The Joy of Failure: Lack, Desire, and Jouissance in Dystopian Contexts
- When
- Friday, November 6, 20261:00 PM – 2:00 PM CSTAdd to calendarGoogle Calendar
- Where
- Jonsson Conference Room (JO 4.122)Open in Maps
- Hosted by
- Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology
Reminders arrive as notifications from the NextToU iPhone app. Get the app
About
The Joy of Failure: Lack, Desire, and Jouissance in Dystopian Contexts Greg Shows Doctoral Candidate: Humanities
This talk explores utopian failure, loss and sacrifice through a dialectical examination of Margaret Atwood’s Flood Trilogy and an antinomic examination of Octavia Butler’s Parable Trilogy. Drawing on theorists such as Todd McGowan, it considers how an ethics rooted in loss and sacrifice produces enjoyment beyond pleasure and pain. Three examples of cultural practice rooted in sacrifice suggest possibilities for restructuring the human relationship to desire and, by implication, the arrangement of human civilization.
Join on Microsoft Teams
Meeting ID: 218 531 369 242 561 Passcode: Uh7rE9Bi
Supervising Chair Shilyh Warren
Dr. Warren is the Senior Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor of Visual & Performing Arts in the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research and publications focus primarily on documentary film and feminist history and theory. She has also written about contemporary feminist documentaries, especially films that advocate for justice for marginalized people or raise awareness about urgent political crises, such as sexual harassment and violence, environmental demise, and reproductive rights. Her second book is Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), an anthology Dr. Warren edited with Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi. Her latest research projects focus on the history of psychoanalysis, especially the roles played by women in Freud’s Viennese circle in the interwar years.
About Greg Shows Having taught English composition and literature for many years, Gregory Shows returned to UT Dallas in 2022. He is now a doctoral candidate whose areas of study include Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic film theory and utopian and dystopian literature. His dissertation explores the utopian impulse as a manifestation of the Lacanian death drive, positing dystopia as the constitutive location of human subjectivity and arguing that its avowal is the only available choice for humanity.