Event details

Full title: Event | ‘We Have Never Had Sex’ – Seminar Series (Fall 2024/Spring 2025)

When (dates, time): September 2024 – May 2025, details below

Where (city, university, venue, room):  University of Amsterdam, details below

Open to (please indicate): ReMa students, PhD candidates and Academic Staff

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 We Have Never Had Sex seminar series 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).

Provisional Schedule

Fall 2024

Session 1, Capital Owes You Nothing. On Lacan, Pascal, and Pure Love

Masterclass by Dr. Dominiek Hoens, Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound

Date and time: September 18th, 15-18h

Location: Doelenzaal, Universiteitsbibliotheek

Readings: email catrinelradoi@gmail.com for readings

In this talk an analysis of Jacques Lacan’s game-theoretical reading of Pascal’s wager is presented, and the novelty of his approach to this well-known pensée highlighted. To situate the latter, the reception of Pascal’s work in fifties and sixties France is outlined, with particular attention to Lucien Goldmann’s Marxian reading of Pascal presented in The Hidden God (1955) and Eric Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s (1969). In both the book and the film, to choose and to act play a crucial role, but the latter remains closer to Pascal’s emphasis on a ‘renunciation of pleasure’ involved in preferring one option over the other. Lacan’s analysis helps us here to detail this renunciation – one loses ‘nothing’ yet one clings to it as if it were ‘something’ – and to understand that pleasure is not only something one has or experiences, but something one virtually is and which can be put at stake to provoke the Other’s desire (c.q. divine grace). In a second part, the Pascalian wager will be brought into a dialogue with another, contemporaneous theological discussion, known as the ‘doctrine of pure love’ developed by François Fénelon. The latter is considered as making the one additional step, Pascal recoils from taking, namely that divine grace is not only a matter of being saved by God, but an active affirming of the divine will even if it wills our own demise. This ‘logical’ moment, hidden in Pascal’s argument yet underlined by Fénelon, allows for an understanding of the present moment, that is how neoliberal subjectivity is characterized by a love for Capital, although it treats and positions the subject as superfluous waste.

Dominiek Hoens, PhD (Ghent  University), teaches philosophy at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound (RITCS, Brussels), where he also does research under the heading of “Capital owes you nothing”. Recent publications include an edited collection on Marguerite Duras  (www.lineofbeauty.org),  a chapter on Jacques Lacan in Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (2020), and several articles on Blaise Pascal.

Session 2, The State of Union: Sex and Recognition in Robert Glück and Obergefell    

Masterclass by Dr. Wendy Lotterman, University of Oslo

Date and time: November 1st, 12-15h    

Location: OMHP room C 1.17    

Readings: None    

This paper examines the determinate negation of the liberal individual as the de facto subject of queer life writing in the work of Robert Glück. About Ed, his erotic memoir once-removed, melancholically fuses its subjects and foregoes the convenience of individual sexuality that bolstered gay and lesbian discourse after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation explicitly disavows its capacity to recognize the group; social difference is forced to be expressed as identity, and collective struggle as personal injury. This discursive constraint was fortified – intentionally or incidentally – by the rise of queer memoir and autofiction in the late 20th century. Glück’s writing, which belongs to the New Narrative movement, dynamically refuses both the reproduction of a liberal subject, and the supersession of the subject tout court that obtained in late 20th century postmodern poetry and was part of his milieu. The indivisibly social subject of New Narrative is read against the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which reiterates the priority of individual liberty at the precise moment that the state expands its recognition of legally valid intimacy. Using Hegel’s definition of the marriage contract – “a contract that transcends the standpoint of contract” by negating the requisite autonomy of its parties – I read this not only as an assimilation of difference into a rights-based framework, but as a reaction against the threat posed by intimacy to liberalism’s inviolable subject.

Wendy Lotterman's first book of poetry, A Reaction to Someone Coming In, was published by Futurepoem in 2023. They are an associate editor of Parapraxis, a magazine of psychoanalysis and politics, as well as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo. Their postdoctoral research project, titled “Lyric Privacy: Possessive-Individualism in US Case Law and Contemporary Poetry,” investigates the genealogical parallel between lyric and liberal subjectivity, arguing that the post-Romantic lyric subject is built upon the same presupposition of individuation that underwrites the Western citizen-subject.

Session 3, On Feminine Sexuality

Date and time: November 22nd, 2024, 12-15h
Location: TBA

Reading Group for The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (Book XX).

Spring 2025

Session 4, Carceral Capital

Masterclass by Dr Jackie Wang, University of Southern California

Date and time: February 21st, 2025, 12-15h

Location: TBA

Jackie Wang is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), a book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the U.S. carceral state. Her forthcoming book manuscript, tentatively titled Vectors of Control, examines how, during the postwar period, calls to reform the U.S. criminal legal system catalyzed experimentation in the realm of criminal procedure and led to the development of new technologies of control. Rather than focusing exclusively on the role of the state in pursuing the policy path now known as ‘mass incarceration,’ her recent research looks at the role of reformers, nonprofits, the Cold War university, and financiers in shaping the development of the carceral state.

Session 5, …Or Worse

Date and time: March 21st, 2025, 12-15h

Location: TBA

Reading Group for The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: …or Worse (Book XX).

Session 6, to be announced

April-May 2025

Conditions for obtaining ECTS

• Students will be able to obtain 1 EC from NICA for doing the preparatory reading and actively participating in two of the six seminars. As an additional requirement, students must write a 100-word question based on the readings for the seminar for two of the six sessions (pass/fail)
• Students will be able to obtain 2 EC from NICA for doing the preparatory reading and actively participating in four of the six seminars. As an additional requirement, students must write a 100-word question based on the readings for the seminar for two of the six sessions (pass/fail)
• Students will be able to obtain 6 EC from NICA for attendance and submission of six 100-word questions pertaining to each seminar’s readings. Additionally, in order to obtain 6 EC, students must produce a 1500-word research paper that engages with the themes and readings of the seminars. The final paper deadline is May 31, 2025, and the paper should be emailed to Dr. Marija Cetinic (m.cetinic@uva.nl). (graded, 40% research questions/60% final paper)