Undergraduate Module Descriptor

POL2112: Politics and Its Discontents

This module descriptor refers to the 2019/0 academic year.

Module Content

Syllabus Plan

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

Key elements of Nietzsche’s thinking: the death of god, perspectivism and genealogy, the transvaluation of all values.
A close reading of The Genealogy of Morality.
Key elements of Freuds thinking: the unconscious (via dreams and parapraxes), the metapsychology of repression, and the struggle between the pleasure principle of the unconscious and the reality principle of the conscious.
A close reading of Civilisation and its Discontents.
A reading of The Mass Psychology of Facism, and a concluding comparison of the theories of Nietzsche and Freud.

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	Guided independent study	Placement / study abroad
22	128	0

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Category	Hours of study time	Description
Scheduled Learning & Teaching Activity	22	11 x 2-hour seminars
Guided Independent Study	50	Private study reading and preparing for seminars
Guided Independent Study	78	Preparation for textual analysis assignments and essay including researching and collating relevant sources; planning the structure and argument; writing up the essay

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Primary Texts

Freud, S. Civilisation and Its Discontents, translated by D. McLintock (London: Penguin, 2002)

Freud, S. Mass Psychology and Other Writings, translated by J.A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2004)

Nietzsche, F. The Geanealogy of Morality, edited by K. Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Secondary Texts

Adorno, T. “Sociology and Psychology I & II”, New Left Review, 46 & 47 (1967-68)

Ansell-Pearson, K. An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Le Bon, G. The Crowd (out of copywrite – available in multiple cheap editions)

Butler, J. Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990)

Connolly, W.E. Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)

Deleuze, G. Nietzsche, translated by H. Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983)

Frosh, S. The Politics of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999)

Gipps, R.G.T. and Lacewing, M. The Oxford Hanbook of Philosophy & Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)

Marcuse, H. Eros and Civilisation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987)

Owen, D. Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault (London: Routledge, 1994)

Reich, W. Mass Psychology of Fascism, translated by V.R. Carfagno (Souvenir Press, 1997)

Stavrakakis, Y. (ed) Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (London: Routledge, 2020)

Wolfenstein, E.V.“Psychoanalysis in Political Theory”, Political Theory 24 (1996)