Readings/Films:

See Description.

Course Description:

What is it to have (or be) a self? How do different media technologies (writing, photography, digital media) generate different forms of selfhood? Is what Freud called the “bodily ego” differently oriented in relation to its written and photographic supports? In the era of networks, algorithms, cognitive behavioral therapy, neuroscience, and neoliberal economics, what is left of the opaque and displaced self described by psychoanalysis?

In this course we will examine several historically-situated paradigms of selfhood, also asking how the experience of having a self gives rise to artistic practices in different media. We will read Foucault’s late seminars on governmentality and technologies of the self from antiquity to modernity, as well as Freud (The Ego and the Id) and some of his French commentators. We will then turn to recent work in continental philosophy and science studies on the brain, cognition, and neuroscience, as well as digital media theory (works by Catherine Malabou, Katherine Hayles, Steven Shaviro, Wendy Chun, Mark Hansen). Alongside this theoretical investigation, we will consider the aesthetic investigations of selfhood by authors, artists, and film-makers that might include Agnès Varda, Orlan, Sophie Calle, Roland Barthes, Ming Wong, Tracey Moffatt, Adrian Piper, Narcissister, Cindy Sherman, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ryan Trecartin, and Paul Preciado.

Additional Information:

Class discussions in English; all readings available in translation.  Priority enrollment for students in doctoral degree programs.

Section times and locations in the Schedule of Classes