Event
Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis of Law, University of London
Should people be free to choose to wear masks? How are hospitals deciding whom to put on a ventilator and whom not? And why are some people choosing to get infected? Acclaimed philosopher and sociologist Renata Salecl examines freedom of choice in the current pandemic and asks why choice is so often anxiety provoking, how it relates to jealousy and envy, and how it can lead to aggression in times of social crisis.
Remarks by David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Asian American Studies.
Cosponsored by Penn's Program in Comparative Literature, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, and the Collaboration Liaison Committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and Penn.
Registration required.
Zoom link will be emailed upon registration.
ASL interpretation provided.
Get 30% off Renata Salecl's new book, A Passion for Ignorance (+ free shipping) when you order from Princeton University Press by December 15th. Use coupon code APFI-FG at checkout.
Renata Salecl is a philosopher and sociologist, who is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Renata has written books on anxiety, postmodernism and love, which have been translated into 15 languages. Her book, The Tyranny of Choice explores how late-capitalism's insistence on individuating yourself through personal choices can prevent the possibility of social change. In her new book published by Princeton University Press in 2020, A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why, Salecl argues that ignorance, whether passive or active, conscious or unconscious, has always been a part of the human condition.
David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor in the Programs in Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. His areas of specialization include American literature, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, queer studies, gender studies, and visual culture. Eng is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, and coauthor with Shinhee Han of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation. He is coeditor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and with Alice Y. Hom of Q&A: Queer in Asian America, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and Association of Asian American Studies Book Award. Eng is currently working on a history of reparations and human rights in Cold War Asia.