Research Seminar: 'Narratives of Perversion in Contemporary Politics', with Ian Parker, 15th of June
Ian Parker
Professor of Management, University of Leicester
Monday 15th June 2015, 2pm-3.30pm, Room 102, 30, Russell Square
NARRATIVES OF PERVERSION IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS
This paper explores the ambivalent political function of fantasies of perversion in the time of psychoanalysis. That is, time as the historical time in which psychoanalysis emerges and functions, and time as the form of narrative which frames an account of perversion and responds to the resistance perversion pretends to enact. It does this by focusing on the politics of paedophilia, the way that politics positions itself today, and the way the politics of psychoanalysis intersects with it. I will take a quite specific case embedded in some general debates about the nature of paedophilia, politics and psychoanalysis. I will describe the local context for this case, and a response to a demand for political engagement with the issue from one political actor in what is one of the latest events in a series of crises of the Left. It has the status simultaneously of being a description, a response, and intervention, perhaps also as an interpretation which was framed in a response as a demand that this attempt a political engagement. Further analysis will focus on the linkage and disjunction between the clinic and politics, and of the relationship between psychoanalysis and perversion as mediated by forms of temporality in the narrative representation of clinical cases.
Ian Parker is Professor of Management at the University of Leicester, and has visiting Professor positions in the Department of Psychosocial studies at Birkbeck as well as at the University of Manchester (in Education), the University of Roehampton (in Psychology) and at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (in Human and Community Development). He was previously Professor of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Ian’s background is in critical psychology, and he is currently Managing Editor of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology. His many books include Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity; Psychoanalytic Mythologies; and Psychoanalytic Practice and State Regulation. A set of six books entitled Psychology after… (e.g. Psychology after Lacan; Psychology after the Unconscious) was published recently by Routledge. Two old ‘classics’ have just been reissued: The Crisis in Modern Social Psychology, and how to end it and Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology. Ian is a practising Lacanian psychoanalyst, trained with the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. All welcome.