玉美人传媒

Dr. Greg Jones-Katz, (Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen)

鈥淭he Neoliberal Animation in America of Theory as a 'Cognitive Good鈥欌��

A euphoria for speculation, generalization, and abstraction swept through the American academic humanities in the late 1960s and the 1970s. 鈥淪uddenly, an Age of Theory,鈥� Elizabeth Bruss observed. This paper explores how and why Theory, in classrooms, at institutes, centers, and conferences, and in publications, became a 鈥渃ognitive good鈥� in the sense given by Rens Rod and colleagues: an epistemic tool of 鈥渒nowledge-making disciplines,鈥� circulated 鈥渨ith the purpose of knowledge production鈥� and 鈥渢ransferred across disciplinary boundaries.鈥� This story is also part of the longer 鈥渉istory of critique.鈥� Like the modernists who sought freedom from conformist attachments, Theorists, by way of interpreting art鈥檚 power to demystify and undermine social bonds seen as cruel and repressive, performed a Sisyphean labor that subverted the 鈥渢ies that bind.鈥� The progressive political effects of the development and trading of Theoretical cognitive goods were legion. Coming intellectually of age in and after the post-Sixties breakdown of the appearance of consensus, Theorists extended the broader post-1960s artistic critique of culture鈥檚 stress on individualism, imagination, antiauthoritarianism, and freedom. Yet Theorists also ironically came to firmly personify the hyper-individualist neoliberal work ethic. The 鈥渋ndustry of high-tech theory,鈥� Camille Paglia observed, was an industry 鈥渁s all-American as the Detroit auto trade.鈥� Indeed, the neoliberal ethos and disposition, or what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello elaborated as a postsixties 鈥渋deology that justifies engagement in capitalism,鈥� animated Theory and possessed Theorists, as well as spaces that circulated Theory, such as the Theory and History of Literature book series, Theory journals, and the Critical Theory Institute. Meanwhile, capitalism disarmingly incorporated the nature, scope, and social effectiveness of critique by way of Theory (i.e., the valorization of a post-structuralist cultural politics) in American higher education, thereby enabling the formation of the 鈥渦niversity鈥� as a theater for culture war conflicts, ultimately shifting attention inside and outside the academy away from underlying changes in capitalism.

鈥淕eneva City of Refuge鈥澛�

(SAUTE 75^th Anniversary Event)

19:00, room PHIL201

Conversations about Geneva as sanctuary, refuge, and space of writing throughout history, with interventions from members of the English department, a local artist and a representative of the UNHCR.

Bilingual (English / fran莽ais)

Free entry, followed by an ap茅ro

Poster

Dr. Nell Wasserstrom (Boston College)

鈥�狈补肠丑迟谤盲驳濒颈肠丑办别颈迟 Revisited: Literary Modernism, Late Style, and the Temporalities of Reading鈥�

This work-in-progress brings together two strands in recent thought: the (mostly anglophone) literary critical elaboration of 鈥渓ate modernism鈥� (illuminated as it has been by scholars such as Jed Esty, Tyrus Miller, and C.D. Blanton) and the (mostly francophone) philosophical and psychoanalytic elaboration of the concept of 狈补肠丑迟谤盲驳濒颈肠丑办别颈迟 (known in English translations of Freud as 鈥渄eferred action鈥� and in French as 补辫谤猫蝉-肠辞耻辫). The latter makes one read anew the 鈥渓ateness鈥� of the former; the former provides generative ground on which to explore the specifically literary dimensions of the latter. The two strands are therefore mutually illuminating, leading us to a new understanding not only of late modernism as the crucial juncture of 1939-1941 that exceeds typical generic, nationalistic, and disciplinary distinctions, but also of 狈补肠丑迟谤盲驳濒颈肠丑办别颈迟 as a more capacious, disruptive logic of belated temporality that subverts the ways in which it has come to be codified as a self-identical psychoanalytic 鈥渃oncept.鈥� Focusing on the final works of Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism [1939]), Walter Benjamin (鈥淥n the Concept of History鈥� [1940]), and Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts [1941]), my book project argues that the singular conjunction of late style and late modernism reveals an intensification of the obsession with belatedness that has haunted modernism since its origins.

Reading Professionalization: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, 鈥淭he 玉美人传媒 and the Undercommons鈥�

group reading led by Simon Swift (UNIGE).

Graduate Student works-in-progress:

Caroline Martin (UNIGE)

鈥淭extual Ideology and Narrative Point of View in New Woman Short Fiction: Case Studies in Contextualist Narratology鈥�

Will Edwards (UNINE)

鈥淓legance, Anachronism, and the Whig Voice in Regency Era Poetry鈥�

In Memoriam: Leo Bersani

group reading led by Patrick Jones (UNIGE)