Seminar (372-0-2)

Topic

On Violence and the Prefigurative: Abolition, Depo

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-420: Wed 1:00PM - 3:50PM

Overview of class

On Violence and the Prefigurative: Abolition, Deposition, Mourning, and Strike

When we grieve communally, we go on a general strike. We demand a suspension and an interruption, the condition of possibility for a beginning that will unfold otherwise. We join forces with the prefigurative, the unthought, and the uncaptured; when we pause, we coalesce with the temporal plasticity of the possible, with that which resists and survives what philosopher María Zambrano calls "sacrificial history."

In this course we will read and respond, through collective and experimental writing, to a series of texts that insists that to change the world means both to invent a new language and to unearth the language of the buried, the unseen, and the unheard. We will focus on the force of the prefigurative and will study forms of counter-history that acknowledge that both the polysemy and ubiquity of violence pose a problem that can only be disentangled through an insurgent poetic transmutation.

Among others prefigurative propositions, we might encounter Rosa Luxemburg's general strike; W.E.B. Du Bois abolition-democracy; Walter Benjamin deposition of the law as a form of counter-violence; Eleni Stecoupoulos's abaton; Denise Ferreira Da Silva's multiple uses of Leibniz's corpus infinitum; Werner Hamacher's afformative strike; Fred Moten's chromatic saturation; Sarah Jaffe's excessive and revolutionary grief; Peter Dimock's injunction to write a love song for imperial times; Paul B. Preciado's dysphoria mundi; Cristina Rivera Garza's forensics of the unbearable in Liliana's Invincible Summer; or Christina Sharpe's wake work. Additionally, all participants will bring their own examples taken from a variety of artistic practices.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Attendance at 1st class mandatory
SoC Additional Distro