The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Lacan

PSYCHOANALYTIC PRACTICES

SPEAKERS: Charles Shepherdson, SUNY Albany

Charles Shepherdson is Professor of English at SUNY Albany, where he is also Director of the Liberal Studies Program and Co-Director of the Humanities Center. Trained in poetry and philosophy at Grinnell and Vanderbilt, with a background in Latin and Greek, he works in literary and intellectual history, contemporary European philosophy, the history of aesthetics, and psychoanalytic theory.  He is the author of Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (Routledge), Lacan and the Limits of Language (Fordham), and Lacan and Philosophy (forthcoming).

He is currently working on a book on Sophocles' Antigone, and another project called Aesthetics and Emotion: A Genealogy, which explores the distinctive character of emotion and affect in aesthetic experience, as it differs from other social, medical, legal, and philosophical formations of emotion. The project focuses on three historical moments and three configurations of emotion: (1) pity and fear in Greek tragedy as a literary form that emerges in the context of Athenian democracy; (2) fear and the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgment at the dawn of Romanticism, and the emergence of modern aesthetics as a domain distinct from moral feeling; and (3) fear and anxiety as a new formation in aesthetics (such as the uncanny) against the background of Freud and Heidegger.

His work has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry A. Luce Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and others. He held the inaugural Aristotelian Chair in the Liberal Arts at Saint Thomas Aquinas in New York, and he served a five-year appointment as a Senior Specialist with Fulbright, including work as a National Science Council Professor in Taiwan. He was recently a visiting scholar at Brown University, and he was also a Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.