Decentering Sex: Reflections on Freud, Foucault, and Subjectivity in Intellectual History

The history of sexuality was dominated for at least two decades by the thought of Michel Foucault, who famously portrayed psychoanalysis as symptomatic of the disciplinary practices embodied by the human and natural sciences.  My talk returns to the tension between psychoanalysis and its neighboring sciences, making a case for the relevance of the psychoanalytic mode of inquiry for intellectual history in the wake of the newer scientific paradigm of mind, namely the cognitive neurosciences. The talk will center in particular on the work of Lou Andreas-Salomé, who consistently mobilized sexual difference not as a phenomenon to be understood or explained, but as a methodological point of entry into discussions about nature, culture, body, mind, and desire.