
‘We Have Never Had Sex’ – Seminar Series (2024)
Dates: 16 January 2024, 15 February 2024, 5 March 2024 (more TBA)
Time: details below
Location: University of Amsterdam
Organizers: SEX NEGATIVITY Research Group (Dr. Marija Cetinić, Tessel Veneboer, Persis Bekkering, Stefa Govaart)
Seminar assistants: Catrinel Radoi, catrinelradoi@gmail.com, Imogen Grigorovich, m.grigorovich@students.uu.nl
For registration and readings: catrinelradoi@gmail.com
Credits: 1, 2 or 6 ECTS
Organized by members of the ASCA Research Group Sex Negativity
Collective debates on sex among feminists in the late 1960s and 1970s elicited two polarizing views: sex positivists and those deemed “anti-sex”. This dyad unleashed a prolific energy of discussion, argument, and analysis––driven as it was by the hope that either bookend would one day complete the daunting task of articulating the essence of “woman” in its unabating subordination to “man”, that is, of pinpointing the essence of woman on the terms of sexual difference.Yet, as Andrea Long Chu remarks à propos this history, “the stronger feminist theories of sex got, the less effective they became” (“The Impossibility of Feminism,” 63). Ushering in a third wave of feminist thinking, the focus of critical inquiry shifted with the emergence of queer theory in the North-American academic context in the 80s and early 90s. Rather than foregrounding sexual difference as the very grounds from which sprang a well-reasoned landscape of social identities, “queer” halted that considerable faith in identitarian intelligiblity. Historically analyzing the usage of the word by field-defining figures such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and David M. Halperin, theorist and linguist Mel Y. Chen concludes that “[queer theory] departs from dominant feminisms in the United States…in its refusal…to advocate or politically favor any particular category other than the (sexually) nonnormative” (Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 69). However, if sedimentation best describes the social temporality in which bodies materialize, antinormativity is itself regulated and constrained by that which it denounces. In line with Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson’s “invitation to think queer theory without assuming a position of antinormativity from the outset” (in the introduction to the special issue of differences, Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions) we ask, How to approach normativity on something other than dyadic terms? We Have Never Had Sex is an attempt to think a more contradictory site than the norm/anti-norm topology still present in queer theory today.Asserting that sex is (the) non-relation, Jacques Lacan’s “There is no sexual relation” is an essential precursor. Importantly, Lacan’s statement in the negative never aimed to ontologize this constitutive non-relation that sex is into intelligible (non)relationships. However, this didn’t prevent it from being canalized in precisely that way: from “relationships are impossible” to “true love doesn’t exist”. Such truisms vis-à-vis relationality misconstrue sex’s confrontation with (the) non-relation as “the cause of the oddities and difficulties within all concrete relationships” (Zupančič, What is Sex?, 23). To falsely decode the non-relation as an obstacle is to think it can be overcome. But for Lacan it wasn’t an obstacle to but the (il)logical condition of relational possibility. So sex names a structural antagonism without the optimism of ontological completeness: “We have never had sex,” declares philosopher Oxana Timofeeva.Prone to installing a logic that exploits difference for the sake of unimaginative sameness, negativity cannot be rendered politically coherent. Negativity is relentless, unnatural, contrived. However, the seminar We Have Never Had Sex does not seek to reduce sex to––nor celebrate sex as––negativity as if it were a bad thing, or, “antisocial”. Sex will have meant work, work in and on the social to which we stay committed and with which we enjoy, too. Heeding the circumlocutionary mode that speaking of sex demands, this seminar series will think sex in its ontological relevance (Lacan, Butler, Zupančič); its relation to negativity and nonsovereignty (Berlant & Edelman 2014, Bersani 2018, Chu 2019); the relatedness of transness and Blackness (Bey 2017); its figuration in cultural objects (Troyan 2014, 2020; Elagoz 2021). An experiment in forms of speculation, the seminar gathers poets, philosophers, artists, performers, and scholars to grapple with questions of foundation, logic and limit, asking how sex is a site of or an encounter with negativity that troubles totality, a “relentless force that unsettles the fantasy of sovereignty” (Berlant & Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, viii).
Schedule (Spring 2024)
Session 1, Without/Beyond: Sexuality, Consent, Gender, Identity
Gender Without Identity offers a counterintuitive approach to think about gender as not rooted in a core gender identity but as a part of psychic life that is already infiltrated by trauma, by the other, and by culture.
Public lecture and masterclass with Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou
Date and time: Tuesday January 16, 18-20h
Location: OMHP room C 0.17
Readings: Introduction and Chapter 1, Sexuality Beyond Consent; Introduction and (additional reading) Chapter 1, Gender Without Identity
Dr Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. They are the author/co-author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; Love and Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; You Can Tell Just By Looking; 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People; and Gender Without Identity. She and Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou are the receipients of the first Tiresias Paper Award, from IPA’s sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee for their co-written essay “A Feminine Boy: Normative investments and Reparative fantasy at the Intersections of Gender, Race, and Religion.”
Dr Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC and a member of the faculty of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her published work has received numerous prizes, including the annual JAPA Essay Prize and the Ralph Roughton Award. She is the 2022 recipient of the Scholarship Award from the division of psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association (Div. 39) and, with Ann Pellegrini, the recipient of the first Tiresias Essay Prize, from the International Psychoanalytic Associations’ committee on sexual and gender diversity. Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is part of the permanent collection of the Freud Museum in Vienna and in 2021 she co-chaired the first US-based conference dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche. Her book, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, is forthcoming in February 2023 from the Sexual Cultures series, NYU Press.
Session 2, Social Hell and the Resistance of Discourse
Public lecture and seminar with Nadia Bou Ali
Date and time: Thursday February 15, 15-18h
Location: Doelenzaal, Universiteitsbibliotheek
This talk analyses Marx’s political theory via both Dante and Lacan. In it I draw on William Claire Robert’s Marx’s Inferno with a focus on the social hell of original accumulation and place it in relation to Lacan’s theory of discourse. Lacan’s theory of discourse is based on the original sin of identifying with the narcissism of God, doubled in the subject of the unconscious. The talk develops a theory of social hell in relation to the impotence of discourse and asks: is original narcissism, that is located in the imaginary, and canalized by capital the cause of the repetition of aggressivity and violence? I will argue that when discourse disavows its inherent impossibilities and resists the negative it unleashes an exterminatory death drive. Psychoanalysis promises only a weak retort to this problem: the subjectification of death in analysis cannot overcome the resistance of discourse, whose impotence stifles. Marx offers a strong critique to this problem by refusing to give discourse the remit of mediation, discourse does not mediate, social forms do. How do we burn the effigies of social forms in our social hell? The cost is high, but increasingly inescapable.
Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and Director of the Civilization Studies Program at the American University of Beirut. Her research is focused on modern Arab thought and literature, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). She has co-edited Lacan contra Foucault: subjectivity, sex, and politics (Bloomsbury, 2019 ) and more recently Extimacy (forthcoming with Northwestern University Press).
Convened by the research group Sex Negativity as part of the We Have Never Had Sex seminar series. Supported by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).
Session 3, ON AB-SENS
Date and time: TBA
Reading group on Lee Edelman’s “Nothing Ventured: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Afropessimism” in Bad Education and Hortense J. Spillers “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
Session 4, On Anteaesthetics
Public Lecture and seminar by Rizvana Bradley
Tuesday March 5, 11-15h
Location:TBA
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the 2023–24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), moves across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—in order to inaugurate a new method for interpretation, an ante-formalism, which demonstrates black art’s recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity
Format
Each public lecture is linked to a seminar (masterclass) for RMA students, PhD-candidates and staff.rMA and PhD students are eligible to take this workshop for credit. BA and MA students are welcome to attend workshops (not for credit).Tasks and Assessment
1 or 2 ECTS
- Students can earn 1 EC from NICA for preparatory reading for, and participation in, two of the seminars. Based on the readings for the seminar/lecture, students write a brief 100-word discussion question for two of the four sessions (pass/fail).
- Students can earn 2 EC from NICA for preparatory reading for, and participation in, four seminars. Based on the readings for each seminar/lecture, students write a brief 100-word discussion question for two of the four sessions (pass/fail).
6 ECTS
- 6 EC for attendance across four sessions with 4 discussion questions (100-words each) and a final research paper (see below for more detail)
(1) reading compulsory texts pertaining to the topic at hand;(2) writing a 100-word discussion question for four meetings about the material read (4×10% = 40% of final grade)(3) attending the sessions and engaging in discussion by posing your prepared discussion question;(4) writing a Final Paper on a chosen topic (60% of final grade) for 6 EC. The final paper should engage the themes and readings of the seminar. The required length is 1500 words and the deadline is May 31, 2024. Email the final paper to Dr. Marija Cetinic (m.cetinic@uva.nl).