Lecture
It’s Fantastic here! A Lacanian Approach to Tourism
By Ruud Welten
Wageningen Geography Lectures 2016 - 2017
For centuries people have travelled around the world. Today, travel drift is greater than ever. It is not hard to see that travel has something to do with desire. In this lecture, tourism is approached in a psychoanalytical way: what is the structure of this desire, obsession even, that makes us travel around the world? Is tourism the name of a collective obsessional neurosis? An introduction into the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) applied to tourism.
Prof. dr. Ruud Welten is Lector Ethics & Global Citizenship at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Associate professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University, and a Thomas More professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. With a background in philosophical phenomenology, he has written extensively about tourism and hospitality broadly conceived, extending to issues of cosmopolitanism, refugees, violence, religion, and business ethics. In Dutch, he published the book ‘Het Ware Leven is Elders – Filosofie van het Toerisme’ (True Life is Elsewhere – Philosophy of Tourism). For an overview of his publications and work, see: https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/webwijs/show/r.b.j.m.welten-2.htm