ANNUAL LECTURE AND SEMINAR

MARCH 13, 2025 4.30PM / ARTS W-215 AND MARCH 14, 2025 11.00AM / 3487 PEEL ST.

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 ‘contrecoup’. Fanon develops his reformulation of the relation between blackness, truth, and sexuality when for the first time he identifies sexuation as a n’est 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.

A separate seminar will be held on March 14 to discuss Professor Marriott’s forthcoming essay, “On Solicitude.”

*Lecture is open to public. For the seminar, register here.

LECTURE AND WORKSHOP

JANUARY 16, 2025 4.30PM / ARTS W-215 AND JANUARY 17, 2025 11.00AM / 3487 PEEL ST.

"First Cow at the End of the World” is derived from Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s new book, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction(Northwestern University Press, 2024), whose titular concept designates that which is both of and against life, that which filibusters the conversion, in the terms laid out by Donna Haraway, of staying with the trouble into making kin. The talk zooms in on Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019) and other examples of anti-pastoral cinema that attribute ecocriticism’s desire for harmonious co-habitation and historical redress to an absent cause. First Cow subtracts the ground of ecocriticism’s reality-testing, or its recognition of the difference between the external and internal worlds. In so doing, the film invites spectators to mistrust its title’s promise of origin stories and progress myths, and to think ecology from negativity.

*Lecture is open to public. For the workshop, register here.

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?

ANNUAL LECTURE AND SEMINAR

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.”