Sex. Sag einfach nein

Leo Bersani

Vortrag, Donnerstag 18. Juni 2015

Leo Bersani zeigt in seiner Lektüre von Freud, Foucault und D. H. Lawrence auf, wie sich Räume des Intimen denken lassen, die nicht im Zeichen von unterdrücktem oder ausgelebtem sexuellem Begehren stehen, sondern in ihrer Heterotopie Subjektivierungen entgrenzen.

Foucault’s problematizing of the nature and even the existence of sexuality and sex is itself problematic.  It should perhaps be seen as an important if somewhat late moment in the modern project of re-defining , or at the very least rearranging the terms of human intimacies.  In literature, there is, paradoxically, the anti-sexual polemic of D.H. Lawrence.  Even more surprisingly, far from affirming the primacy of sex in human relations, psychoanalysis could be thought of as both questioning traditional assumptions about sexuality and proposing (à la Foucault…) a new economy of bodily pleasures and of the relation between soma and psyche.

Leo Bersani is literary theorist and Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He also taught at Wellesley College and Rutgers University, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. Out of his numerous book publication Homos (1995) and Is the Rectum a Grave? and other Essays (2010) made him well known in the context of Queer Theory.

Wann: Donnerstag 18. Juni 2015, 19.30
Wo: ICI Berlin, Christinenstraße 18-19, Haus 8 (U-Senefelder Platz)

Die Einladung erfolgt in Kooperation mit dem Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenkolleg der Freien Universität Berlin.

Der Vortrag ist Teil der Reihe
Desire’s Multiplicity and Serendipity

desire_bunt_wd eine Kooperationsveranstaltung zwischen dem Institut für Queer Theory und dem ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry .

Desire, wandering about and forming assemblages, might be accompanied by serendipity or mate with jouissance or the power of the erotic, even as it fails to reach its presumed aim. Instead of running on a single track, we take desire to be functioning in a multiple manner. We call on desire’s serendipity to grasp its illogical, contingent modes as a figure of fortunate errans. The lecture series looks for queer reconceptualizations of desire, its cultural articulations and lived realities. The key question is how to get from the critique of desire as a hierarchizing and normalizing force to the heterotopias of desire. What would it mean to understand or experience desire as opening up to alterity, undermining its own involvement in structural inequalities and normative violence?

Logo_ici Logo_englisch2