Masters’ School Seminar 15.12.2021 3 p.m.

The next Masters’ School Seminar will be held on December 15, 3 p.m.

Our guest is professor Adam Lipszyc.

Biographic entry:

dr hab. Adam Lipszyc, prof. IFiS PAN, is the head of the Center for Psychoanalytic Thought based in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He teaches in the Graduate School for Social Research and at the Franz Kafka University of Muri. In his work, he focuses on the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis, philosophy of literature, as well as on the 20th century Jewish thought. Most recently, he published (in Polish) a collection of essays on Polish literature (Red Letters, 2018), as well as a book on Freudian thought (Freud: the Logic of Experience, 2019).

Presentation abstract:

The Paper Nose of Literature: On Descartes, Lacan, Bataille – and Laurence Sterne!

In my lecture, I would like to show on a rather peculiar example how philosophers can benefit from reading literature. Thus, in the first part of my talk I shall focus on the philosophical and anthropological meaning of the figure of the pineal gland and of that of the third eye. Relying on Descartes, Bataille, Lacan and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel I shall present the idea of the third eye as the phantasy in which the subject overcomes the symbolic castration and gains full sovereignty. Then, in the second part of my talk, in search of a way out of the dilemma between the sovereign position and the position of subjection to law, I shall focus on Laurence Sterne and on a rather curious passage in his Tristram Shandy where the figure of the pineal gland plays a crucial role. Seemingly frivolous and marginal, this passage, when read carefully, turns out to be an antireligious and counter-philosophical manifesto of literature as a perverse, ambigous, seductive enterprise which transcends some of the key oppositions established by philosophers and theorists of psychoanalysis.