Bracha L. In this course we will read contemporary theorists of the body and power to articulate understandings of relations between the state and sexuality; embodiment, will and agency; race, class, mobility and power. This class is interdisciplinary in method and scope, as we will examine a variety of cultural texts including theoretical essays, novels, and films.
In these two lectures I will try to see how Derridean deconstruction can enrich our understanding of the political tropes of sexuality and gendered embodiment. His insistence of exploring and deploying the lexicon of the living organism as always already metaphorical is a resource for thinking the regulatory terms of embodiment as always to some extent untethered from the semantic field of the gendered body conceived as pre-social.
In the second lecture, I will look at further examples which are homologous to the way queer figures fit into this discourse of sycophancy but which themselves do not connote queer embodiment: the figure of the actor in the discourse of antitheatricality and the concept of the placebo.
In pointing out the consistency with which the figure of the prostitute as effeminate man , the sycophant, the actor, and the concept of placebo are constructed as a different manifestation of the same failure of political inauthenticity, I will argue that deconstruction can effectively show not only the construction of normal bodies at the cost of excluding some bodies as abnormal, but that the political rhetoric of inauthenticity organizes the logic of life in general.
In the course of two mornings, Bracha L. Ettinger will present the concepts of Eros of borderlinking and wit h nessing , and explain the difference between inter-subjectivity and transubjectivity in order to further articulate the human subject as informed by the matrixial-feminine-maternal dimension. Bracha will deal with the relations between trauma, joy and the work of the memory of oblivion , as well as between beauty and the wound , and elaborate on her concept of love intermingled with primary compassion and awe in com-passion, and on the weave composed by the Hebrew words for care , trust and fidelity as affects and enactments , truth-knowing, art-working and maternality.
