We need a thought which does not fall apart in the face of horror.

- George Bataille, The Accursed Share

 

The seminar takes its point of departure from horror as a thing whose relation to form is troubled and troubling, and whose tonality exceeds the specificity of the genre associated with its name. Like the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit) with which it is inseparably bound, as the artist Mike Kelley puts it, horror remains “difficult to describe.”  This difficulty is bound up with the thing itself and its peculiarity of tone. It is horror's distinctive unknowability that transports us to the core of modernity and the art that defines it. To allude to Victor Hugo’s description of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, art registers modernity with a shudder (“un nouveau frisson”). If we are to come to terms with our historical place and thus grapple with the on-going effects of how modernity continues to unhinge the subject, we need forms of thought, as Bataille suggests, that do not disintegrate in the face of horror. Horror thus poses the problem of form and formal retraint with the utmost precision, since it poses the problem of form at its limit, as a matter of what lacks form, i.e., the formless. Not dissimilar to the structure of the unconscious, horror is the thing evaded, addressable only indirectly, appearing only at the margin and the disturbances that unsettle the line. 

The core of the seminar is organized around four nodal points: Sigmund Freud’s essay on The Uncanny(1919) and the artist Mike Kelley’s exhibition The Uncanny (1993); Julia Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection; Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom, and Eugenie Brinkema’s Life-Destroying Diagrams. The project of the seminar will be a workshop based around Brinkema’s book. Brinkema will give a public lecture and participate in the workshop. Students will be expected to present material during the course of the seminar and present a short paper at the workshop.  

 

Meetings: 14.10 - 10-13:00 (SR 25) 28.10 -  10-13:00 (SR 25) 04.11- 10-13:00 (SR 25) 18.11 - 10-13:00 (SR 25) 2.12 - 10:13:00 (SR 25) 9.12 - 10-13:00 (SR 25) 16.12 - 10-13:00 (SR 25) 13.01 - 10-13:00 (SR 25) 20.01 . 10 - 18:00 (Tagung: rm TBA) 

Class presentation and Workshop presentation