New modules have been introduced for the academic year 2011-12.
Slavoj Zizek among other top academics teaching on MA programmes
New modules have been introduced for the academic year 2011-12, which will be available to students on the following courses:
New modules for 2011-12:
Derek Hook, Fantasmatic formations
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This option course explores the notion of fantasy as a key concept within the emerging field of psychosocial studies. Clinical psychoanalytic renderings of the idea (in Freud, Klein, Lacan and Laplanche) will be introduced before the term is set to work in explicitly political contexts. Psychoanalytic social theory - as in diverse writings of Frantz Fanon, Jacqueline Rose, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek - might be said to utilise this notion as a 'third term' that represents both the societal mediation of the subjective and the psychical mediation of the structural. Grasping the implications of this conjunction - that is, the social order's determining influence on the subject, the subject's role in maintaining this order - will require the introduction of a series of concepts (libidinal economy, passionate investments, the big Other, distributions of enjoyment) crucial to contemporary critical theory.
Lynne Segal and Naomi Segal, Sexing the Body: Psychoanalytic and other Framings
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This option will take a double approach: each pair of sessions will offer:
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a broad angle on the sexed body from a psychosocial perspective (LS)
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a close reading of a text, film or other cultural phenomenon from a humanities perspective (NS).
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This will allow students a broader way of exploring how the human body has been theorised and represented in the last 125 years, looking particularly at aspects of sex and gender.
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What does it mean to ‘live’ our body?
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What do masculinity and femininity mean in the contemporary west and where have these understandings come from?
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How did the ‘problem of femininity’ preside over the birth of psychoanalysis and how far has it changed in the last century?
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Is masculinity the new femininity? Is the personal still political
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How are our senses affected by rapid changes in technologies?
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How have life-cycles and the markers by which we describe them – infancy, adolescence, maturity, ageing – changed for bodies living in new conditions of exposure and alterability?
Slavoj Zizek, Lacanian Axioms: Psychoanalysis and Politics
- This module will be taught as an intensive, three-week option by the International Director of the BIH, Professor Slavoj Žižek.
- It offers an advanced study of Lacanian theory one of the foremost exponents of these ideas. Žižek’s work is an important strand in the MA in Psychosocial Studies and will also have a significant presence in the MA Psychoanalysis, History and Culture.
- It is also highly cited in many other postgraduate programmes in the arts and humanities offered at Birkbeck. The module thus offers students an opportunity to engage directly with the thinking of one of the world’s foremost intellectuals, in a context in which they are well prepared to make the most of this connection.
