Acts of Poetry, Acts of Interpretation: Genet and Lacan
Cultural Studies Graduate Program Salon Seminar featuring James Penney
Event Details
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Thursday, January 19, 2023
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Traill College
Building: Bagnani Hall
This salon seminar will have two aims: first, to introduce my about-to-be published book Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion; and second, to frame the challenge of introduction writing, which I’ve always found difficult, in a way that may prove helpful to a broader audience of graduate students and academics in the humanities. The book stages a somewhat high-concept dialogue between the French writer Jean Genet and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on the philosophical theme of ontology, or the metaphysical inquiry into being.
I argue that Genet’s literary discourse on the poetic image and Lacan’s theory of the act of interpretation in psychoanalysis rely on a similar conviction concerning an inherent negativity in both knowledge and being: an epistemo-ontological torsion, discontinuity, or incompletion. Further, I consider the challenge of introducing the book’s complex theoretical argument (which considers both the long and complicated history of “poetry” as well as the references to logic discourse in Lacan’s theory of the act) while at the same time addressing the difficulty posed by writing about Genet, a major canonical figure of 20th century world literature with a huge and generation-spanning bibliography of criticism that includes monumental works by, among countless others, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. Next, I try to position my book’s argument against the recent proliferation of ontological inquiry in so-called continental philosophy in currents such as object-oriented ontology (OOO) and speculative realism. Finally, addressing contemporary controversies linked to race, sexuality and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I reflect on the extraordinary continued relevance of Genet’s work today.
James Penney teaches in the Cultural Studies and French and Francophone Studies departments at Trent University. His previous books are After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics (2014), The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference (2012), and The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire (2006). His new book project considers Badiou, Lacan and the idea of philosophy.