Event overview
Part of the InC (Continental Philosophy Research Group) spring seminar series. These talks by current Goldsmiths research students, Goldsmiths academic staff and invited speakers, aim to present current research in the field of continental philosophy. The events are free and open to all.
"Agamben's Cat & Mouse Game"
In his 2005 essay In Praise of Profanation, Giorgio Agamben invokes the cat that plays with a ball of yarn as an exemplar of his strategy of profanation. The cat’s play frees the hunting behavior from its “genetic inscription” as exclusively directed toward the end of the capture and death of the mouse, both liberating the mouse from being prey as well as exhibiting the hunting behavior as pure means. Through its deactivation of the hunt, the cat’s game with the yarn renders inoperative its predatory character and opens it to new use, but this play is admittedly episodic, the mouse’s respite is only temporary, and the tale remains one of capture and evasion—a cat and mouse game. Yet, conversely, far from indicating emancipation, Agamben’s critique of deconstruction as a thwarted messianism in which infinite deferral prevents the trace from knowing its own fullness, can also be understood as a cat and mouse game. As he writes in The Time That Remains (2000), “A signification that only signifies itself can never seize hold of itself, it can never catch up with a void in representation,” and in this sense, the cat’s efforts are eternally thwarted by the mouse that forever evades her clutches in a nightmarish repetition. Further, Agamben himself seems to play a cat and mouse game with his readers in his tendency to retroactively recharacterize his concepts, arguably restricting them to a proteanism that evades fixed definition in spite of his continued ascription to them a teleological significance in the history of Western metaphysics.
This paper will attempt to draw together these somewhat disparate ideas, the manifold cat and mouse games of Agamben’s thought, in order to gauge to what extent Agamben himself evades the apparatuses of capture that he has identified for us.
Jenny Doussan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths where she undertakes teaching on the BA Art History course and does administrative work. She is on the research board for InC.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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15 Mar 2011 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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