Queer@Kings and Pluto Press present:
After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics by James Penney
Book launch and discussion
Wednesday 6 November at 6.15 pm
Room S-1.22 (Strand campus, first basement) King’s College
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After Queer Theory makes the provocative claim that queer theory has
run its course, made obsolete by the elaboration of its own logic
within capitalism. James Penney argues that far from signalling the
end of anti-homophobic criticism, however, the end of queer presents
the occasion to rethink the relation between sexuality and politics.
Through a critical return to Marxism and psychoanalysis (Freud and
Lacan), Penney insists that the way to implant sexuality in the field
of political antagonism is paradoxically to abandon the exhausted
premise of a politicised sexuality.
After Queer Theory argues that it is necessary to wrest sexuality from
the dead end of identity politics, opening it up to a universal
emancipatory struggle beyond the reach of capitalism’s powers of
commodification.
James Penney teaches cultural theory at Trent University, Canada. He
is the author of The Structures of Love: Art and Politics beyond the
Transference (2012), and The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and
the Impossible Absolute of Desire (2006).
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“The audacious and sound thesis of Penney’s new book – that the
political as such is structured by sexuality – reties the knot between
Freud and Marx in a way that exposes just how politically anemic
theories of their pairing have become in recent years. Opting for an
emancipatory rather than lifestyle politics, After Queer Theory wrests
the anti-homophobic project from the grip of an at once hopelessly
narrow and uselessly general queer theory.” – Joan Copjec, Brown
University
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Following Penney’s presentation we will have a short discussion with
Hector Kollias (French, King’s College) and Nina Power (Philosophy,
Roehampton), chaired by Jordan Osserman (Psychoanalysis, UCL), and
followed by audience Q&A.
Mark Carrigan 