こんな催しがバークレーで
11日に関東支部の主催により吉祥寺で予定されているワークショップにお招きするMacCannell教授から次のよう催しのお知らせが来たのでここにいちおうコピペします。8月の末にカリフォリニアはバークレー周辺にいるひとはぜひ。なかなか面白そうです。やはり21世紀はラカンの世紀になるかも（世の常識とは反対に）。ラカンもっと勉強しなくては（といいながら世界でいちばん精神分析を憎んでいる男の本の翻訳のゲラとここしばらく格闘するのだが、この本も面白いですよ、とかぬけぬけと言ってしまう小生のリベラルぶり）。しかし資本主義という怪物をただ呆然と眺めているのでなければ、やはり＜享楽＞という問題系は避けて通れぬはずなのだが、日本ではなかなかこんな催しは大学でもないのですね。サバちゃんが待ち遠しい次第：
“WHAT IS WEALTH?" AN INVESTIGATION INTO ITS PSYCHICAL AFTERMATH
THE NINTH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUMSupported by:
(a): THE JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS,
THE CALIFORNIA PSYCHOANALYTIC CIRCLE, and by
THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, UC BERKELEY
AUGUST 28-29, 2009 • 370 DWINELLE • UC BERKELEY
What psychoanalysis enables us to conceptualize is nothing other than this, which is in line with what Marxism has opened up, namely that discourse is bound up with the interests of the subject. This is what, from time to time, Marx calls the economy, because these interests are, in capitalist society, entirely commercial. It’s just that since the market is linked to the master signifier, nothing is resolved by denouncing it in this way. For the market is no less linked to this signifier after the socialist revolution.-- Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII
At one point in his seminar on “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,” Lacan complains that no economist – not even Marx -- ever really bothered to ask, “What is wealth?” since its only definition appears to be that “wealth is an attribute of ‘the wealthy’.” He argues that psychoanalysis is tied to politics through the field of economics: both deal with jouissance (enjoyment: a satisfying of a desire, a fantasy fulfillment in attaining the object of a drive).
In talking of the other side of psychoanalysis, the question arises of the place of psychoanalysis in politics. The intrusion into politics can only be made by recognizing that the only discourse there is, and not just analytic discourse, is the discourse of jouissance, at least when one is hoping for the work of truth from it.[1]
Given that ‘the economy’ is today’s topique du jour and that ours is a time of global financial turmoil, can we ask this question anew?
What has wealth come to mean for us today?
Freud used the term ‘wealth’ in a very technical way, as a psychical relation to communal ‘wealth’ (the material and cultural assets created by the collective sacrifice of drive satisfaction to the benefit of human society). [Civilization and its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion]. It is a psychical relation that remains hostage to each individual's unconscious hostility to this required sacrifice, and by extension to society and culture as such.
As we watch American conservatives repeat their call for a new Reagan Revolution to weaken the last ideals of communal or shared wealth (see recent news of ‘tea baggers’ and threats of secession over taxes) we hope in this Symposium to undertake an examination of why wealth and economics inspires such ardent (and often unconscious) passions.
Equally open to psychoanalytic examination are the massive gambles and thefts that the idea of wealth has apparently inspired (Madoff, Stanford, et al.). Housing and food turned into commodified 'signs of wealth' have created a host of unintended, deleterious consequences. The question of how psychoanalysis works under this discourse may also be addressed here.
In Seminar XVII, Lacan claimed that a ‘discourse of the university’ {Hegel and since; Lacan assimilates it with capitalism] dictates the coordinates of our era. It is a discourse that places S2, or total accumulated knowledge -- a ‘treasury of signifiers’ -- in the position of discursive dominant. The a, the surplus jouissance that was the excess produced by work of the slave in the prior discourse, now sits on the same level as the vast accumulation of knowledge as if there for the taking by one and all. Or so it seems -- for one cannot ignore what is below the bar: the split Subject and its signifying Truth hidden beneath this new regime.
The top line of university discourses algorithm reads: S2 --> a. It seems like a displaced, expanded version of the formula of the fantasy [S <> a] where the a once sat beneath the bar in the prior discourse of the Master. The effect is that the productive energy and psychical power of fantasy appears to have been evacuated from social discourse. At the same time, however, the now-visible a lends its aura of fulfilled fantasy to the S2.: fake jouissance or what Lacan calls “jouissance en toc.”
Saturday August 28 2009 Room 370 Dwinelle Hall
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Co-Chair CPC, UC IrvineIntroduction
Greg Flemming, Social & Political Thought, and Arshavez Mozafari, Political Science, York University, Toronto
The Strike And The Martyr: Lacan, Marx and Wealth in Canada And IranManya Steinkoler, English, BMCC CUNY, New York City
Customer Satisfaction Guaranteed: Working Hard for the Money: Bernie Madoff and the Lacanian Understanding of Perversion
Rebecca Colesworthy, Draper Fellow and Assistant Professor, Humanities and Social Thought, New York University
From the Trojan Horse to the Tessera: The Political Economy of Psychoanalysis?
Nathaniel Dektor, Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
Mr. Merdle’s Anamnestic Bosom in Dickens’s Little Dorrit
Sunday August 29, 2009 Room 370 Dwinelle Hall
Dean MacCannell, UC Davis, Co-Chair CPC
Revisiting Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism
Jason MacCannell, Geographer, Sacramento
From Oprah to the Field of Dreams: The Homeless Revolution snd Wealth's CounterrevolutionsJulie Park, English, Bilkent University, Turkey
The Promise of Happiness
それ以前に10月のペンシルベニア遠征についてどうにか具体化しなくては・・・？なのに火→水→木→金と連続出勤という過酷な吉祥寺・・・。
