︎ Can we have a Marxist Erotics?

Jan 13, 2022

You can now watch this seminar for fee on our Youtube Channel here

Over the past 30 years there has been a resurgence of interest in sexuality within Marxism. It has broadly followed three strands: a critical political economy of sexuality; the struggle for recognition and inclusion of diverse sexual identities within a queer and materialist politics; and the emancipatory potential of the interconnections of Marxism and Psychoanalysis. These have brought both political and theoretical imperatives, struggles and contradictions. Together, these constitute a rich vein of critical and revolutionary thinking.

What has been less seriously explored, notwithstanding the occasional flirtations of Žižek, is a marxist erotics that fleshes out the exploration of sexual fantasy, pleasure and richness of relations in rich ethical and imaginative forms. This lecture will sketch the first formulations of a field of enquiry that is important in exploring radical interpersonal and subjective relations, making  meaningful links between the personal and the political and linking the phenomenological with a materialist political economy

(Paul Reynolds)