I'm so excited to be involved in this (free, online!) event on the theme of failure, in particular its relation to temporalities of care. This event is one of a series organised as part of Kingston's Race/Gender Matters research group. It will feature guest speaker Lisa Baraitser, Birkbeck, who will give a short talk, followed by a discussion around the event's themes with Katie Hall and myself. It's open to all, so please check out the details below!
Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck): Care again, Care better: the temporalities of failure and repair
Online, Wednesday 13 January 2021, 6pm-7.15pm
Failure fascinates. Its violence and its inevitability can be gripping; equally, it has the capacity to reveal how our lives are defined by restrictive notions of success. As Jack Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure, failure may even provide the basis for resistance – though any engagement with failure’s generative potential must simultaneously acknowledge its associated hardships and exclusions.
In her examination of practices of care, including motherhood, Lisa Baraitser addresses the relationship between care and failure. In Enduring Time she declares: ‘Love itself is always already ambivalent, being experienced as distinct from destructiveness at the very point that one can recognize that the two have come together, when we come to understand, that is, that care entails understanding failures of care.’
Thus failure is not a simple opposite of success, or adequacy, but rather is something that haunts these positions – always present and always telling us something. Through such haunting, failure can reveal structures that might otherwise remain invisible. Lisa Baraitser’s talk, the following discussion led by Kingston PhD students Anna Johnson and Katie Hall, and a concluding Q&A will explore the complexities of failure and its possible relations to practices of care, politics, ethics, time, creativity and more.
Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) and Enduring Time (Bloomsbury 2017), and has written widely on motherhood, psychoanalysis, care and time. She is currently co-PI on the Wellcome Trust funded project Waiting Times, that investigates the relation between time and care in health contexts. She is a psychoanalyst, and member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London.
Free to attend; all welcome. For details of how to attend, please email Martin Dines: m.dines@kingston.ac.uk
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