Censorship: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Live Online)

Censorship entails formal prohibitions on speech. Yet, authors, philosophers—and ordinary folk—routinely circumscribe their self-expression, well beyond what may be required by an employer or the state. So what prevents us from expressing ourselves fully? Various theories have tried to explain this gap between our intention and its expression. Sigmund Freud called it “repression,” Leo Strauss “persecution,” Claude Levi-Strauss “taboo”; while for Jacque Derrida, the very idea of identifying the speaking self as the central unit of meaning-making is “logocentric.” The concept—sometimes used literally, other times metaphorically—that floats above all these theories, abstracting the gap between what we want to say and what we can or do say, is censorship. But is censorship an appropriate concept for thinking through all of these various attitudes to language, politics, psychology, and culture? How can it encapsulate all the agents and agencies of meaning involved in producing the gap between intention and expression? This course explores the concept of censorship through the lenses of politics, literature, psychology, and language. In all these fields, censorship marks the struggle for power over meaning itself, in which the locus of control is part of the question. Within all these fields, we will discuss a set of recurring questions about intention and expression, agency and power, politics and epistemology. Unlimitedly, we will consider whether censorship is a unified concept of political power, a loosely defined metaphor for artistic expression, or both. Readings will be drawn from literature, philosophy, theory, and psychoanalysis, including works by Heinrich von Kleist, Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Strauss, and Sigmund Freud, among others.