→ 2015

The Sexual and the Queerness of the Drive

Teresa de Lauretis
lecture, Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin, 2. July 2015
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 8
Laplanche proposes that the sexual drive is not innate or endogenous but is constituted as an effect of seduction, repression, and translation. In the context of Laplanche’s theory of the sexual, the lecture examines the difference between drive and desire, the function of the concepts of castration and the Oedipus complex, the relations of sexuality and gender, and the nature of sublimation.

Continue reading →

Sex. Just say no

Leo Bersani
lecture, Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin, 18. June 2015
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 7
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.

Continue reading →

Challenging the Neocolonial
Queer and Diasporic Forms of Un_learning

workshop series
various locations in Berlin
The series of workshops and public events seeks to challenge the colonial matrix of power and its legacies in different manifestations of intimacy in our everyday interactions. How do colonial, imperial, and racialized histories enter into, shape, and influence various forms of intimate relationships (queer, sexual, political, platonic, domestic)? And how can we contest and rework these histories through practices of un_learning? What does “un_learning” mean? What does the queer gap do to Spivak’s call to “unlearn one’s privileges”? How can we find new ways of facing the tensions and fractions within queer, feminist, queer of colour, anti-racist movements?

Continue reading →

Politics of Unthinkable Desire:
On Love, Jealousy, and the Telephone

Jelisaveta Blagojević
Tue 28 April 2015, ICI Berlin
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 5

In this talk, Blagojević used the notions of love and jealousy to point out how the Western, self-possessive, self-reflexive, and self-affective subject has constructed itself. The talk also dealt with Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of singular being to propose a sexually differentiated yet non-oppositional concept of “woman” – which might still serve as another name for the multiplicity of sexes that corresponds to the multiplicity of desires.

Continue reading →

Perversion and Love in Postwar Psychoanalysis, or:
Why We Should Reread Robert Stoller

Dagmar Herzog
Wednesday, March 11, 2015, ICI Berlin
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 4

This talk considered the peculiarities of psychoanalysts’ responses to the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s. Topics covered included the highly ideological (mis)uses of the ideal and dream of love in marginalizing non-traditional sexualities as well as the strategies ultimately used by anti-homophobic psychoanalysts to challenge the dominant norms, with particular attention to the late Robert Stoller’s innovative ideas about sexual excitement.

Continue reading →

desire Conserves desire Transgresses desire:
Round Table on the Paradoxical Politics of Desire

A. Engel, J.J. Govrin, C. Holzhey
Wed February 04, 2015, ICI Berlin
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 3

Starting their conversation with different understandings of serendipity and of the politics of desire in psychic, social, and structural registers, the organizers of the lecture series wish to engage in a discussion with the public: What are the potentials of happenstance and erring when trying to leave the dis/comfort zone of identity and normative forms of intimacy and sexuality?

Continue reading →