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Graduate Courses

CINE 796 - THE AESTHETIC AND ETHICAL FORCE OF GESTURE

ARTH 796 | ENGL 778
401 | SEM | Leo Bersani | R 5-8pm | FBH 25

The language of gestures. How do gestures mean? Ways in which gestural meanings differ from verbal meanings. Gestures as vehicles of lines of force. Distinction between the human subject as a personality and as an emitter of lines of force. Personality and lines of force as different registers of being. Ontological pathology of incomplete lines of force. Significance of this for psychoanalytic therapy and the representation of the human in literary fiction and in the visual arts. Among works studied: Deleuze, G.H. Mead, Bergson; Caravaggio, Robert Gober; Lawrence, "Women in Love", James, "The Awkward Age"; Kimberly Peirce, "Boys Don't Cry", Lars von Trier, "Meloncholia", Bruno Dumont, "Humanity"; Freud, Lacan film clip, C. Bollas.