Event overview
INC Research Group in Continental Philosophy
Abstract: There are two radically different ways of thinking about a politics of dust. The first comes from ancient Greece and it refers to the dust that Antigone sprinkled over Polynices’s dead body. This is dust as a symbol of defiance, dust that signifies resistance to Creon’s sovereign authority by evoking ancestral, sacred law – dust as a metonymy for revolutionary power. And there is also Sebald’s dust, the emblem of natural history, as Eric Santner brilliantly puts it, that is, as emblem of the destruction, the detritus that discloses a history not premised on progress and not promising ultimate redemption. In other words, Sebald’s dust has no defined revolutionary aim, but is rather an object linked to awakening and to a messianic temporality that retains a revolutionary possibility, albeit one that – unlike Antigone’s – does not challenge the sovereign directly. In-between these two opposed ways, there is Hamlet, who views man and woman as the quintessence of dust. Vardoulakis will explore what this quintessence might consist in through a detour via Hobbes, in order to derive some conclusions that relate to current debates about bare life and sovereignty.
Dimitris Vardoulakis is lecturer at the University of Western Sydney. His books include The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (Fordham UP, 2010); as an editor Spinoza Now (U of Minnesota P, 2010), After Blanchot (2005), The Political Animal (special issue of Substance, 2008) and The Politics of Place (special issue of Angelaki, 2004)
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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9 Apr 2010 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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