Eve Watson: The Humanization of Feminine Differentiation and Sinthomic Singularity

A lecture in English by psychoanalyst, academic and writer Eve Watson from Dublin, who is the academic director of the Freud Lacan institute. It offers a psychoanalysis of contemporary discourse and the social Other, and of the misogynistic and dehumanizing backlash against the feminine, gender non-conformity and transness. Drawing on Lacan, she argues that the vast field of the feminine and the multiple singularities of gender differentiation trouble the circuitry of the social bond in market capitalism, which prioritises the equivalence of all consumer subjects. Psychoanalysis, as a practice that produces new master signifiers and emphasises the sinthome, is positioned against the “alethosphere”, Lacan's term for what is now the technosphere, to offer a perspective on its pathological effects, while also interrogating its own anxieties about gender non-conformity.