Event overview
InC Seminar Series: 'The future: philosophy between utopia and end-time prophecy'
Jon Shaw (Goldsmiths) 'Editorial Futurology: Fernando Pessoa and Tharg the Mighty'
In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alain Badiou turns to the 'case' of poet Fernando Pessoa to set out a (if not the) task for contemporary philosophy. If, as Badiou asserts, 'modern' philosophy (covering all of those tendential axes we might associate with the proper names Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Deleuze) shares in an anti-Platonism, where is the thought which can resolve, or overcome the disjunction of Platonic and modern thought? It can be found, he tells us, in the heteronymic practices of Fernando Pessoa - the constellation of poems signed by Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro and Pessoa-in-person.
This problem is a long-standing one for Badiou, evident even as the driving force in his monograph on Deleuze, The Clamor of Being. His argument is compelling, yet he fails to attend to a facet of his chosen case
which would bolster it yet further and even offer a praxis for the fulfilment of the task: No matter what degree of credence we give to the 'reality' of the hetronyms, and to Pessoa's relation to them, the vulcan and restless machinations of explosive multiplicity reduced to common source (only to be re-fractured) is resolutely clarified by the fact that Pessoa undertook relentless editorial activity on behalf of all of these poets - including, or course, himself. The editorial procedure treats the work of each and all of the
heteronyms with a levelling impersonality.
This strange machination is mirrored and inverted in the case of Tharg the Mighty, the ('fictional') editor of British weekly sci-fi comics anthology 2000 AD, who also appears as a character within its pages (most notably, for us, in the series of Futureshocks penned by Alan Moore in the early 1980s). The succession of editors of the comic's 24 year history have written Tharg stories, and themselves appeared as 'editor droids' subject to the Mighty's draconian inconstancy, which is also, of course, their own - the Tharg stories also offer other writers on the comic to criticise their editor.
Exploring and combining these strains of editorial machination in line with Badiou's defined philosophical task, we shall test the possibility of a thought which does not choose anti-Platonism over its regressive reinstatement, and come to ask what the possibilities might be for a contemporary philosophy capable of looking to comics with a reverence and insight previously reserved for poetry. The particular knotting of visual and textual elements which comics are (uniquely) capable of may point toward a combination of discursive and non-discursive thought which may well serve the kind of overcoming which Badiou's Pessoatask demands.
Illustrative Bibliography:
Badiou, Alain Handbook of Inaesthetics; The Century; The Clamor of Being
Balso, Judith Pessoa, The Metaphysical Courier
Moore, Alan (et al.) The Complete Futureshocks
Pessoa, Fernando A Little Larger than the Entire Universe
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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13 Mar 2012 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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