LECTURE AND WORKSHOP
John Paul Ricco
2024 / APR 03 / WED 16.30 / REGISTRATION REQUIRED
“Sex and Exclusion” (Workshop)
In this paper, I consider recent work by photographer Dean Sameshima, specifically two series of images produced in Berlin taken during the pandemic, one of nearly empty sex club interiors, titled being alone, and the other, of boxes of extraneous items left for the taking on city sidewalks, titled, zu verschenken (to take away). In doing so I raise questions about time and temporality; hospitality; profanation; solitude; anonymity; drawing upon work by Maurice Blanchot and Adam Philips while doing so. At this political-historical juncture, it is imperative that we think further and in decidedly queer ways, about the ethics of exclusion, beyond the prevailing desires for and platitudes about inclusion.
2024 / APR 04 / THURS 17.00 / ARTS W-215 McGILL
“To Become Extinct in the Very Practice of One’s Thinking” (Lecture)
in c/o with the AHCS Graduate Symposium, “Reorienting the Sublime”
Could it be that a radical re-structuring of our relation to the world, a re-structuring that would prioritize the ethical and the aesthetic, is not only necessary, but would be the very means by which the human as an event in the world (Bersani) stands the chance of surviving? And further, what if such an ethical-aesthetic rapport was a matter of the drives, as these forces have been conceptualized by psychoanalysis? What exactly is the relation between the psychological and the ecological if there is any? And how would such a relation bear upon the question and nature of thinking—including the relation between thought and extinction? Is consciousness and thinking ecological (Abram), as much as it is mental and physiological? In my paper I trace the relations between soma, psyche, and the eco-geological, situating the drives at their frontiers as forces connecting and separating them from each other—a rhythmic oscillation (or tension) that we might sense and then call a world.
John Paul Ricco is Professor of Comparative Literature and Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (2014) and The Logic of the Lure (2003).
2023 / MAR 23 / THU 17.00 / ARTS W-215 McGILL
ANNUAL LECTURE
Alenka Zupančič
“Desire”
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 “bad” or as something best avoided and suppressed.
*Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Communication Studies.
Alenka Zupančič is is Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her books include Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax (2023), What IS Sex? (2017), Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (2012), and The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008).
ANNUAL LECTURE
2022 / MAR 17 / THU 17.00 / ZOOM
Lee Edelman
“Queerness, Figurality, and Progressive Fantasies of Collective Being”
*Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Communication Studies.
Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. His works include Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (2022), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994).