Avgi Saketopoulou: Sexuality Beyond Consent
Conversation between the author and Kris Dittel (Fellow)
Fellow Kris Dittel talks with clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou about Sexuality Beyond Consent. In her eponymous book, Saketopoulou challenges the cultural obsession with the healing of trauma and calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience.
The discussion will delve into the concept of limit consent and how it expands our understanding of desire and relationality. Additionally, Saketopoulou will consider the role of risk and self-risking in aesthetic experience, especially through art, as a means of encountering the opacity in oneself and in the other.
Text: Kris Dittel
Access Info:
Online: The call will be enabled with automatic closed captions in English. The event is hybrid and will be held in English. You can either attend in person at Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen or follow the event online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be provided after registration via Eventbrite.
Onsite: Unfortunately, the space in Innsbruck is not wheelchair accessible. The bathrooms are used as gender neutral. Chairs with backs, arms and floor seating is all available. We have plenty of space to store mobility devices of all kinds. There is a low sensory space available.
Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in NY. She serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her publications have received numerous prizes, including twice the annual prize of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Ralph Roughton Award, and the Symonds Prize. Her interview on psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna) and her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023) braids psychoanalysis with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore the vicissitudes of overwhelm and repetition. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity, which includes a re-worked version of the essay for which the two authors received the International Psychoanalytical Association’s First Tiresias Prize. Avgi Saketopoulou is in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in the book The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche, and is currently working on her next publication project provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism: The Aesthetics of Confusion and Opacity.
https://www.avgisaketopoulou.com/
Kris Dittel (The Netherlands/Slovakia) is a curator, editor and writer. Her practice is driven by long-term research projects that materialize in various forms, including exhibitions, publications, public events, performances, texts, talks, and more.
Her most recent project, Unruly Kinships, included an exhibition, a study group series, and an event program, co-curated with Aneta Rostkowska (Temporary Gallery CCA, Cologne 2022-24). This project explored possibilities of kinship beyond the nuclear family and examined ways we may form relations with/in the world.
With Clem Edwards, Kris Dittel co-edited The Material Kinship Reader (Onomatopee, 2022), which addresses material relations beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family. Currently, she is co-editing two volumes: Unruly Kinships (Jap Sam Books, 2024) with Aneta Rotskowska, and a children’s book, Life with Fifi (Böks, 2024), with Angelica Falkeling.
Alongside her curatorial and editorial work, Kris Dittel is also an active educator, primarily serving as a research supervisor and writing tutor.
https://krisdittel.com/
Location
Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen