SIAH PGR Seminar Series | Anticipatory Images: The Human and Humanity in "The Buribunks" and “Ping”, Joseph Owen Event
- Time:
- 17:00
- Date:
- 26 January 2022
- Venue:
- Online
For more information regarding this event, please email Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities at siah@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
These PGR-led, monthly sessions are aimed to share the excellent doctoral research being undertaken within the Faculty. These are an opportunity to engage in cross-School and cross-Faculty discourse and to be part of an inclusive community of ideas, concepts, methods, and approaches that characterise research in the Arts and Humanities. Initially these sessions will be run online, with a view to moving to a blended approach in the new year.
Anticipatory Images: The Human and Humanity in "The Buribunks" and “Ping”
In their respective works, “The Buribunks” (1918) and “Ping” (1966), Carl Schmitt and Samuel Beckett approach the problem of anticipation, and its effect on ideas of the human and of humanity. Beckett’s understanding of anticipation is like Schmitt’s, but it also entails a very different stance and affective relationship to who counts as human. Bringing the two texts side-by-side helps illuminate more starkly and precisely two observations: one, the relation between anticipation and both writers’ ideas of the human; two, the value of the human as less and as more than a political category. This paper uses “Ping” to advance a reading of sovereignty in which demarcated space is articulated through fractured and percussive time, and, in conjunction, successive time is articulated through confined and overwhelming space. The analysis draws on Schmitt’s lifelong intellectual treatment of anticipation, which begins with “The Buribunks” and continues through to his postwar work on Raum and nomos. While appearing to demonstrate a wry capsizal of the state of exception, Schmitt’s state of anticipation is rather a way of working through the critical implications of thwarted representations of sovereignty. By taking a long view of Schmitt, this paper seeks to understand the human and humanity with recourse to Beckett’s short prose
Biography:
Joseph Owen is a doctoral researcher in English at the University of Southampton. His thesis is entitled Carl Schmitt, Sovereignty, Modernism. He works as a policy associate at PPS and teaches seminars on political theory and the novel.
You can find a recording of this seminar here .
If you are interested in leading a session and sharing your research with a wider Faculty/University PGR community, please contact Dr Jo Turney ( J.A.Turney@soton.ac.uk ) or Professor Ryan Bishop ( R.Bishop@soton.ac.uk ) or if you want to discuss access to the sessions contact Claire Wilkins ( c.lwilkins@soton.ac.uk ).