Seminars

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the U.S. Supreme Court negated nearly fifty years of precedent supporting reproductive justice, health, and women’s autonomy to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973). Simultaneously, the decision gave new life to a strange entity that has been less closely studied: “the unborn.” This essay examines the premises required to make these entities come alive, and outlines the claims that need to be in place to grant these quasi-legal entities a legal standing in active conflict with, even favored over, that of women. In particular, the essay considers what so-called “unborn persons” might have to do with corporate or artificial personhood.

Freud’s “Thoughts for the Time on War and Death” elaborates on how the experience of mass death shifts one’s understanding of individual death and vice versa. Conceived as a primitive relation between loved ones and enemy combatants (of identifications and cathexes), the fundamental distinction between life and death occurs through the experience of being next to the corpse. This short article examines that article by Freud as a way to understand how the human and the group is configured psychoanalytically through death.

This talk explores the use of flat, cool, distant, deadpan, recessive, or otherwise inscrutable affects in a handful of contemporary US poets on the left. Along the way, it contrasts varying receptions of modernism as an emotional as much as a formal regime in the US and the UK, debunks the expectation that lower-key emotional performances are less politically potent than turbulent ones, thinks about tone in relation to comic and tragic models of sociality, and tries to expand the repertoire of lyric performance beyond spectacular, intensive, or heightened feeling. Ideas and authors for discussion include (among others) Juliana Spahr, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Wendy Trevino, Holly Pester on "poet-voice," Tina Post on deadpan, Lauren Berlant on the "sentimental whiteness" of US national culture, and Shonni Enelow on acting's "Great Recession."

Doubting that the new meaning of hegemony brought to light by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe can really replace the old one, I argue that only an anarchist interrogation of horizontality and a refusal of representation, including the one comprised in the signifier/signified relationship, is able to radically challenge the logic of political and theoretical domination.