Events

Past Event

POSTPONED Columbia University Shakespeare Seminar: Steven Swarbrick (Baruch College, CUNY) "Epicures in Kissing: Asexuality, Psychoanalysis, and Venus and Adonis."

November 12, 2021
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
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Zoom

Note from the Organizers: As many of you are already aware, the Student Workers of Columbia University (SWCU) has gone on strike as of November 3. In order to respect the picket line, the Shakespeare Seminar is postponing its November 12 meeting. After discussing the matter with our speaker, Steven Swarbrick, we have rescheduled the meeting for January 28, 2022, from 7-8:30 pm on Zoom, and we look forward to seeing you then for Professor Swarbrick’s talk, "Epicures in Kissing: Asexuality, Psychoanalysis, and Venus and Adonis." 

Postponed

Freud’s readings of Shakespeare are notorious for their universalizing claims about human sexuality. What is less commonly noticed, and what my essay seeks to foreground, is the asexuality that underwrites psychoanalytic theories of sex. From Leo Bersani’s claim, “There is a big truth about sex: most people don’t like it,” to Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s coauthored book, Sex, or the Unbearable, psychoanalysis affirms Julie Sondra Decker’s account of sexuality in The Invisible Orientation, where Decker describes sex as “at best tolerable, at worst uncomfortable.” Following Decker, the field of asexuality studies urges scholars to question the monopoly that sex has on our existing tools of research and to recognize sexuality as a compulsory system shaping bodies, pleasures, and cultural hermeneutics. Focusing on Venus and Adonis, I show that Shakespeare’s poem is replete with asexual encounters, including objectless kisses and an unromantic partner who, at the end of the poem, reproduces himself asexually as a plant. In other words, it is not Adonis alone who spurns sexual romance; Venus’ insatiable kissing is a textbook example of Freud’s point about the paradoxical asexuality of sex: when it comes to the pleasures of kissing, Freud says, “‘It’s a pity I can’t kiss myself.’” This essay invites us to read asexuality not as a particular orientation. Instead, it asks how asexuality, psychoanalysis, and Shakespeare disorient our readings of sex.

This event will be held online via Zoom. You can access the meeting using this link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/92415392848. The full Zoom invitation is copied below.

The meeting will be held from 7-8:30pm EST, with announcements from 7-7:15pm, the talk 7:15-8:00pm and Q&A from 8-8:30pm. We will also host a casual social/cocktail half hour after the meeting. Since there won't be a dinner and we have no space constraints, an RSVP is not required

Details

This event will be held online via Zoom.