2025听
Professor David Marriott
"from this impossibility anything follows"
March 13th 2025 at 4.30 PM
Location: Arts W-215
This talk is concerned with redefining the relation between race, truth, and sexuality. Raced sexuation must not be defined as something missing from reality (as Lacan and others would have it) but its real fantasy, of which sexuation is merely the 鈥�contrecoup鈥�. Fanon develops his reformulation of the relation between blackness, truth, and sexuality when for the first time he identifies sexuation as a n鈥檈st pas (or is not). The exclusion of that insight (from a range of texts) often coincides with a vicious exclusion of blackness the nature of which often goes unremarked. It is in fact a fantasy upon which critical thought discovers its own imaginary of sex as a separate sphere. Examples of such exclusion will be discussed as I outline how Fanon develops his philosophy.
2023
Alenka Zupan膷i膷
"Desire"
March 23rd 2023 at 5:00 PM
Location: Arts W-215
Over the last decade or two, the question of desire seems to have all but disappeared from theoretical approaches to sexuality and its vicissitudes, in favor of a focus on enjoyment and drive, or on deconstructing the power of the norms that guide our thinking about sexuality. Although desire cannot simply be divorced from these concerns, it has its own autonomous conceptual core. It is linked to the violent emergence of subjectivity and raises questions that go beyond and are more fundamental than those of individuality and its forms of enjoyment or identity. Subjectivity is not the same as individuality, and desire in particular tends to break down the usual moorings and supports of identity. The relationship between desire and fantasy also deserves closer consideration. The talk will focus on the disruptive, destabilizing, and even destructive nature of desire, without viewing these traits as simply and inherently 鈥渂ad鈥� or as something best avoided and suppressed.
听
2022
Lee Edelman
"Queerness, Figurality, and Progressive Fantasies of Collective Being"
March 17, 5 PM
Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry and has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. He is the author of听Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire听(1987),听Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory听(1994),听No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive听(2004), and听Sex, or the Unbearable听(2014, co-authored with Lauren Berlant). His new book,听Bad Education, or Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing听is forthcoming from Duke University Press.