Deleuzian Impoverishment: New Research in Aesthetics of Community
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Deleuzian Impoverishment:
New Research in Aesthetics of Community
Monday 14 November 2016, 1-3pm, room 112, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H OPD
This is BRAKC's first symposium of the 2016-17 academic year. We will be welcoming academics from Turkey, France and Malta, who will present us their recent research in the aesthetics of community.
Refreshments will be served. To book a place, please contact Nathalie Wourm at n.wourm@bbk.ac.uk.
Cory Stockwell (Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey)
Deleuzian Impoverishment
Anyone interested in the theme of impoverishment in Deleuze's work will find it in many different forms, such as subtraction, reduction, and exhaustion; and in many different places, for instance the beginning of one of Deleuze and Guattari's most celebrated texts, A Thousand Plateaus. In the first plateau, 'Rhizome,' in a discussion of multiplicity, they insist that the multiple 'must be made,' and that the way to do this is via what they term the n 1: 'the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted.' It would be difficult to think the question of community from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari's work, in other words, without taking this subtraction into account. But does this thought, a thought of both the multiple and the fragmentary, not nonetheless, in the subtlest of manners, leave unity intact? This paper, through a reading of A Thousand Plateaus (with particular attention paid to the analysis of Pierre Clastres in this work), and drawing upon Roberto Bolaño's 1996 novel Distant Star, argues that unity always lies in the background of Deleuze and Guattari's thinking of multiplicity; but that, at the same time, these thinkers provide us with the very tools necessary, not so much to go beyond as to distance ourselves from this unity, by way of an act of impoverishment.
Cory Stockwell is Assistant Professor in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. His work has appeared in journals such as the Oxford Literary Review, CR: The New Centennial Review, and SubStance. His current book project deals with the place of stars and other 'heavenly bodies' in the work of Kafka, Lispector, and Bolaño.
Thierry Tremblay (University of Malta)
Senses of Community
The notion of Community has been and still is at the centre of philosophical, political and social debates in the West. The word Community has different etymological roots in European languages (e.g. κοινός in Greek, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in German, spoleÄenstvà in Czech or yhteisö in Finnish).Roman languages and English may share the same word (stemming from the Latin Communitas), but their meanings and uses diverge: a community is not, for instance, always a communauté. This short paper will try to make sense of the different words expressing the 'common' of the community.
Thierry Tremblay is Senior lecturer at the Department of French at the University of Malta. He taught literature, literary theory and philosophy at the University of Cyprus, Charles University in Prague and the Anglo-American University in Prague. He is a member of CCC (Communauté des Chercheurs sur la Communauté). He is the author of Anamnèses: Essai sur Pierre Klossowski (Hermann, 2012), Frontières du sujet: Une Esthétique du déclin (L'Harmattan, 2015) and is the editor of the special issue on Pierre Klossowski for the journal Europe (2015).
Rémi Astruc (Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France)
The Aesthetics of Community in Contemporary Thought
What is it that brings us together and allows to feel a sense of shared experience and existence with people whom we don't even know? Why is it that the question of community remains highly important, despite an increasing majority of individuals who are less and less in contact with actual forms of living in common? Why (and how) is it that art in the first place, narrative arts (telling tales, novels, films) but also dancing or poetry occasionally allow us to feel that we belong to a community of beings?
Astruc argues it is because, through the arts (and beyond one's conscious will), community not only unveils itself, but also, if we are in a position to be affected by it, 'speaks' itself to us and acquires a form in doing so. He will present the research he is conducting alongside an international network of researchers (the 'CCC') focused on the notion of community across disciplinary frameworks, including two new works published in 2016: a book-length essay entitled Nous? l'aspiration à la communauté et les arts and La Communauté revisitée/Community Redux. Both books explore the actuality of the notion of Community in contemporary thinking as it relates to the issues that define our present, ultimately seeking to understand what can still bring us together in societies where the answer to this question remains largely unclear. This roundtable presentation and discussion will provide an opportunity to share research concerns on all aspects of thinking Community'"in the past, present, and future'"on a multidisciplinary level. It will also provide the occasion to learn more about the 'CCC' and its future activities.
Rémi Astruc is Professeur de littératures francophones et comparées at Université de Cergy-Pontoise, where he was also Director of the Department of Literature. He is an expert on representations of identity and community in literature, comedy and the grotesque, and the anthropological function of literature, and is the author of numerous books and articles on these themes.
Contact name: Nathalie Wourm
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