On Friday, October 24th, Sara Brill, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, will give a lecture on
“Natal Fantasies, Necropolitical Realities”
Venue: PC249, Södertörns högskola
Time: at 10.00–12.00
Brill’s talk explores the role that birth fantasies play in ancient Greek constructions of philosophy, and considers the relevance of the analysis of these fantasies for addressing contemporary challenges to reproductive agency. Brill argues that the cultivated ignorance about the material conditions of human coming-to-be that drive many of these challenges circulates around a core set of images, several of which are borrowed from and/or attributed to Greek antiquity. Tracking a few of these images, and the broader social imaginary of birth from with they draw, via an image from Plato’s Phaedrus, Brill traces the sources Plato uses to construct this image, observing the intervention he makes in an ongoing conversation about the nature of human generativity, and suggesting a few alternate lines of interpretation opened by some fruitful ambiguities in Plato’s text. Concluding with a return to contemporary concerns, Brill considers what the model of natality at work in this image can tell us about the connection between fantasies of birth and forms of oppression.
Sara Brill is Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, USA. She works on the psychology, politics, and ethics of Plato and Aristotle, as well as broader questions of embodiment, life, and power as points of intersection between ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary critical and feminist theory. She is the author of Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life (Oxford UP, 2020) and Plato on the Limits of Human Life (Indiana UP, 2013); co-editor of Antiquities Beyond Humanism (with Emanuela Bianchi and Brooke Holmes) and The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy (with Catherine McKeen); and she serves as the editor of Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. She is currently Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall and the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge University.
The talk and discussion will be held in English.
This event is organized by the Stockholm Seminar in Feminist Continental Philosophy (fanny.soderback@sh.se) and the Södertörn Center for Ancient Philosophy (charlotta.weigelt@sh.se).