Lecture: April 3, 4pm - 6pm
Workshop: April 4, 11:30pm - 1pm

Contrasting the logic that wounds only produce suffering and that, therefore, the proper approach to trauma is the reparative, Saketopoulou draws our attention to the concept of traumatophilia, which conditions a differently textured relation to injury. In this talk, she turns to art that lingers in the wound not in order to address/heal the injury but to graze against it, even to risk re-opening it in the interembodied space of the theatre. Such art is not after healing or repair: it risks, rather, an exposure to traumatic intensities that cannot be captured through anamnesis, intensities that have a fugitive relationship to being grasped or understood, and which, importantly, exert a sadistic force on the artist and the audience. That such sadism is also tender is not a contradiction, but the very condition of a kind of sadism we might think of as aesthetic. Drawing on the first part of the Cadela Força trilogy by Carolina Bianchi and the art collective Cara de Cavalo, Saketopoulou explores how wound and aesthetics meet through an ethical form of sadistic practice conjugated not through clarity, understanding, or catharsis but through the courting of confusion.

Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst who lives and works in New York City. She completed her analytic training at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she also teaches. Her published work addresses issues around trauma, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) and co-author with Ann Pellegrini of Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation 2023).

Thank you to our co-sponsors:
Institute for the Humanities, UMOR, and LSA DEI Office