The Sexual and the Queerness of the Drive

One of Freud’s original contributions to 20th century epistemology is the notion of “polymorphous perverse” infantile sexuality. Revisiting Freud, Laplanche reformulates it as the specific character of all human sexuality, which he calls “the sexual” and defines as distinct from and in conflict with love (attachment). He proposes that the sexual drive is not innate or endogenous but is constituted as an effect of seduction, repression, and translation. In the context of Laplanche’s theory of the sexual, the lecture examines the difference between drive and desire, the function of the concepts of castration and the Oedipus complex, the relations of sexuality and gender, and the nature of sublimation.

Teresa de Lauretis is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written on cinema, semiotics, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and feminist theory. She is the editor of the special issue of the journal differences with the title “Queer Theory”, where the words first appeared together (1991). Her books include Technologies of Gender (1987), Figures of Resistance (2007) and Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (2008). Her works translated into German include Die andere Szene: Psychoanalyse und lesbische Sexualität (1996, 1999) and “Freuds Bildersprache”, Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Theorie und Praxis 27.1 (2012).
Website: teresadelauretis.com