Lutecium a non-school
of
Lacanian/Freudian Psychoanalysis
San Francisco, California
Psychoanalysis and Poetics
with David Marriott, Ph.D.
(6pm - 8pm)

The theme of this seminar returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses in order to discuss the social
bond of poetics. Lacan develops this theoretical frame in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On
Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, and some of the selected fragments from Television. He proposes that there
are four fundamental discourses, or structures of discourse, that produce different social bonds for the subject. These discourses
consist of the master’s discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, the university discourse, and the analyst’s discourse. While Lacan is
concerned with the limitation of the master's discourse and the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in the
analyst's discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to make an hysterization of discourse in the process of analysis—
because this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse—he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the
analyst’s discourse for Real change to occur. Seminar XVII, which took place in 1969, follows the student and social revolt of May
68, a historical moment in which Lacan was immersed. He is critical of revolutions that appear to simply question the master and the
university, and as a consequence only reproduce a new master, without shifting social bonds, as he cynically suggests that the
Parisian students of 68 were in danger of doing. However, we do find moments in Lacan’s seminars in which he suggests that a
writer can have a similar position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other discourses to enact
some social change. Therefore, I am using this frame to ask questions, develop a  dialogue, about poetics and social change. Can
poetics operate like the analyst's discourse to create a different social bond through language? Do poets intervene in these other
discourses or intersect with them in subversive ways that shift discourse and social bonds? Is Lacan’s concept of the structure of
the four discourses useful for us today, particularly as we head into financial cuts in the arts and academia that may limit
interventions in hegemonic discourses? Or do we need to rethink what poetics and discourse are and reconsider how we engage
with and disseminate them?
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Poet and critic, David Marriott, was born and educated in England and received his Ph.D. in literature from the University of Sussex.
His first book, On Black Men (Edinburgh University Press, 2000; Columbia University Press, 2000), was an interdisciplinary study of
how models of selfhood come to acquire cultural recognition through the aberrant fictions of race. His second book, Haunted Life:
Visual Culture and Black Modernity (2006, Rutgers University Press) extends this meditation on discourses of inwardness and the
paradigmatic aberrations of race into a comparative study of black atlantic modernism. Incognegro (Salt Publications, 2006) is his
most recent book of poetry - a collection of poems and prose drawn from journals and chapbooks, plus previously unpublished
pieces, centered around the black European and American literary/historical experience. Dr. Marriott is also coeditor (with Vicky
Lebeau) of Psychoanalysis and Poetics (1998, Fragmente) and has written many articles on poetics.  His present project, The Two
Freedoms, is a critical study of C.L.R. James and Jules Marcel Monnerot. Dr. Marriott joined the University of California, Santa Cruz
faculty in 2003 and is professor of History of Consciousness. His academic interests include literary theory, psychoanalysis, black
cultural theory and philosophies of race, and the literary and visual cultures of modernism.
Friday, November 20, 2009, 6pm - 8pm
(Followed by Writing Group "Letters" Reception & Presentations, 8pm - 10pm)
Flood Building, 870 Market Street, San Francisco
Room - TBA
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Seminar Fee: $80 professionals / $60 interns / $40 students
Writing Group "Letters" Open House (8pm - 10pm): Free
Writing Group "Letters"
Presentations & Open House
(8pm - 10pm)
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Poetry and Knowledge
David Marriott, Ph.D.