UCLA PROGRAM IN EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL THEORY

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER. Abstract: The idea of deconstruction as formulated by Heidegger (before Derrida and differently from him) implies to question the provenance of our concepts in order to bring out ways of relating to phenomena that have been concealed by a received and crystallized conceptuality. I would like to illustrate this idea from a significant example: the notion of body. It seems obvious to us that the human being possesses something like a “body” that can be separated from the other part that constitutes it, the spirit or the psyche. However, at the beginning of Western thought, there...

Abstract: Aristotle’s Poetics, which provides the earliest Western theory of fictional narrative (muthos), has in turn become an object of fiction for contemporary novelists (Borges, Eco). But the story of the Poetics goes back earlier: Aristotle as poetician was chosen as the subject of a painting by Rembrandt, and since the Renaissance, his poetical theories have been embroidered into conflicting critical metanarratives about its place and effect in the history of aesthetics. Does such a proliferation of narratives simply make a case for skeptical relativism towards this “mythical object”? or can these narratives in turn become the object of a critical...

Abstract: Freud famously stated that literature was the royal road to psychoanalysis. Following course, Lacan noted, in “The Signification of the Phallus”, that if one wanted to understand human sexuality and desire, better read Sophocle’s Oedipus, or Longus’s Daphnis and Chloë, than rely on biological inquiry and data . Even Foucault described his project to devise a “history of sexuality” as a manner of “transcribing” Diderot’s fable, Les Bijoux Indiscrets, in the language of historical inquiry. In other words, fictional narration, for which dreams and phantasy could be said to provide a template, might be the best way to approach...

Abstract: Marco Polo and his father and uncle spent seventeen years in China, and because of his personal history there, Sinologists have long scrutinized and debated his connection to the larger history of China and his status as a historical writer of China. In response to biographical discussions about Polo in Sinology, this talk investigates the way history informs the study of Le Devisement du monde. I compare Polo’s work to Chinese historiography, a genre centered on the theorization of political authority and the body politic. While Medievalists locate Polo in the European Middle Ages as a Christian European who...

Abstract: Innumerable types of graphic marks populated the visual environment of Mediterranean cities in the later Roman empire. Different sign systems competed over every imaginable surface, from walls to papyrus, lead or gems, objects to clothes and bodies, for attention, recognition, and power. That vast repertoire of signs interacted with viewers in a thousand different ways, over and above literacy. Intelligibility was often the exception. A whole constellation of practices and discourses foregrounded the realm of the unintelligible, the aporrheton, and offered the audiences of the later Roman East competing modes for apprehending what is hidden within signs. Anchored in...