skip to main content
Goldsmiths - University of London
  • Students, Staff and Alumni
  • Search Students, Staff and Alumni
  • Study
  • Course finder
  • International
  • More
  • Search
  • Study
  • Courses
  • International
  • More
 
Main menu

Primary

  • About Goldsmiths
  • Study with us
  • Research
  • Business and partnerships
  • For the local community
  • Academic departments
  • News and features
  • Events
  • Give to Goldsmiths
Staff & students

Staff + students

  • Students
  • Alumni
  • Library
  • Timetable
  • Learn.gold - VLE
  • Email - Outlook
  • IT support
  • Staff directory
  • Staff intranet - Goldmine
  • Graduate School - PGR students
  • Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre
  • Events admin
In this section

Breadcrumb navigation

  • Events
    • Degree Shows
    • Black History Month
  • Calendar
Workshop

Tomsic and Chukrov: Marxism and Psychoanalysis


31 May 2019, 4:00pm - 7:00pm

305, Professor Stuart Hall Building

Event overview

Cost Free
Department Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought , English and Creative Writing , Sociology
Website Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought
Contact A.Toscano(@gold.ac.uk)

From Soviet Psychology to the Present

The critique of psychoanalysis in Soviet Marxist philosophy and psychology was predicated on the secondary role of the unconscious and hence of ‘psychics’, in the construction of the social subject. Key studies such as Voloshinov’s Freudianism (1976) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) and Leontiev’s Activity and Consciousness (1977), insisted that what functions as lack and alienation in psychoanalysis are in fact socio-economic categories and hence prone to dissolution under communism, having no stable ontology of their own. Consequently, the unconscious is simply that part of consciousness, which has not yet acquired awareness; indeed consciousness is nothing but an assemblage of socio-cognitive activity and labour, and therefore precisely an extension of social production. This classical mode of Marxist argumentation was subject to severe critique in the 1970s such as Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), Guattari’s Machinic Unconscious (1979) and Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975). In these texts desire and the unconscious were claimed as the irretrievable force of capitalism’s libidinal and phantasmatic nature. Meanwhile Lacan’s critique of philosophy’s reliance on consciousness in the 1960s was even stricter, calling the transparently rational subject a fatal error of philosophy. What, therefore, is left of the Soviet Marxist critique of psychoanalysis? This symposium will explore this question, specifically through a discussion of subjectivity and the social function of language, from these two drastically opposed standpoints.

Samo Tomsic obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is currently research associate at the cluster of excellence Matters of Activity as well as guest lecturer at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory, both at the Humboldt University Berlin. His research areas comprise continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, structuralism and epistemology. He is the author of The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (Verso, 2015) and, most recently, The Labour of Enjoyment. Toward a Critique of Libidinal Economy (August, 2019).

Keti Chukhrov is ScD in philosophy, an associate professor at the Department of Сultural Studies at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). Currently she is a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow in UK. She has authored numerous texts on art theory and philosophy. Her full-length books include: To Be—To Perform. ‘Theatre’ in Philosophic Critique of Art (European University, 2011), and Pound & £ (Logos, 1999) and a volume of dramatic writing: Merely Humans (2010). Her forthcoming book deals with the communist epistemologies in the Soviet Marxist philosophy of 1960s and 1970s.

Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought

Dates & times

Date Time Add to calendar
31 May 2019 4:00pm - 7:00pm
  • apple
  • google
  • outlook

Accessibility

If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.

Event controls

  • About us
  • Accessibility statement
  • Contact us
  • Cookie use
  • Find us
  • Copyright and disclaimer
  • Jobs
  • Modern slavery statement
Admin login
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
© Goldsmiths, University of London Back to top