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After Joyce:Rethinking Contemporary Irish Literature in Europe
Get PDFThe year 2022 marks the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the establishment of the Irish Free State, but also the 50th anniversary of two other important political events in Ireland: the referendum with which Irish citizens formally approved Ireland’s entry into the European Economic Community, and the passing of the European Communities Act by the Irish Parliament, which marked the formal acceptance of this entry. Currently — post-Brexit — Ireland’s geopolitical situation and its belonging to the EU seem all the more central for Ireland’s own future and for the solidity of the European project: the aim of this reading and discussion is to look at the present situation through Joyce’s oeuvre and its impact on contemporary Irish literature. In Joyce, Europe is treated as a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia, a combination of other spaces both disturbing and reassuring, which compel the reader to an ongoing process of reassessment of the very notion of national culture and cultural belonging. It is an idea of Europe that continues to change and transform against the author’s tumultuous cultural-political context. Joyce’s peculiar polyglossia points to a European cultural dimension and a linguistic code beyond national boundaries, while strongly acknowledging those different cultures and the intricate relationships on which they are based. The event will delve into the works of contemporary Irish authors Nuala O’Connor and Adrian Duncan, the relationship between Irish and European literature, and the relationship between Irish literature and Europe as a cultural, transnational, and plurilinguistic site. O’Connor and Duncan will read passages from their most recent publications and debate the significance of Joyce’s legacy for contemporary Irish literature. This discussion is accompanied by the two-day conference Joyce and the Idea of Europe at Bard College Berlin, focusing on the notion of Europe as a complex cultural and geopolitical space of exchange, which emerged in James Joyce’s works. Nuala O’Connor’s fifth novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times and is the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022. Nuala has curated the current exhibition at MoLI – Love, Says Bloom. She is editor at flash fiction e-journal Splonk. Adrian Duncan is an artist and award-winning writer based in Ireland and Berlin. His debut novel Love Notes from a German Building Site was published in 2019. It won the 2019 John McGahern Book Prize. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Dalkey Literary Awards Emerging Writer. Duncan’s second novel A Sabbatical in Leipzig was published in 2020. It was shortlisted for the Kerry Novel of the Year Award. His third novel, The Geometer Lobachevsky, was published in April 2022
Unintentional Reenactments:<i>Yella</i> by Christian Petzold
Get PDFWhat is the relationship between reenactment and repetition compulsion? By shedding light upon the different levels of reenactment at stake in Yella by Christian Petzold, I analyse the ‘transitional spaces’ where the German filmmaker places his wandering characters who have ‘slipped out of history’. In Yella Petzold mixes up past, present, future, and oneiric re-elaboration to question the memory of the past of GDR, which in his view has never really been constituted as history. The characters that populate this movie move in a setting constructed at the crossroad between a protected environment where the reenacted events are sheltered by the time and the space of the plot and a place weathered by the unpredictable atmospheric agents of the present. How and to which extent can the clash between different temporalities produce a minimal variation
The Other Side of Italian Thought:Emanuele Severino
Get PDFContemporary Italian philosophy has become recognized internationally as a distinct tradition, often associated with a post-Foucauldian notion of biopolitics and essayistic forms enabling a quick reaction to the affairs of the day yet without compromising the systematic ambitions of philosophical thought. But Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) shows a radically different side of Italian philosophy: unabashedly metaphysical, uncompromisingly Parmenidean, and increasingly recognized as one of the most remarkable and challenging thinkers of the twentieth century — in the words of Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari, the only alternative to Martin Heidegger. Over the course of six decades, from La struttura originaria (1958) to Testimoniando il destino (2019), Severino developed a most original and untimely philosophical project, which attempts to think the relationship between nihilism and the tradition of the West, the incontrovertibility of the truth of being, the contradiction of becoming, the eternity of all beings. Severino came to refer to his work as to ‘the language that testifies to destiny’, namely a testimony to the eternal and necessary structure of the appearing and disappearing of the eternal beings — the ‘destiny of necessity’ (Destino della necessità, 1980). The symposium The Other Side of Italian Thought: Emanuele Severino aims to introduce the principal axes along which Severino’s thought can be unfolded to an international audience. The symposium thus joins an increasing number of international projects of the last few years: the first edited translation into English of one of Severino’s most important works, The Essence of Nihilism (2016, A. Carrera and I. Testoni, eds), the foundation of an international journal dedicated to Severino’s thought, Eternity & Contradiction: Journal of Fundamental Ontology (G. Goggi, ed.), as well as the forthcoming English translations of Severino’s Law and Chance (Legge e caso, 1979) and Beyond Language (Oltre il linguaggio, 1992) (trans. D. Sacco)
Case Histories from Below:Class Struggle in the Psychoanalytic Consulting Room
Get PDF‘The recovery of voices has been a central purpose of history from below from the very beginning’, writes Marcus Rediker in ‘The Poetics of History from Below’ (2010). Writing such histories usually necessitates working with sources that were not produced by the oppressed people whose voices the historian hopes to recover. Feminist scholars have long sought to counteract the clinical interpretations in Freud’s pseudonymised case histories with readings that foreground the circumstances of the real women who were his patients, supplementing his cases with social history. These re-readings not only recovered voices but also contested Freud’s analyses of his woman patients’ very capacity to speak, as Elaine Showalter noted in The Female Malady (1985): ‘Freud failed Dora because he was too quick to impose his own language on her mute communications.’ It is axiomatic to characterise psychoanalysis as the preserve of the bourgeoisie due to the money and time generally required to access treatment. Though certainly true for most times and places, the affordability of psychoanalysis has varied geographically and historically, depending both on provision available under different healthcare systems and on the existence of organisations offering low fees or free clinics. Indeed, psychoanalytic consulting rooms can be sites of class antagonism and discussions of class occasionally ruffle the pages of psychoanalytic case histories. Focusing on examples by British psychoanalysts, including Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, this paper will attempt to construct an alternative to existing analyses of the encounter between Marxism and psychoanalysis that focus on abstract theories by grounding itself instead in socially and economically contextualised accounts of clinical practice.Hannah Proctor is Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She is currently researching a cluster of social scientific projects based at institutions in the US in the early years of the Cold War that developed theories of the ‘Soviet mind’. Her monograph Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ and Soviet Social History was published as part of the Palgrave-Macmillan series Mental Health in Historical Perspective in 2020. Her second book Burnout: On the Psychic Toll of Political Struggle, which she began working on as a fellow at the ICI Berlin (2016-2018), is forthcoming with Verso. She writes a regular column for the culture section of Tribune magazine, is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and is web/social media/reviews editor of History of the Human Sciences.
Organized by Wilhelm Brüggen (BIPP), Monika Englisch (BIPP) and Andreas Gehrlach (HU Berlin
Merlin’s Open Mind:Madness, Prophecy, and Poetry in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s <i>Vita Merlini</i>
Get PDFThis essay considers the observatory in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, with its seventy doors and seventy windows, as a structuring emblem of the title character’s state of mind and, by extension, the poem’s poetics and epistemology
Reducing Climate
Get PDFThe notion of reduction is central to the discourse on climate disaster and environmental collapse. A political understanding of climate has led to urgent calls for ever increasing measures aiming at reduction—for example reducing emissions or consumption. Such calls are based on the premise that there can be quantitative remedies to the current environmental disaster. However well-intentioned, earnest, and necessary such approaches are, this symposium would like to pose the provocative question whether the current will for quantitatively defined action against climate breakdown might actually be a symptom of—rather than a solution to—the problem at hand. The attempt to restore nature to a desirable or optimal state seems to be a desire to sublimate, dismiss, or silence the aporias that environmental disaster imposes intellectually, politically, and existentially. In order to think through the blindspots of the dominant discourse on climate breakdown, the symposium addresses a range of topics including the local dimensions of the climate question, the psychoanalysis of apocalypse, visual representations of ecological disasters, the paradoxes posed by the reliance on scientific authority, the philosophy of climate, and notions of climate debt and climate futures. The symposium features a workshop entitled ‘Legal Imagination for Gaia’ that attempts to develop lateral alternatives to the legal personification of nature. The workshop seeks to create or repurpose legal concepts such as species, trans-subjective rights, diffuse interests, ecocide, and intergenerational justice