LFU:online

The students get to know an example of the social theoretical application of psychoanalysis. They train themselves in reading theoretical and socio-critical texts.

Social movements have often assumed that the bourgeois nuclear family with its Oedipal structure and the privileged position of paternal authority embedded in it are responsible for the integration of people into social structures of domination. The abolition of the Oedipal constellation was therefore also at the centre of the idea of sexual liberation that guided the generation of 68.

About 50 years after this awakening, we are in a constellation that psychoanalytically oriented social theorists call "post-Oedipal". However, they do not associate this with a society freed from domination, but rather postulate that today we are dealing with a new kind of domination that no longer emanates from a "master", but rather from a "tyrannical system based on the ideal of communication and the pedagogical relationship" (Roudinesco). Guiding this view is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who as early as 1968, in his famous statement: "What you want is a new master, you'll get one!" warned the protesting students that with their protests they were merely working towards a new technology of domination. Under the eloquent expression of the "discourse of the university", Lacan observes in his diagnosis of the times a change in the subject structures that allows a paradoxical imperative to take the place of the paternal prohibition, which tells us to enjoy.

The seminar explores the psychoanalytical foundations of this transformation and introduces both this newer psychoanalytically oriented social theory and some central concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The seminar is intended as a reading seminar. The focus is on the joint development of text comprehension and discussion. The texts of the seminar plan are to be read in advance by all seminar participants. This reading also counts as a performance record.

Active participation, reading, protocols

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