Schedule & Readings

All readings are available as free electronic documents! Readings not hyperlinked below are available here.

Beham and Beham, Death and the Sleeping Woman, 1548

Introduction

Week 1 (Sept 14):

• Bataille, The Beginning (The Birth of Eros), pp. 22-54 of The Tears of Eros

Week 2 (Sept 21):

• Foucault, Preface on Transgression

Unit 1: Blood

Week 3 (Sept 28):

• Freud, The Return of Totemism in Childhood, fourth essay of Totem and Taboo

Week 4 (Oct 5):

• Girard, Sacrifice, pp. 1-38 of Violence and the Sacred

Week 5 (Oct 12):

• Marx, On the Jewish Question, available in Marx: Early Political Writings (pp. 28-56, Cambridge University Press, 1994)

• Marx, The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret, in Capital, volume 1, chapter one, section 4

Unit 2: Sex

Week 6 (Oct 19):

• Freud, Fetishism

• Freud, Embarrassing dreams of being naked, in The Interpretation of Dreams

• Freud, The Analysis of the Psychical Personality, in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: New Series

Week 7 (Oct 26):

• Foucault, pp. 1-49 of The History of Sexuality, volume 1: The will to knowledge

Week 8 (Nov 2):

• Bataille, Taboo and Transgression, pp. 11-80 of Eroticism

Reading Week: Nov 7 - 11 😂😊😹 No class!

Charles Gleyre, La Danse des bacchantes (1849, oil on canvas)

Unit 3: Drugs

Week 9 (Nov 16):

• Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy, pp. 61-171 of Dissemination

Week 10 (Nov 23):

• Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (available in Marx: Early Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 57-70)

Week 11 (Nov 30):

• Freud, The Future of an Illusion 

Conclusion

Week 12 (Dec 7):

• Nietzsche, The madman, pp. 181-182 of The Gay Science

• Nietzsche, The two types: Dionysus and the Crucified, pp. 542-543 of The Will to Power