Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Beth Guilding (Goldsmiths):
'What is the Disaster? The Gaze to the Sky'
“For man dwells by spanning ‘on the earth’ and ‘beneath the sky.’ This ‘on’ and ‘beneath’ belong together. Their interplay is the span that man traverses at every moment insofar as he is as an earthly being.”
Thus speaks Heidegger, whilst discussing Hölderlin’s poem ‘In lieblicher Blaue’ [‘In Lovely Blue’], in his essay ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ Here, he suggests that man’s very nature is dependent on this interplay between earth and sky, and man or woman’s status as a being who resides between them. But what does he mean by this? Furthermore, how does this dwelling, or ‘spanning’ relate to art (that is to say, to poetry, which is, Heidegger tells us in an earlier essay, ‘the founding of truth’)?
These are huge questions that arise from what Heidegger also calls the ‘riddle of art’, questions that require time, perhaps endless time, to address; thus, in this paper our task shall be to explore just one aspect of this riddle: the riddle of the sky. And we shall be exploring this riddle not only through the eyes of Heidegger, but also, more poignantly, through the eyes of the child we meet in Blanchot’s 1980 text The Writing of the Disaster, the child who arises in Blanchot’s fragment ‘(A primal scene?)’.
Taken together, both the Heidegger’s essay and Blanchot’s primal scene can be seen to pertain to the same event: an event whereby the gaze to the sky brings about a rupture in the spectator’s relationship to and with language, as well as with the Self. The aim of this paper is to explore the meaning of this gaze, what happens to the sky and how, in turn, this brings us back to the opening lines of The Writing of the Disaster, that ‘the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything in tact.’
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Feb 2013 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
