A Workshop organised by Professor Daniel Katz (Warwick) and Professor Benjamin Noys (Chichester), hosted by CPCT.

Saturday, 18 March 2017
10:45am – 6:30pm
RHB 342, Goldsmiths, University of London

(Free) registration here.

The current theoretical scene has often swung between invocations of affirmative joy and melancholic meditations. This oscillation is figured in the assumption of a joyous continuity between philosophy and politics, or the melancholy and chastened consideration of their sundering. Instead, this event focuses on neurosis as a missing term, a form of ‘blockage’, of delay and prevarication, which could open-up the tensions of the present moment. In particular this also involves a re-consideration of poetry as a site that has witnessed a resurgence in political engagement and the thinking through of the damaged subjectivities of contemporary capitalism. Poetry, often dismissed under the signs of neurosis or of lack of relevance or popularity, offers another ‘minor’ site for interrogating the theoretical and political moods and affects of the present moment. This unstable combination of neurosis and poetry is a deliberately fragile construction that we hope can allow the exploration of the fragilities of our subjectivities and experiences.

 

SCHEDULE

10:45-11:00 am – Introduction

11:00-12:00 pm – Professor Emma Mason (Warwick): “Critical Vulnerability and the Weakness of Poetry”

12:15-1:15 pm – Professor Daniel Katz (Warwick): “Real Ruins: Modernist Neurosis, Impersonal Politics”

1:15-2:45 pm – Lunch

2:45-3:45 pm – Dr. Natalia Cecire (Sussex): “The Cell, the Shell, and the Death Drive: Marianne Moore and the Open Secrets of the Natural World”

4:00-5:00 pm – Professor Benjamin Noys (Chichester): “The Cosmogony of Revolution: Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters and Anti-Neurosis”

5:15-6:15 pm – Roundtable

 

PRELIMINARY READINGS

(For PDFs copies please visit https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ll0vsfxjzmxq0yr/AACeRSwFZ9905X6cwPV42Kusa?dl=0)

Berardi, Franco, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Semiotext(e), 2012).

Carson, Anne, “Gnosticisms,” in Decreation (New York: Vintage Books, 2006)

Noys, Benjamin, ‘Long Live Neurosis!’ (2016): https://www.academia.edu/27780212/Long_Live_Neurosis_

Katz, Daniel, “‘I did not walk here all the way from prose’: Ben Lerner’s virtual poetics”, Textual Practice online, 24 March 2016: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1119987

Lysack, Krista, ‘The Productions of Time: Keble, Rossetti and Victorian Devotional Reading’, Victorian Studies, 55.3 (2013), 451-470.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, ed. by Adam Frank, 123-51. Series Q. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Seltzer, Mark, The Official World (Duke University Press, 2016).

Vattimo, Gianni, “The Shattering of the Poetic Word,” in The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988, orig. in Italian, 1985).

Taussig, Michael T. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Contact: j.ng[at]gold.ac.uk