Living on After Failure. A Talk with Irving Goh | Program in Experimental Critical Theory

The Program in Experimental Critical Theory presents

Living on After Failure

A Talk with Irving Goh

Tuesday, April 14, 2026
5:00pm PDT
Kaplan Hall Room #348

Advanced Registration

Advanced registration is required by Friday, April 10, 2026.

REGISTER TO ATTEND HERE

About the Talk

In this talk, Irving Goh will present on his latest book, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). He will share his thoughts on failure as failure, that is, failure without recuperation, failure as all negativity. Such a thinking of failure as a thorough impasse not only resists narratives of progress and ideologies of success and their accompanying notions of grit and resilience. It also registers, at the ontological level, the affective structure of existence. Professor Goh will also discuss the literary texts that inform his work on failure.

Readings to be discussed are listed below and are available on the ECT site:

• Introduction and Ch. 3 of Living On After Failure.

About the Speaker

Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, L’existence prépositionnelle (Galilée, 2019), The Deconstruction of Sex (with Jean-Luc Nancy, Duke UP, 2021), and most recently, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). His next book, Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit, will be published by Cornell UP this summer 2026. For his current book projects, he is interested in the end(s) of work, world literature and the question of citizenship, and theorizing the Asian figure.

About the Program in Experimental Critical Theory

The focus of the 2025-2026 Experimental Critical Theory seminar (COM LIT250), taught by Professor Eleanor Kaufman, is “Structure.”