Our second fellow is Bonnie Honig – she is with us from the 05th of May to the 15th of May!
Tuesday 7th of May Seminar 1 at Dalhousie 1S05 14.00 – 16.30: Wordplay in Austin: What was Austin DOING in citing the Hippolytus? Is “My tongue swore to but my heart did not” canny calculation or cri de coeur?
READ:
JL Austin, How to Do Things with Words. Pp. 1-52
Euripides, Hippolytus, Cambridge version
Recommended:
Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts, Marianne Constable, Chs. 1 and 4
The Noose of Words, Readings of Desire, Violence and Language in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Barbara Goff, 1990, Chapter 3 (55-78)
Wednesday 8th of May Lecture at Dalhousie 2F13 16.00 – 18.00: Fatal Forgiveness: Hippolytus as Noir (on the politics of genre)
WATCH: Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl, 1946)
Friday 10th of May Seminar 2 at Dalhousie 1S05 14.00 – 16.30: What is a Cri de Coeur? Pain, Aberrancy, Labor, Work, and Action in Wittgenstein and Arendt
READ: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Paras. 1-47, 143-5, 185-7, 192-3, 243-274, 286, 290, 309-310, 323, 384
Arendt, The Human Condition, sections on Labor, Work, and Action with special attention to mentions/discussions of language, speech-action, and pain in each one.
Recommended: “Wittgenstein on Going On,” Hannah Ginsborg, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2020), 50: 1, 1–17.
Tuesday 14th of May Seminar 3 at Dalhousie 1G10 10.00-12.30: What (Else) Is a Cri de Coeur? A Tradition of Black Grammarians
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” and “Interstices: A Small Drama with Words”
Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights: “The Pain of Word Bondage” 146-66, and “On Being the Object of Property,” 216-236.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, Chapter 3, 75-87, and Chapter 4, 118-123.
The first fellow is Bayo Akomolafe, a prominent Yoruban philosopher, who will be visiting 29th March – 6th April. In addition to a talk on Wednesday the 3rd of April there will be 3 chances to engage with Bayo and his thinking.
To be spirited away: What does it mean to be responsible in a posthuman world?
Tuesday 2.04 10.00 – 12.00 Dalhousie 1G05
In this staggered storytelling, story-listening, speculative fabulation, sci-fi, spiritual event – part social theatre, part creation, part story construction, part communal sensing – Dr. Akomolafe deploys the parabolic vehicle of “The Spaceship Human” and his theory of white syncopation to examine and revisit prestigious notions of authenticity, inclusivity, justice, truth, politics and responsibility.
Talk : An Ocean of Milk: Ethics, Morality, and the Promise of Sensuous Solidarities in Turbulent Times,
Wednesday 03rd of April 16.00-18.00 Dalhousie 1G06
Between 1942 and 1945, the Manhattan Project successfully alchemized the world’s first nuclear weapons in Los Alamos, USA, eventually deploying them over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forcefully bringing the Second World War to a luminous end. Or so our history books suggest. In molecular worlds beneath the threshold of the visible and beyond hasty declarations of victory, in small gestures, the radioactive material from the explosion snuck into the flesh of bodies, plants, and oceans. As Barad reminds us, the year 1945 still pulses and shimmers seditiously in our bodies. This glowing radioactivity marks an edge of a moral order that territorializes how we think, how we act, how we are subjectivized, how we respond to crisis, and how we compose solidarity. In this talk, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe proposes that contemporary expressions of solidarity could be a form of biopolitical power scaffolding the citizen-subject in its dissociation. He theorizes queer openings of some kind – \cracks\ he calls them (always stylized in the reverse solidus) – as sites of ethical exile and potential new modes of being-together-with in sensuous solidarities.
The Second Gift of Prometheus
Thursday 4.04 10.00 – 12.00 Dalhousie 1G05
Using the archetypal story of a chained Titan in the Greek Titanomachy, Dr. Akomolafe tells a story of crossroads, the chiasmus that twists outcomes and subverts linear trajectories of change. He uses this story to examine trauma and healing as modes of manufacturing and maintaining subjecthood, and invites “abtherapeutic” gestures that walk away from the couch.
Listening Together – bring your lunch along
Thursday 4th of April 13.00 – 16.00 Dalhousie 1G05
In this forum, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe convenes an exploratory session of listening-together, of eating together, of thinking together at the fugitive edges of pedagogical capture. He invites listening as a making-together and a being unmade-together.