About the Course
Why Lacan, now? Lacan’s psychoanalysis, a radical rethinking of Freud’s project, emerged across a 20th century riven by the repetition of crises, at once psychical, social, economic, political, ethical, and aesthetic. His response, a patient unpacking of the structures undergirding crisis repetition in the psyche, capitalism, democracy, and the arts, eschewed the rush to implement band-aid, reformist measures (à la May ’68), which for Lacan only deepened the structural causes of bad repetition. Alas, critics have largely responded to his patience by charging him with conservativism.
In a 21st century that continues to repeat 20th-century horror, the time is ripe to revisit systematically Lacan’s thought with rigour.
This course offers a systematic working through of Jacques Lacan’s oeuvre, from his dissertation on ‘Self-Punishing Paranoia’ (1932) through his conceptions of the ‘Imaginary’ (1930s and 1940s), the ‘Symbolic’ (1950s), and the ‘Real’ (1960s and 1970s). The pedagogy is for academics, artists, and analysts who do not necessarily have a background in Lacanian psychoanalysis. You’ll be expected to read carefully selected sections of Lacan’s Écrits (1966) and Seminar (1953-1980) before each session, which will be conducted in a structured lecture/discussion format.
About the Professor
Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge
Certificate
Students will receive a Certificate of Completion upon successful attendance of a course or a Certificate of Completion and Letter of Evaluation if they successfully attend and complete the final assignment. Those who complete three courses (attendance and writing) in the Theoretical Explorations track over two calendar years are eligible for a BICAR Diploma in Theoretical Explorations.
Refund Policy
We will refund your mode of payment — minus a 25% processing fee — if you choose not to take this course after the first session. Or, you can ‘roll over’ your balance to another or future BICAR course without a fee deduction.
Register
To register, we can facilitate two modes of payment — either a direct bank transfer to our Indian account or we also have a PayPal link: