Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us of politics, and to what practical purpose can this knowledge be put? Does psychoanalysis merely describe the world, or could it also change it?
Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford and a contributing editor at the LRB. Her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century, was published in 2021. The title essay was first published in the LRB as ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’ She’s also written for the paper on subjects including free speech on campus, pronouns, octopuses, bestiality and sharks.
The second and third lectures will be given by Adam Shatz and Seamus Perry at 7 p.m. on Friday 16 January and Friday 30 January respectively, at Conway Hall – and will be listed very soon.
Now in their fifteenth year, the annual ‘London Review of Books’ Winter Lectures have been the occasion for many of the paper’s most widely discussed interventions of recent years, from Judith Butler on who owns Kafka to Hilary Mantel on royal bodies, Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange to Mary Beard on women in power, Meehan Crist on childbearing in the age of climate crisis to Pankaj Mishra on the Shoah after Gaza. A reading list of past lectures can be found on the LRB website here.
