Desire, wandering about and forming assemblages, might be accompanied by serendipity or mate with jouissance or the power of the erotic, even as it fails to reach its presumed aim. Instead of running on a single track, we take desire to be functioning in a multiple manner. We call on desire’s serendipity to grasp its illogical, contingent modes as a figure of fortunate errans. The lecture series Desire’s Multiplicity and Serendipity looks for queer reconceptualizations of desire, its cultural articulations and lived realities. The key question is how to get from the critique of desire as a hierarchizing and normalizing force to the heterotopias of desire. What would it mean to understand or experience desire as opening up to alterity, undermining its own involvement in structural inequalities and normative violence?

Organized by Antke Engel, Jule Jakob Govrin, Christoph Holzhey


The Lecture Series Desire’s Multiplicity and Serendipity is a cooperation between the Institute for Queer Theory and the ICI Berlin.


All talks start at 19:30 and will be in English.

Shaka McGlotten: Political Aesthetics of Drag
Wednesday, 15 October 2014

David Halperin: What is Sex for?
Wednesday, 5 November 2014

Antke Engel, Jule Jakob Govrin, Christoph Holzhey: desire Conserves desire Transgresses desire
Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Dagmar Herzog: Perversion and Love in Postwar Psychoanalysis
Wednesday, 11 March 2015

Jelisaveta Blagojević: Politics of Unthinkable Desire
Tuesday, 28 April 2015

Serena Dankwa and Jafari S. Allen: Desire, Friendship, and Intimacy in the Black Atlantic
Thursday, 28 May 2015

Leo Bersani: Sex. Just Say No
Thursday, 18 June 2015

Teresa de Lauretis: The Sexual and the Queerness of the Drive
Thursday, 2 July 2015