2021-2022 seminar Ana Teixeira Pinto: Love is the answer! What is the question? ~ from month to month
Seminar 5 (11 + 12 June 2022) in PAF
Haunted Nature
with guest lecturer Sladja Blazan
Telling connections linking horror and history are exposed in the sighting of a ghost. In this seminar, we will explore the intersection of worlding and (gothic) horror with respect to the concept of “Nature” through the lens of haunting. We will see that no new ghosts are at the center of current engagements with Nature but rather very familiar struggles structured around conceptualizations of race, class, and gender. Confirming Sylvia Wynter’s predicament that future cultural struggles will be geared towards securing a conception of a self-exclaimed “human” that implies whiteness, masculinity, cis-ness, and ability, a category of “Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,” we will take a closer look at how current narratives either confirm or reject this model of a self-exclaimed “human” in the face of the nonhuman through the concept of haunting.
reading:
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010. Chapter 1.
Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Chapter1 “Etymologies: Terror; or; On Surviving” and Chapter 2 “Etymologies: Horror; or On Dismembering,” 4-10.
Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt (eds.). “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017, G1-G14.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “On Becoming Human: An Introduction.” In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
Seminar 4 (30 April + 1 May 2022) in PAF
Sublimity (and sexuality)
As Meg Armstrong notes in her essay The Effects of Blackness, it is a cliché to say that romanticism rearticulated theological ideas in symbolist idioms. Meteorological phenomena and landscapes, often native to Europe, became emblems for secularized, and by extension naturalized, transcendence. But, Armstrong continues, this naturalization not only connoted native bodies, it also attached itself to imported bodies, exotic bodies, foreign to the undulating valleys and snowy slopes of the Palatinate or the Bohemian region—bodies that “quickly become subject to an aesthetic discourse.” In this seminar we will survey the aesthetic categories of the sublime, the exotic and the grotesque, and their imbrication with tales of conquest and plunder occurring at sites of imperial extraction or expansion.
Seminar 3 (26 + 27 March 2022) in Bergamo
Immortality
In her essay Inheritance and Finitude Donna V. Jones ties the quest for immortality to the temporal structure of the economy, that is, to the “inheritance of assets already accumulated and living on immortally as it were and trivializing the efforts of the living.” In this seminar we will look into fantasies of eternal life, the early 20th century search for supermen types, the conversion of wealth into power, and evolutionary schemes.
Seminar 2 (17 + 18 February) in Arnhem
The pursuit of happiness
“Everyone wants the good life” is the first sentence is the eponymous book by Yi-Fu Tuan, but, the author goes on to caution “how it is conceived varies greatly from culture to culture,” from person to person even, under the individuating conditions imposed by modernity. Samuel Smiles' 1859 book Self-help, the book that inaugurated the self-help genre, was published in the same year as Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. In her book The Promise of Happiness Sara Ahmed describes happiness as “a way of maximizing your potential.” Subjective pleasure and displeasure validate and naturalize teleology. Addressing J.G.Herder, German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously quipped:
“Does the author really mean that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited by more civilized nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been just as good if this island had been occupied by happy sheep and cattle as by happy human beings who merely enjoy themselves?”
In this seminar we will look into the aspirational dimension of the Western conception of happiness and its function as an imperial technology.
reading
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness: Happy Objects and Unhappy Queers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Chapter "Envy"
Mills, Charles. "The Chronopolitics of Racial Time." Time & Society 29, nr. 2 (2020): 297-317.
Terada, Rei. “Hegel’s Racism for Radicals.” Radical Philosophy 2, nr. 5 (2019)
Seminar 1 (13 + 14 November) in Nida
Love conquers all
“Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel” French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan famously wrote in 1970. His formula, especially in the English translation ––“there is no such thing as a sexual relationship”–– is somewhat misleading: Lacan is not denying people of different genders have sex, rather he is saying that there is no possible relation between masculine and feminine positions. Vernacular expressions like “battle of the sexes” also find heterosexuality to be fraught with difficulties, yet pop culture tends to naturalize intimate agonies while churning out self-help manuals to “help us better manage our romantic lives by making us more aware of the ways in which we unconsciously engineer our own defeats.”(1) As Lauren Berlant sustains, while the relation of romantic fantasy to lived intimacy is a tenuous one, love remains a site of disappointment, but not disenchantment, with the way life is lived under the rule of private property.
In our first seminar we will look at the social function of romantic love and its position within the cultural grammar of modernity.
(1) Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts, Cambridge: Polity, 2015.