Spring 2023
Session 1, Master, slave and the negative power of the unconscious
Introductory session with Charlotte Szász, Thursday March 9, 14-17h
This seminar will ask whether we can read Hegel’s master slave dialectic as a battle between the unconscious and conscious. Taking at its starting point Hegel’s claim that “the individual’s unconscious spirit has its existence in women”, we will discuss feminist readings of Hegel, mapping the unconscious/ conscious sexualization on the master slave dialectic, and drawing on Lacan’s reading of this passage. We will consider the debate on the difference between recognition and cognition in Hegel’s sexual difference in the phenomenology.
Charlotte Szász is a philosopher. She teaches at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg on psychoanalysis, history of philosophy and feminist philosophy and is part of the Research Group "Cultures of Critique“. Her PhD, titled “Eternal Irony – Femininity and Knowledge“ is on the question of sexuality in Hegel’s self-consciousness.
Session 2, On Topological Regimes
Public lecture and masterclass by Nora Fulton (she/her), May 15 2023, 13-16h
This talk will focus on how the mathematical concept of topology or spatial deformation has migrated into its current and widespread application to sexual difference and its capacity for change, principally in psychoanalytic theory, historical queer separatisms, and discourses of the sexed body.
Nora Fulton is an author and scholar based in Montreal, Canada, where she is a PhD candidate in English at Concordia University and a co-ordinator at the Centre for Expanded Poetics. Her research focuses on fundamental ontology, gender studies and trans theory, as well as traditions of modernist and avant-garde feminist poetry. She is the author of three books of poetry—Life Experience Coolant, Presence Detection System, and Thee Display (Documents & Anteism, 2021)—and her writing has been published in Trilobite, Social Text, Homintern, Some Magazine, The Tiny, and elsewhere. Her critical and theoretical work has been published in Radical Philosophy, Music and Literature, Diacritics, and Paideuma.
Session 3, Disorganization and Sex
Public Lecture and masterclass by Jaimeson Webster (she/her), Thursday May 25, 2023
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author, most recently, of Disorganization & Sex and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis; she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine. She teaches at the New School for Social Research.
Session 4, Gender as Disalienated Pleasure
Public lecture and masterclass by Kay Gabriel (she/her), Thursday June 8, 2023
Kay Gabriel is the author of A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat, 2022) and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Nightboat, 2023). With Andrea Abi-Karam she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese. She runs publications at The Poetry Project, teaches at NYU-Gallatin and lives in Queens, NY.