Stella Sandford: The Many Names of Sex

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Time: 6.00pm - 8.00pm
Venue: Chelsea Lecture Theatre, University of the Arts London, John Islip Street, London, SW1P 4JU
Price: free
Speaker(s): Stella Sandford (CRMEP)

Please join the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) for their 2016/17 research series.

In the first edition of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud's break with both his sexological and philosophical predecessors is marked with a conceptual distinction (obscured in the usual English translations) between the ‘reproductive drive' and ‘sexuality'. For some of Freud's philosophical predecessors, something like the ‘reproductive drive' and the differences between the sexes themselves are understood either as the clearest expression of purposiveness in nature or in terms of a metaphysics of nature. In both cases sex difference is not merely a natural empirical fact but a philosophical presupposition developed either telologically (Kant) or metaphysically (Schopenhauer). This lecture will show how Freud's rejection of the concept of the ‘reproductive drive' in favour of that of sexuality is thus also a rejection of teleological and metaphysical conceptions of sex difference - the conceptions that still dominate popular discourses today

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Contact: Eric-John Russell
Email: k1543754@kingston.ac.uk