SEMINAR

NOVEMBER 11, 2024 4.30PM / 3487 PEEL ST.

Focusing on three famous Freudian psychoanalytical cases, in which little boys had some mental issues with animals – Little Hans, The Rat Man, and the Wolf Man – Oxana Timofeeva's new book, Freud's Beasty Boys, revises the role played by animals in male gender socialization. Bringing Freudian psychoanalysis into a dialogue with philosophy, Timofeeva argues for its relevance to those who want to understand how patriarchy works, but also points at its limitations. Freud claims that unconscious sexual fantasies are the origins of a number of psychic disorders, such as hysteria, obsessions, and phobias. But what are the origins of sexual fantasies?

WORKSHOP AND LECTURE

APRIL 3-4, 2024 4.30PM / 3487 PEEL ST.

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?

ANNUAL LECTURE

MARCH 23, 2023 5PM / 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.

ANNUAL LECTURE

MARCH 17, 2022 5PM / ZOOM

This figural irrationality of zero points to something in signification that escapes the closure of identity and the determination of being. We can interpret its unthinkability as the “queerness,” the self-negation of being, whose structuring presence in every order gets reduced to the status of nothing. As what a given order excludes from the frame of intelligibility, as whatever threatens the order of being that such a frame constructs, queerness, too, names a jouissance incapable of positivization; it similarly refers to something radically “unthinkable” about the subject: its inextricability from the “Non-Being” that “makes Being itself languish.”