Category: Lecture

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Lisa Baraitser, ‘Enduring Time – On Violence and Care’, Alt_Cph_2020, 16 September 2020

Our PI Lisa is speaking on ‘Enduring Time – On Violence and Care’ as part of Alt_Cph_2020 on Wednesday, 16 September 2020 at from 5 – 6.30pm (UK time).  This event is a Zoom webinar and is free to attend.

Lisa’s talk will be part of the Patterns of Resistance programme of events and you can sign up for the webinar here or visit the Alt-Cph_2020 site here.

In its early stages, the ongoing global pandemic laid bare the hidden structures of care and dependency that we often close our eyes to. COVID-19 also alerted us to our collective vulnerability and dependency – and the violence that so often goes hand in hand with care.

In her 2017 book ‘Enduring Time’ psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Lisa Baraitser diagnoses our present as a moment of suspended time. Between a traumatic past and a foreclosed future, we find ourselves in stuck time, a time closely connected to the time of care. In this talk Lisa Baraitser will be in dialogue with the curator Miriam Wistreich to use our current moment as a thinking space to consider the relationships between vulnerability, violence, resistance and care.

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Rethinking Women’s Time: Some thoughts on gender, care and waiting

Lisa will be talking about her book Enduring Time at Goldsmiths later this month.  This is free event and no registration is required.

314, Third Floor, Professor Stuart Hall Building
Goldsmiths College

10 June, 2019
17.00 – 19.00

Drawing on recent work on ‘enduring time’ in this talk I revisit Julia Kristeva’s 1979 essay Women’s Time, reading it against contemporary theories of time and gender to develop a notion of a ‘maternal death drive’. Kristeva conceptualized female subjectivity as strung out between cyclical time (repetition) and monumental time (eternity without cleavage or escape). These two ‘feminine’ forms of time work to conceal the inherent logic of teleological historical ‘masculine’ time which is linear, progressive, unfolding, and yet constantly rupturing, an ‘anguished’ time. Masculine time, Kristeva argues, rests on its own stumbling block, which is death.

What if historical time is no longer ‘unfolding’, progressive or linear, but is ‘foreclosed’ by the immanent disasters of capitalism? If we are now living in a suspended present in which time fails to unfold, then the tension between masculine and feminine time is radically altered. Historical time itself becomes monumental, and feminine time no longer sutures the future in the figure of the child, as Lee Edelman argued in No Future (2004), but articulates a kind of dynamic chronicity, alive to the potentials of not moving on, but without giving up on the ethical principle of one’s own future being bound up with the future of another. From this perspective a ‘maternal death drive’ drives a wedge between the repetitive return to inertia of Freud’s death drive, and the heteronormative developmental time line of reproduction that queer theories of temporality have worked to disrupt. What comes to matter, when time is suspended in its maternal form, is the time of mattering itself – the time it takes for us to come to matter to one another in a suspended present with no future.

For more info click here.

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Professor Elizabeth Freeman lecture – Committed to the End: On Care Work and Rereading

Committed to the End: On Care Work and Rereading
Professor Elizabeth Freeman (University of California, Davis)

B01 Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck College
London
WC1E 7JL

18.00 – 20.00
Friday, 24 May 2019

Professor Elizabeth Freeman – a leading queer theorist and author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories – will be giving a lecture on the intersections between the spatiotemporalities of domestic fiction, re-reading and care taking at Birkbeck on 24 May, 2019.

The is a free event but booking is required via the Eventbrite page. Tickets are limited so sign up quickly.

For full details please visit the Birkbeck website.

 

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Lisa Baraitser: ‘On Time, Care and Not Moving On’ at ICI Berlin, 5th July 2018

Lisa will be giving this lecture at 19.30, 5th July, 2018 at the ICI Berlin.  (And it is now available to watch here …)

Taking up the themes of her recent book Enduring Time, this talk will offer some reflections on the relations between time and care. Care is often assumed to be a set of practices that take the form of an affective engagement with others, so that we can maintain, sustain, and repair the world. Yet care can also be thought about as a political and ethical decision to remain in what Christina Sharpe calls ‘the wake’: the ongoing disastrous time of the persistent effects of slavery. Remaining, for Sharpe, involves inhabiting and rupturing the wake’s elongated temporality. From this perspective, Baraitser will argue that care is bound up with histories of the antithesis of care, or failures of care, that bring on ways of thinking that we may also need to take care of and involve the temporal practices of staying alongside others and ideas when care has failed; waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, repeating, and returning as the temporal forms that care takes.  Some psychoanalytic resources will help to think about the chronic and interminable, and the repetitive and developmental, in order to better understand the intersections between time, care, and not moving on.

For more details and booking info, visit the ICI Berlin site.


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