2023
Alenka Zupančič
"Desire"
March 23rd 2023 at 5:00 PM
Location: 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. Subjectivity is not the same as individuality, and desire in particular tends to break down the usual moorings and supports of identity. The relationship between desire and fantasy also deserves closer consideration. The talk will focus on the disruptive, destabilizing, and even destructive nature of desire, without viewing these traits as simply and inherently “bad” or as something best avoided and suppressed.
2022
Lee Edelman
"Queerness, Figurality, and Progressive Fantasies of Collective Being"
March 17, 5 PM
Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry and has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. He is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and Sex, or the Unbearable (2014, co-authored with Lauren Berlant). His new book, Bad Education, or Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing is forthcoming from Duke University Press.