Guest Speaker: “‘Sexuality’: The End of (a) Narrative”, Anne Berger (Paris VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis)
Kaplan Hall 348Abstract: Freud famously stated that literature was the royal road to psychoanalysis. Following course, Lacan noted, in “The Signification of the Phallus”, that if one wanted to understand human sexuality and desire, better read Sophocle’s Oedipus, or Longus’s Daphnis and Chloë, than rely on biological inquiry and data . Even Foucault described his project to devise a “history of sexuality” as a manner of “transcribing” Diderot’s fable, Les Bijoux Indiscrets, in the language of historical inquiry. In other words, fictional narration, for which dreams and phantasy could be said to provide a template, might be the best way to approach...