Fourth Annual Magliocco Lecture: Dr. Tim Dean
Dr. Tim Dean, Professor of English, University at Buffalo, will address the Department of English and Journalism, the University Community, and the general public at the fourth annual Magliocco Lecture with a talk entitled “What is Psychoanalytic Thinking: An Approach to the Humanities.” Dean will speak in the Lincoln Room of the University Union, at 7:00 pm, Tuesday, November 3rd.
Dean is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo, where he teaches psychoanalysis, queer theory, and poetic modernism. He is author of Gary Snider and the American Unconscious (1991), Beyond Sexuality (2000), and co-editor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (2001). This year, he published Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (University of Chicago Press). Martha C. Nussbaum writes that Dean’s “Unlimited Intimacy is novel, fascinating, insightful, and courageous. Tim Dean convincingly argues that confronting head-on a sexual subculture that is alien to most readers, and understanding the fantasies that propel it, is a very good way of stimulating thought—not only about that subculture, but about one’s own choices and behavior and about the general social process of demonizing and pathologizing certain sexual practices.”
Dean is working on the cutting edge of the humanities, developing psychoanalytic readings of literature and culture driven by the most recent work on sexuality and queer theory. In preparation for his talk, we offer of Dean’s essays. Find brief summaries and excerpts from each, as well as a biography, below.
“Of what does Kurtz die?” asks Tim Dean in “The Germs of Empire: Heart of Darkness, Colonial Trauma, and the Historiography of AIDS.” In this provocative essay, Dean writes, “While we can neither prove nor disprove the apparently preposterous hypothesis that Kurtz dies of AIDS, I propose it as a heuristic device to illuminate both the historiography of AIDS and impact of colonialism, as well as the particular force of imperial ideology in Heart of Darkness.” Combining epidemiology, the culture wars, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, he puts forward a compelling argument, concluding that Conrad’s novel allows us to imaginatively conceptualize how the violence of empire must be considered:
Conrad enables us to see why imperialism should be counted a vital “cofactor” in the etiology of this new disease. And so, while Heart of Darkness remains vulnerable to charges of racism, Conrad’s novella permits us to grasp that Africa is not the origin of AIDS—European colonialism is. Thus according to the psychoanalytic understanding of history that reconceives origins and causality in terms of the unsymbolizable, traumatic real, it is historically apposite—if not empirically verifiable—that Kurtz, the European colonist par excellance, should be one of the first to die from what we now call AIDS.
In his essay “Art as Symptom: Zizek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism,” Dean suggests that reading literature or culture as symptom is both powerful and productive, but also fraught with ethical dangers. Talking the work of Slavoj Zizek as exemplary, he explains “The problem lies in the way that treating aesthetic artifacts as cultural symptoms elides the specificy of art, making cultural forms too readily apprehensible as what Zizek, in one definition of the symptom, calls ‘the point of emergence of the truth about social relations.’” Dean provides a brilliant summary and incisive critique of the critical desire to “unmask” the truth of art as symptom, while suggesting a more nuanced approach to psychoanalytic interpretation focused on those moments and elements of art that cannot be reduced to a general claim about culture: “We might even say that art’s purpose lies in intensifying those aspects of alterity that otherwise remain dormant in everyday discourse and intersubjective communication.”
In “Lacan and Queer Theory,” Dean observes that “from an Anglo-American perspective, Lacan makes psychoanalysis look rather queer.” Contrasting Foucault and Lacan, Dean argues that Lacan’s theory should complicate the role of both identity and pleasure in queer theory. He writes, “Developing a discourse about sex that focuses primarily on pleasure rather than on either biological reproduction or the reproduction of social norms remains a vital political enterprise. But it is awfully naive to imagine that sex could be a matter only of pleasure and self-affirmation, rather than a matter also of jouissance and negativity.” Explaining key concepts of Lacan—including jouissance, l’objet petit a, and the Other—Dean shows how Lacan can both enrich and complicate queer theory.
Questions? Contact David Banash, <d-banash@wiu.edu>, 309-298-1103.
