Why People Love The Breakfast Club

This event has ended.

A research seminar with guest-speaker, Professor Todd McGowan (University of Vermont) as part of the Capitalism, Crisis and Ideology research theme at the School.

Abstract:

Immanuel Kant’s great insight in the Critique of Practical Reason was that the source of our freedom lies in giving ourselves laws, not in the absence of restrictions. Law has the ability to free us from the constraints of nature as well as from the constraints of social demands. This is illustrated in a near-perfect fashion in the classic teen film The Breakfast Club, where the imposition of the law frees students from the rigid social demands that they struggle against. 

Biography: Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (2017), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013), and other works.

This event will be delivered through the medium of English. If you wish to ask any questions in the medium of Welsh during the QandA session, a request for simultaneous translation should be made to mlang-events@cardiff.ac.uk by 2 May.