Miami Symposium > Joan Copjec

FLASH!!! The Miami Symposium guest speakers May 31st 2013 Joan Copjec's conference: “The promiscuity of Sex” "The end goal of the feminist revolution is not just the elimination of male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself." Shulamith Firestone's famous pronouncement seemed finally within reach by the 1980s when feminists began to replace the very category of sexual difference with that of gender. Sharply critiquing the faulty premises underlying this disastrous shift, this paper argues that sexual difference is a fundamental category of psychoanalysis and cannot be surrendered. Reading The History of Sexuality: vol. 1 alongside Freud's History of the Psychoanalytic Movement and Lacan's Encore seminar the paper shows just how cannily Freud and Lacan anticipated and answered Foucault's challenges to the psychoanalytic notions of sex, sexuality, and sexual difference. The argument begins by defending Freud against the old charge of "pansexualism."

Dr. Joan Copjec Member of the Editorial board of C/C Dr. Copjec is Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo and founder and editor of its psychoanalytic journal, Umbr(a). She is also a Distinguished professor in English, Comparative Literature, and Media Study. Author of several books, including Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists and Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (both from MIT Press), she is currently finishing a book on Iranian cinema, Islamic philosophy, and psychoanalysis with the working title, "Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran." She organized the first large-scale conference on Lacan in 1987 for the journal October. English language editor of: Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, the French television interview with Lacan. Several Lacanian documents were published as a result of the conference and the TV interview released in the U.S.. Reserve your seat at http://www.miamisymposium2013.org/