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Situating Vulnerability:Politics, Law, and Institutions
Get PDFVulnerability has emerged as a crucial term to describe the human condition, especially in light of the pandemic. Its etymology can be traced back to the Latin term ‘vulnus’, which denoted both a ‘generic wound’ and the ‘infringement of a right’. This semantic ambiguity still persists in current interpretations of vulnerability, with some understanding it as an ontological concept (namely vulnerability as a shared human condition) and others as a political and legal category that identifies specific groups or individuals who are exposed to discrimination. While the universalistic account of the notion fails to bear witness to the unequal distribution of precarity as it affects certain lives, the particularistic approach risks reproducing and even fostering the isolation and marginality of groups and individuals identified as needing protection. In this latter approach, one fails to account both for the agency of such subjects and groups as they resist those conditions and for the systematic and structural connotations of certain forms of violence. However, many feminist theorizations claim that vulnerability, in its embodied and relational connotation, is still a helpful tool for mapping the present since it allows one to grasp how forms of resistance emerge. Taking this perspective entails many critical questions: What would it mean to understand vulnerability as a situated condition linked to relationality and interdependency, rather than as a state that pertains to certain subjects? How should politics, institutions, and law take care of vulnerable lives? Can vulnerability be theorized, politicized, and ‘juridified’ in a manner that takes into consideration the diverse and plural ways in which everyone is exposed to it? In what senses does this concept necessitate an understanding that is derived from situated knowledge, such that the concept does not remain a theoretical abstraction? In order to address such urgent issues, this symposium aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between feminist and gender studies, political philosophy, post- and decolonial studies, critical theory, legal studies, and social sciences
‘My Mother Tongue Is a Foreign Language’:On Edmond Jabès’s Writing in Exile
Get PDFThis chapter examines Edmond Jabès, who chose to write his oeuvre in French despite his Jewish-Arabic origins and his being conversant in both Hebrew and Arabic. French was never a true ‘mother tongue’ to him but rather ‘a foreign one’. This poetical choice was also instrumental to his creation of a cosmos that is very clearly defined by la page blanche, or the ‘blank page’. His writing develops this idea, both literally and metaphorically. A blank sheet is the only thing a writer has to work with at the start of every writing act, therefore it represents a kind of material opposition that all writers must overcome. It represents in this context an existential nothingness that precedes and simultaneously escapes both human and divine creation. In Jabès’s writings, a blank page has two connotations at once: a condition for writing and nothingness. This ambivalent condition results in the paradoxical assumption that his ‘mother tongue is a foreign language’, because it cannot offer the same spiritual intimacy as another language, say, the Holy Language, and because the writer’s ‘mother tongue’ — and, by extension, human language — is always impure and infiltrated by foreignness
Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories
Get PDFUlysses, Dante, and Other Stories presents a unique form of creative scholarship. It employs Dante’s late medieval take on Ulysses and his tragic pursuit of ‘virtue and knowledge’ as a prism that refracts an ancient myth of journey and return into a modern story of discovery and nostalgia. Working notes, fragments from Ulysses’ many stories, personal memories, illuminations, and rewritings combine to form a new chain of narratives about the desire to create, the art of travelling, and the will of self-reinvention.List of FiguresIncipit | 1-121. Lectura | 13-452. Sing me, o Muse, again | 47-903. To Pursue Virtue and Knowledge | 91-1244. ‘… And Maybe Sometime’ | 125-1725. It Was Sunset | 173-2126. All In One Place | 213-263Colophon | 265-270A Narrated Bi(bli)ography Preceded by a Postface and Interspersed with Notes that Lack Superscript. Also Illustrated, for that Matter. With the Addition of a One-word Glossary.A List of Primary Source
Model MA-1:The Bomber Jacket as a Shifting Object of Projection
Get PDFThe bomber jacket MA-1 was originally designed as military apparel by the United States Air Force and later became part of the ’New Look’, a military strategy that the US Army developed in the age of militarism and in the shadow of a possible atomic conflict during the cold war. It came into being as a civilian garment in Europe in the late 1950s. Since then it has evolved into different types and styles and has become a model in various subcultural contexts — a model that turned into an icon, possibly because it embodied a certain crisis chic and suggested protection. Dany’s talk will reflect on questions such as: How directly does fashion respond to reality and why do styles in fashion often consist of random elements that strangely reappear in parallel with crises? How did the bomber jacket fare in the crises of 1992, 2001, 2008, and 2020? What role do self-referential loops play — when, e.g., a dystopian survival look is making a comeback — or are fashion styles now all mixed up anyway? Hans-Christian Dany lives in Hamburg and writes in the morning. Sometimes his writing turns into books like, among others, Speed. Eine Gesellschaft auf Droge (2012), Morgen werde ich Idiot. Kybernetik und Kontrollgesellschaft (2013), or No Dandy, No Fun (2023, with Valérie Knoll). The talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Marietta Kestin
From Material to Symbol, to Model:The Bridge
Get PDFThis lecture will present the bridge as a structure of interconnectivity by which one passes from one form or familiarity to another. The bridge is a model of communication. By locking two into the space of one, it enables thought and the experience of the social. Interdisciplinarity and transculturality also depend on bridges, approachable with lesser or greater degrees of enthusiasm. Ethics itself depends on a bridge, endorsing, like bridges at their best, reciprocal relationship. Harrison’s presentation will articulate several features of bridge-form while examining case studies that range from material history (bridges of trade and war, for example) to the ambitions of religion (binding a here to a transcendent there) and to accomplishments of poetry, music, and philosophy. Some specific exegeses will even aim to exemplify the otherwise theorized bridges between disciplines and the cultures articulated within them. For bridges are built not merely by putting things in contact, but by creating traffic between them. Thomas Harrison is Professor of European Languages & Transcultural Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. It is from his most recent study — Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account (2021) — that this presentation is culled. He is also the author of 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, a study of pan-European expressionism, and of Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello. His L’arte dell’incompiuto has appeared in Italian. He has edited Nietzsche in Italy, with contributions by Agamben, Serres, and Nancy; The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry; and, with Gian Maria Annovi, The Ends of Poetry, containing critical studies alongside an anthology of forty contemporary poets. He has written essays on Georg Simmel, Claudio Magris, Carlo Michelstaeder, Gianni Vattimo, Michelangelo Antonioni, and several topics in the comparative arts
