Dagmar Herzog

Talk, Wednesday 15 March, 2015, 7.30pm ICI Berlin

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

Dagmar Herzogis Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published widely in the history of religion in Europe and the U.S., on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and on the histories of gender and sexuality. She recently completed Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge UP, 2011), and is currently at work on a new project on the European and American histories of psychoanalysis, trauma, and desire. She is also the author of Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (Basic, 2008), Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton UP, 2005), and Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton UP, 1996; Transaction, 2007). She is the editor and coeditor of six anthologies, including, most recently, Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Northwestern UP, 2007).

When: Wednesday 15 March 2015, 7.30pm
Where: ICI Berlin, Christinenstraße 18/19, H 8 (U2 Senefelder Platz)

The talk isorganized in cooperation with and sponsored by the Research Center Archive for Sex Research, Humboldt University Berlin

and part of the lecture series
Desire’s Multiplicity and Serendipity

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?