QUILTING POINTS:

The first meeting of the Reading Group for 2013 will be on Thursday the 31st of January at 5.15pm in the School of English. We will look at Lacan's "The Tragic Dimension of Analytical Experience"     in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (Routledge), pp. 293-325. The text will be introduced by Linda Roland Danil (CIGS, Leeds). This group is generously funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute's Graduate Research Funding Programme.

The final meeting of the Reading Group for 2012 was on Thursday the 6th of December at 5.10pm in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English. We looked at Lacan's " The Essence of Tragedy: A Commentary on Sophocles's Antigone "     in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (Routledge), pp. 243-90. Dr Elizabeth Pender (Classics) introduced the text. This group is generously funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute's Graduate Research Funding Programme

The next meeting of the Reading Group will be on Thursday the 22nd of November at 5.10pm in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English. We will be looking at Lacan's " Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet " as published in Yale French Studies No. 55/56 (1977). Ed Powell (English) will introduce the text. Some wine will be served This group is generously funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute's Graduate Research Funding Programme

The next meeting of the Lacan Read(s) Across the Disciplines Reading Group will be on Thursday the 1st of November at 5.10pm in the Alumnus Room of the School of English. We will be looking at Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" from Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English . Dr Stefan Skrimshire (Theology and Religious Studies) will introduce the text. Some wine will be served This group is generously funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute's Graduate Research Funding Programme.

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.

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...

I was like all the other students of philosophy at the time, and for me, the rupture came with Beckett:  Waiting for Godot , a breath-taking spectacle. - Michel Foucault Bruno Clement, writing of early critical responses to Beckett's  Trilogy  by, amongst others, George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, notes that they are all written "under influence." I mean... their content is indebted, in more than one way, depending on the particular case, to the discourse used by the work itself. Writing "under influence," philosophers from Bataille to Badiou have chosen to write their philosophy through Beckett. Richard Begam, Anthony Uhlmann, Steven Connor, Leslie Hill, Thomas Trezise, and other notable Beckett critics have commented extensively on the impact this has had in the realm of Beckett studies. Andrew Gibson has demonstrated the reciprocal impact Beckett has upon a reading of Badiou, for whom Beckett constitutes "a so...