DELEUZE AND ANALYSIS: Lack◇Excess
Announcement: I will be teaching a year-long online course throughout 2025 on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and its intersections with Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy, notably with the thought of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, at the Philosophy Portal.
Enrolment Options: you can sign up for the individual year-long course, or get access by becoming a member of The Philosophy Portal. To find out more about this project, visit: Deleuze and Analysis.
Course Description: "Deleuze and Analysis: Lack◇Excess" is a ten-session course offering a series of philosophical encounters between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, focusing on the dynamic interplay of lack and excess as central themes in their works.
Programme: through critical readings and discussions of their oeuvre the course will examine how both thinkers conceptualize desire, drive, machinic processes, language, subjectivity, and the production of jouissance.
Approach: by exploring key texts of both thinkers and integrating perspectives from philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of how Deleuze and Lacan's ideas converge and diverge, contradict and sublate each other, enriching contemporary philosophical discourse and research programmes.
Logic: the course employs an innovative tool - Jacques Lacan's diamond-punch ◇ - as a logical operator capable of providing a creative heuristic to navigate complex theoretical landscapes, to encounter novel conceptual characters, and to revision notions such as desire as production, the creation of concepts, and the ontology of the Real.
Intended Audience: designed for individuals interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, this course invites participants to engage actively with transformative ideas that challenge traditional paradigms and open up new avenues for thought.
Course Schedule: the course will take the form of a monthly online seminar, starting January 15 2025, on Wednesdays at 7pm CET (Central European Time):
January 15th / Session 1: The Incipit of ANTI-OEDIPUS — Desire, Drive, and the Enunciative Context
February 19th / Session 2: "Destruction" in ANTI-OEDIPUS — Contextualising the passage "Destroy, Destroy..."
March 19th / Session 3: The Noetic Paths of Deleuze and Lacan — Exploring Deleuze's "I Have Nothing to Declare" and Lacan's Introduction to Seminar XI
April 16th / Session 4: Deepening the Understanding of Deleuze and Lacan’s Paths — Deleuze's "Dialogues" and Lacan's "Tuché and Automaton"
May 21st / Session 5: Moving Beyond Stereotypes — Deleuze and Lacan's Shifts in Theoretical Focus
June 18th / Session 6: Alain Badiou as a Bridge Between Deleuze and Lacan — Ontologies of Multiplicities and the Real
September 17th / Session 7: Desire as Production — Deleuze and Guattari's Collaboration and Lacan's Theory of Discourses
October 15th / Session 8: Slavoj Žižek as a Bridge Between Deleuze and Lacan — Exploring Zizek's idea of a Deleuze/Lacan Alliance Around the Real
November 19th / Session 9: What Is Philosophy? Analyzing Philosophy Through the Graph of Desire and the Creation of Concepts
December 17th / Session 10: The Diamond-Punch ◇ as a Creative Heuristic — Condensing the Underlying Logic of Desire, Excess and Pulsation
See you there!!! I am going to chunk and post on my substack my various screeds and notes from occasional intros and discussions I've given or led over the years on the Lacan-Deleuze intersection so as to get them off my desk and start new. (As in zen mind / beginner's mind....) In doing so I will be directing my readers, fit company though few, to this opportunity at every turn. I hope some of them will commit.