Transforming Tradition: Baroque Ventures, Identities and Values in Literature and Theory II

Charles University, Spring Semester 2006

Erik S. Roraback

B.A., Pomona Coll.; Rotary Scholar, Univ. of Western Australia; Oxford exchange student, École Normale Supérieure-Paris; Ph.D., Univ. of Oxford; Visiting Prof., Univ. de Provence (Aix-Marseille-1); Adjunct Prof., Vermont Coll. Union Institute & Univ.

SNAPSHOT:

“Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it [emphasis added]. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.”

--Walter Benjamin, culture critic 1892-1940, “On the Concept of History”

“Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated has been done and accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.”

--Friedrich Schlegel, Jena Romantic critic and author (1772-1829)

TWO ACADEMIC HOURS PER WEEK

E-mail: erik.roraback@praha1.ff.cuni.cz or erikroraback@hotmail.com

Time and Place: To Be Announced.

Office hours: To Be Announced

Special program: Intercultural Studies (English and American Studies, Charles Univ.); Suffolk University Program (Charles Univ.); ERASMUS; Institute of Philosophy and Religion (Charles Univ.).

Objectives:

We shall use the operative concept of the Baroque as a periodizing category to find new points of approach to some major figures and movements in primarily continental European literary and theoretico-philosophical culture from the last three hundred and fifty years (which is to say since the birth of the modern age: the long-Baroque modern). In so doing, this interdisciplinary seminar that dialectically deconstructs the opposition between literature and theory/philosophy seeks to elucidate some of the major contours of a Baroque or of a postbaroque aesthetic and world-picture that would speak to our contemporaneity by showing how we are not only still terraced and demarcated by discoveries of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries, but also that this epoch produced concepts with unlimited developments. The question for these thinkers and writers of how to forge an effective mode of being over against the great powers of the modern baroque world and of how these authors interrogate the fact/value distinction, will here be engaged in particular. Therefore, the thematic trio of ventures, identities and values will also be explored in some depth. Students of literature without formal training or background in theory or in philosophy are welcome to attend for the course also aims to give some background knowledge in intellectual history for the concepts that helped to form the history and development of literature in English and in other European languages. Thinkers and writers explored include Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Henri Bergson, Simone Weil, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Étienne Balibar, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, all of whom today are enjoying interest in their writings both in and outside of departments of literature and philosophy. The course is conducted in English and stands on its own as a separate seminar from the others that have already been offered as part of a cycle of seminars I am giving across a several year period around the topic of the literary and philosophical baroque.

“If I were to be asked what we are, I should answer: ‘We are the door to everything that can be, we are the expectation that no material response can satisfy, no trick with words deceive .’”

--Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“It is always a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned, or of tempting it into an uncertain combat.”

--Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?

“the knowledge of human misery, knowledge of which is the door of all wisdom.”

--Weil, Gravity & Grace

Assessment:

To receive credit for the seminar students will be required to have no more than three absences and to submit a final composition of 2500 words on a topic of their creative choice that may also be graded as písemná práce. (Specialization students will be required to submit a longer final essay of 3500 words that may also be marked as písemná práce.)

Material:

Selections from some of the following texts will be available in a course reader, or available as single texts on reserve, at the English department library; others of the texts the instructor will refer to in the seminar and students are encouraged to pursue their own interests accordingly even beyond the life of the course:

Bataille, Georges: Guilty (1961, trans. 1988 Lapis).

Inner Experience (1954, trans. 1988 SUNY).

On Nietzsche (1945, trans. 1992 Athlone).

The Accursed Share (Volumes 1, 2 & 3, Zone Books MIT P)

Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents (AK Press,

2003).

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari:

What is Philosophy? (1991, trans. 1994 Columbia) pp. 163-200 “Percept, Affect, and Concept”.

Klossowski, Pierre: Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969, trans. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997).

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe: “Obliteration” pp. 57-98 from The Subject of Philosophy, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 83 (1975, 1979, trans. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993).

McDonough, Tom, ed.: Guy Debord and the Situationist International (2005, MIT P).

Nancy, Jean-Luc: “Of Being Singular Plural” from Being Singular Plural pp. 1-100 (1996, trans. 2000 Stanford).

“Shattered Love” pp. 82-109 from The Inoperative Community (1986, trans. 1991 Minnesota).

Rancière, Jacques: The Politics of Aesthetics, with an afterword by Slavoj Žižek (London:

Continuum, 2004).

Roraback, Erik S.: --“A French Nietzschean Baroque: Georges Bataille’s The Atheological Summa, Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, and Maurice Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond” work-in-progress.

--“An Existential-Aesthetic Baroque through Kierkegaard’s Diary, Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value, and Bergson’s Two Sources on the Morality of Religion” work-in-progress.

--“Contemporary Baroque Conditions for Being and Inventing:

Balibar’s Politics and the Other Scene (2002) and Negri-Hardt’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)” work-in-progress.

Weil, Simone: Gravity & Grace (trans. 1997, Nebraska).

Provisional schedule; more exact readings to be announced:

Weeks 1-4: The Economic and the Social in the baroque period: 1650-2005: Balibar, Rancière, Hardt

and Negri

Rancière, Jacques: The Politics of Aesthetics

Roraback, Erik S.: “Contemporary Baroque Conditions for ‘Existence and Creation’:

Balibar’s Politics and the Other Scene (2002) and Negri-Hardt’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)” work-in-progress

Weeks 5 & 6: Values, Identities, Ventures: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Bergson, Weil

Roraback, Erik S.: “An Existential-Aesthetic Baroque through Kierkegaard’s Diary, Wittgenstein’s

Culture and Value, Bergson’s Two Sources on the Morality of Religion”and Weil’s Gravity & Grace”

Weeks 7-12: Choices of Existence: Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski

Bataille, Georges: The Atheological Summa

Blanchot, Maurice: The Step Not Beyond

Klossowski, Pierre: Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Roraback, Erik S.: “A French Nietzschean Baroque: Georges Bataille’s The Atheological Summa, Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, and Maurice Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond”

Weeks 13-14: The Individual and the Social: Guy Debord and the Situationist International

McDonough, Tom, ed.: Guy Debord and the Situationist International (2005, MIT P).

Essays due 10 June 2006.