offered by classic works in psychoanalysis. We will consider what specific historical case studies may do to revise basic concepts in psychoanalysis such as fetishism. We will look not only at how psychoanalysis informs the study of visual media such as cinema but also at how imaging technologies have influenced the elaboration of basic concepts in psychoanalysis such as projection. Required readings will include selections from Ashis Nandy’s Time Warps, Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, and Case Histories I & II, Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis and Écrits, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Teresa Brennan’s History after Lacan, Homi Bhabha’s “Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt,” Luce Irigaray’s The Speculum of the Other Woman, Julia Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt, Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, and Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Over the span of the semester, seminar participants will write and revise one substantial essay or write one short piece and produce an art project. These creative contributions will engage and build upon works studied in the course. It is expected that projects will pursue the specific interests of seminar participants and, thus, may range widely in terms of their critical questions, the geographic and temporal location of the primary visual material they analyze or reference, and the written and visual forms they take. No prior familiarity with psychoanalytic criticism is required.