11 January 2018

5-7pm

Richard Hoggart Building (RHB) Room 144

This talk will focus on Foucault’s 1969 article ‘What Is an Author?’ and on Lacan’s comments on it. Although Lacan highlights the links between Foucault’s notion of the author and the subject of the unconscious as conceived by psychoanalysis, it will be argued that Lacan’s materialist stance is ultimately incompatible with Foucault’s fundamentally vitalist ontology.

Lorenzo Chiesa is Director of the Genoa School of Humanities and Visiting Professor at the European University at St Petersburg. He also teaches at the Freud Museum, London. Previously, he was Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent, where he founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. His most recent works include The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (MIT Press, 2016), The Virtual Point of Freedom (Northwestern UP, 2016), and Lacan and Philosophy (Re.press, 2014).

All welcome.