APPI Clinical Seminar Series: Ian Parker Seminar – Intersectionality: Art, Representation, Violence and Identity
Saturday 20 September 2014. 11:30 – 13.30.
Price: €20 (full member); €25 (non-member); €15 (student w/id)
Location: Carmelite Centre, Clarendon Street, Dublin 2. (Entrance opposite Brown Thomas car park)
Ian Parker’s paper is concerned with the way an opposition between ‘experience’ and ‘structure’ (as posed in academic debate) overlaps with and complicates an opposition between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ (posed in left political debate), and is further complicated by an opposition between the ‘subject’ and the ‘statement’ (configured psychoanalytically). The conceptual frames set up by these oppositions are disturbed by systemic violence which is symptomatically manifested in debates in, among other places, specific cultures of the left in Britain concerning art, representation, violence and identity.* The focus here is on the term ‘intersectionality’, and the ways in which this term takes on a distinctive meaning in particular sets of debates. The concept ‘intersectionality’ (which should provide a way of explaining what is happening) thereby becomes turned into part of the apparatus of the problem. Some suggestions are offered for how we can theorise this ‘misapplication’ of theory outside the academic world and the stakes for psychoanalysts of contemporary alternatives to the politics of identity. The relation, or non-relation, between academic and political debate is the underlying question for left academics, and for psychoanalysts committed to speech and writing (to the truth and the transmission of discourse).
* The image illustrating this post is a photo of Dasha Zhukova from the Russian website Buro 24/7 (Photograph: Buro 24/7)
Link here to The Guardian, article by Shaun Walker for information /context.
Ian Parker is Professor of Management in the School of Management at the University of Leicester, Co-Director of the Discourse Unit www.discourseunit.com and a practising psychoanalyst in Manchester. His books include Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity (Routledge, 2011), and six books in the series ‘Psychology after Critique’ (Routledge, 2015).
