Prof. Kaja Silverman.

What is an object? This is a question with a vast range of possible answers. An object can be a commodity, a fetish, a work of art, a message, an extension of the human body, or a religious artifact. Under certain circumstances, even people can be objects. This course will investigate a wide range of the forms which objects assume in our culture, of the systems of representation through which we create them, and of the discourses through which we are accustomed to thinking about them.

Texts: Levi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship; Karl Marx, “Commodities.” Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” and “Commodities Among Themselves”; “The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave”; Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, “Object”; Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” and  “Fetishism”; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”; Robert Maplethorpe, The Black Book; Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism,” and Looking for Trouble”; Kaja Silverman,  “The Lacanian Model”; Marcel Proust, “Overture” in Swann’s Way; Jean Baudrillard, “The Ideological Genesis of Needs” and “Fetishism”; Norman Bryson, “Abundance”, James Agee, “Overalls.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness;” Jonathan Flatley,  “Warhol Gives Good Face”; Agnes Varda, The Gleaners and I.