Online Event
11.02., 24.03. & 26.04.2021 · 19.00
In the time of Corona, intimacy is precarious: as an experience we are in danger of losing, but also one we are nostalgically mourning or re-imagining for a future to come. What does a pandemic and its cultural, social, and technological consequences, such as the protection from others and the disappearance of social encounters and bodily contact, teach us about intimacy? How does Covid-19 change our understanding of intimate moments?
In the context of queer culture and theory, intimacy has had a peculiar position for quite some time. For intimacy is not necessarily the scene in which identities are formed or affirmed. Queer theory has emphasized intimacy as a site where identity is left behind and new forms of the self can emerge, for example in forms of public sex, or what Leo Bersani calls ‘impersonal intimacy.’ One might say that intimacy itself is a queer phenomenon.
This lecture series takes queer theory’s conversation about intimacy as a starting point to discuss some of its cultural possibilities, mediated forms, and philosophical trajectories in the context of Corona. It is part of the public program of the exhibition Intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond at Schwules Museum Berlin.
Please register in advance on the dedicated ICI event page.
In cooperation of the ICI Berlin, the ZfL research project Neighborhood in Contemporary Berlin Literature and the Schwules Museum. Supported with funds form the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF).
Thursday, 11 Feb 2021, 19.00
Susanna Paasonen: Infrastructures of Intimacy and the Deplatforming of Sex
with Ben Miller and Georg DickmannSusanna Paasonen’s feminist and queer analysis focuses on the question of online pornography and new ways of connecting via platforms and chatrooms, as in her 2011 Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Taking exception from the prevalent techno-skepticism that summarizes online communication and representation uncontestably as forms of commodification and alienation, Paasonen’s talk “Infrastructures of Intimacy and the Deplatforming of Sex” discusses the stakes of the new potentials of getting together online—aesthetically, socially, sexually, and politically. For Paasonen it is the tactile dimensions of online encounters, more so than the visual, that affect us as ‘resonance’ or ‘grasp’ us.
Wednesday, 24 Mar 2021, 19.00
Jean-Luc Nancy: Touche-touche
with Eva Geulen and Apostolos Lampropoulos
Jean-Luc Nancy has long considered touch to be central for an understanding of the relation between the self and the world, a crucial question of his philosophy he will also explore in his talk entitled “Touche –touche.” His rethinking of community and the political from phenomenological and deconstructive perspectives directs our attention to the body and its ‘naked existence’ beyond metaphysics. The impact of this philosophical project on contemporary modes of being together is also demonstrated in his most recent publication on the Corona crisis, Un trop humain virus (2020).
Monday, 26 Apr 2021, 19.00
Tim Dean: How to Have Intimacy in an Epidemic
with Ben Nichols and Peter RehbergQueer-theoretical accounts of intimacy in particular have been decisively shaped by readings of art and literature and psychoanalytic reflection. In this context, Tim Dean’s 2009 Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking has presented a crucial intervention. For Dean, the practice of condom-less sex and ‘breeding’ becomes a place to reinvent community and ethics. For the past ten years, Dean’s thinking has evolved around questions of infection, pharmaceutical regimes, and the forms of the self and the social that come with them. His talk “How to Have Sex in a Pandemic” echoes the title of Douglas Crimp’s seminal 1987 essay about AIDS “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic?”
https://www.zfl-berlin.org/event/jean-luc-nancy-touche-touche.html
https://www.zfl-berlin.org/event/tim-dean-how-to-have-intimacy-in-an-epidemic.html