Theories of the Signifier

BA Core Course

Prof. Shirley Sharon-Zisser

Course no.: 626 2017/18, Spring term, 4hr credit for BA

Monday and Thursday, 10-12, Webb 102 (Mon), Webb 103 (Thurs)

Reception hours: Monday, 14:00-15:00 or by appointment, Webb 509

E-mail address: shir3@post.tau.ac.il

Course prerequisites: interest in poetics, literary theory, psychoanalysis; love of language. It would be beneficial for students to have taken the introductory course in theory. Poetry analysis or narrative analysis would also be useful.

Course Description

Please note that this seminar proceeds from a psychoanalytical Freudian-Lacanian position.

The course is taught from a psychoanalytical Freudian-Lacanian position.

Words are the stuff of poetic language, what literature is made of. They are also the stuff of psychic life, the constituents of the unconscious. But what is the nature of words? How are words, components of the distinctly human phenomenon language is, related to the organism language affects? Philosophers and rhetoricians have grappled with this question since antiquity. So have, in modern times, linguists, literary theorists, and those whom Lacan teaches are the modern inheritors of the rhetors and the Sophists, ancient reflectors on the relation of the subject and the signifier, namely psychoanalysts. The course will review and discuss theories of the signifier from Plato’s Theaetetus, Aristotle’s Poetics, Rhetoric, and Sophistical Refutations, through those of Ferdinand de Saussure, Martin Heidegger, Edward Sapir, Thomas Sebeok, Jacques Derrida, Freud and Lacan, as well as other psychoanalysts such as Sandor Ferenczi, Nicolas Abraham, and Michele Montrelay. Special emphasis will be given to the question of the intersection of the linguistic and the biological, the possible place of the organic in words and forms of conjunction of words which organize it.

Course Requirements

Requirements: regular attendance, active participation (10 %), mid-term assignment (30 %), final assignment (60 %).

  Course Reading

The course will focus on a close reading and discussion of the works listed in the bibliography. Most texts are available online, and those that are not will be uploaded to moodle. Students are expected to have read the texts thoroughly before they are discussed in class and always to have a text in class for reference.