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Showing posts from September, 2012

Courtly Love as anamorphosis: Thursday 11th of October

The next Quilting Points Reading Group meeting will be on Thursday 11th of October in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at 5.15pm. The text under discussion will be "Courtly Love as anamorphosis" from Lacan's Seminar 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. It will be introduced by Arthur Rose.

Seminar: Revolutionary Sex in Walton's *Troilus and Cressida*

Our first Speaker will be Dr Paul Harper-Scott (Royal Holloway). He will be presenting in Seminar Room 3 of the LHRI at 5.15pm on Thursday the 27th of September. His paper is titled "Revolutionary Sex in Walton's *Troilus and Cressida*". Abstract: William Walton's opera * Troilus and Cressida * is an unexpectedly arresting intervention in the ideological field of sexuality and gender. Drawing on theories of sex, love, pornography, and communism by Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, this paper argues that the circling of desire around the structural impossibility of a sexual connexion leads Troilus and Cressida to challenge culturally mandated scripts for normative heterosexuality in modernity. Paying particular attention to the pornographic interlude in which they consummate their love and the paradoxical deepening of their commitment to one another through Cressida's betrayal of Troilus, it suggests possibilities for conceiving a revolutionary l