marxismNL

Allegories of Desire - Lecture by Nadia Bou Ali

June 11, 16:30-18:00 at UvA - PCH 1.05

Psychoanalysis as a field can be seen to be concerned with one core problem: the tragedy of human desire. Lacan develops this in the direction of structuralism, a baroque structuralism nevertheless, with the aim of capturing the permutations, the different moments of what we could call the phenomenology of desire. The talk engages with Fredric Jameson's claim that psychoanalysis is but one level of allegorical interpretation of modernity and the experiences that constitute it. Psychoanalysis is a practice attuned to the strange situation of 'discontinuous realities' being placed in contact with one another. Desire emerges in the gap between need and demand, it names or places the subject in relation to an other who is genderless or of an ambiguous gender. Although desire is a master signifier it has no content, it always requires other levels of narratives, of interpretation. Further, desire slips into the speculative concept of the drive. In modernity the alienated subject of desire is faced with the alienated Other who does not know they are alienated, God is dead, but he doesn't know it. The talk proposes that the allegories of desire provide some insight into our contemporary moment of late capitalism, a time of monsters parading around as though they were not already dead. 

Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and director of the Critical Humanities Program for the Liberal Arts at the American University of Beirut. She works on the intersections between critical theory, modern Arabic thought, and psychoanalysis. She is the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex and Politics (Bloomsbury, 2018), Extimacy: Encounters Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (Northwestern UP, 2024), and the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic (Edinburgh UP, 2020). She is co-editor of the book series Psychoanalytic Acts (Edinburgh UP). Her forthcoming book is entitled Structure and Form (Verso, 2026). Her works have been translated into French, Spanish, and Arabic. She is also a psychoanalyst residing in Beirut. 

The (Trans–) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School (TSP) is an intensive five-day series of events at the intersection of trans theory and psychoanalysis that takes place yearly in June at the University of Amsterdam. TSP is a collaboration between research groups Sex Negativity and Queer Analysis. Although participants go through a selection process, we offer two lectures that are open to the public. Anyone can attend with no need to register. All lectures are in-person only.