The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT), Goldsmiths, cordially invites you to

Arun Saldanha (U Minnesota; CPCT Visiting Professor)

Sexuation and the ontology of race: notes towards a Darwin after Fanon

Friday, 21 November 2025 from 5-7 pm GMT
RHB 137a and online

[Click here for the Zoom registration]

Psychoanalytical theory has done systematic work to ontologize sex as the irrepressibly insistent question spurring human existence. But is there only one such question? While for obvious ethico-political reasons Lacanian theorists of race relegate it entirely to the symbolic register and to modernity, perhaps the fact bodies become objects of such strongly racialized desires indexes a second profound ontological compulsion. Perhaps, as Darwin speculates with his theory of sexual selection, the aesthetic and psychic economies of sex itself necessitate a sensitivity to phenotype. Both sexuality and kinship remain riddled by lack and misinterpretation. It is important to stress that as subset of phenotypical variation “race” is entirely contingent on European colonization and capital. The talk will end by addressing the implications of the immanent critique of evolutionary theory for a renewed politics of universality. 

About the speaker

Arun Saldanha is Professor in the School of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) as well as Visiting Professor at CPCT in Autumn 2025. The author of Space after Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (U of Minnesota Press, 2007) as well as co-editor of books on sexual difference, Deleuze studies, and food geographies, he is currently working on a new book tentatively titled Phenotypically: A Materialist Theory of Race, which seeks a critical “return to” Darwin after Fanon in light of a resurgence of far-right fantasies around human biology.

Contact: j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk