Lecture series 2014/2015 at the ICI Berlin

presenting talks by Shaka McGlotten, David Halperin, Dagmar Herzog, Jelisaveta Blagojević, Serena Dankwa, Jafari S. Allen, Leo Bersani und Teresa de Lauretis.

“Desire’s Multiplicity and Serendipity” is a collaboration between the Institute for Queer Theory and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin and supported by a range of other institutions.

Shaka McGlotten, Wed 15 October 2014: Political Aesthetic of Drag

David Halperin, Wed 5 November 2014: What is Sex For?

Antke Engel, Jule Jakob Govrin, Christoph Holzhey, Wed 4 February 2015:
desire Conserves desire Transgresses desire. Roundtable on the Paradoxical Politics of Desire

Dagmar Herzog, Wed 11 March 2015:
Perversion and Love in Postwar Psychoanalysis,
or: Why we should Reread Robert Stoller

Jelisaveta Blagojević, Tue 28 April 2015:
Politics of unthinkable desire: on love, jealousy and telephone

Serena Dankwa and Jafari S. Allen, Thu 28 May 2015:
Desire, Friendship, and Intimacy in the Black Atlantic. Individual talks, shared conversation.

Leo Bersani, Thu 18 June 2015: Why Sex?

Teresa de Lauretis, Thu 2 July 2015:
The Sexual and the Queerness of the Drive

Desire’s Multiplicity and Serendipity

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 as functioning in multiple registers. We call on desire’s serendipity to grasp its illogical, contingent modes as a figure of fortunate errans. The lecture series “Desire’s Multiplicity and Serendipity” looks for queer reconceptualizations of desire, its cultural articulations and lived realities. The key question is how to move from a critique of desire as a hierarchizing and normalizing force to the heterotopias of desire. What would it mean to understand or experience desire as an opening up to alterity, undermining its own involvement in structural inequalities and normative violence?

> Desire’s Multiplicity_Serendipity (pdf)
Antke Engel, Jule Jakob Govrin, Christoph Holzhey