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Spring 2025 Speaker Series

Spring 2025 Schedule:

Bartleby, the Inscrutable Scrivener: On the Negative Constitution of Action with Dmitri Nikulin, The New School

Monday May 5 at 1pm PST 

Please register to attend virtually here

In Melville’s celebrated story Bartleby the Scrivener, everything is put in the negative. The inscrutability and seeming incomprehensibility of the main character’s actions and the challenge presented by his famous “speech-act” of “I prefer not to” makes it particularly challenging to narrate the story and make sense of it. Bartleby comes in negative relief, elusive in his seeming ordinariness. For this reason, one has to use uncommon philosophical and literary means, including apophatic accounts and alliteration, in order to describe the indescribable, pointing toward unutterable strangeness and barely explainable human goodness. Bartleby’s acting is inscribed into his mode of being. He writes but does not read and almost does not speak beyond “I would prefer not to.” Not exercising self-reflection, he does not display any interiority. His apparent non-thinking is translated into an action bound by negativity, which eventually halts and evaporates. In “preferring not to,” Bartleby wills nothing. Yet, since nothing is nothing, it cannot be willed. Such a will is not a rational will that claims itself for itself as moral and establishes itself in an act of autonomous volition. It is the will that does not will itself and thus wills to stop willing. It is the will that negates and suppresses but does not destroy itself. In this way, the act of willing nothing does not annihilate the will altogether but rather suspends itself. This establishes a logic of preference that does not prefer anything and hence prefers nothing. The action defined by Bartleby’s silent and motionless being is therefore the action of non-preference.

Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. His interests range from ancient and early modern philosophy to philosophy of literature and of history. He is the author of a number of books including Matter, Imagination and Geometry (Ashgate, 2002), On Dialogue (Lexington, 2006), Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford University Press, 2010), Comedy, Seriously (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), The Concept of History (Bloomsbury, 2017), Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2019), Critique of Bored Reason (Columbia University Press, 2022), and Non-Being in Ancient Thought (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

 

Black Anticolonialism and Radical Relation with Sophia Azeb, UC Santa Cruz

Monday May 12 at 1pm PST

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This talk explores the radical anticolonial subjectivities forged across what Richard Iton suggests as "diasporic breathing room," or - in my own interpretation - the ungeographic sensibilities that Black study offers transnational and translational theories of decolonisation. Focusing on the productive tensions emergent from 20th century Black anticolonial practice - particularly the unmapping tendencies of Frantz Fanon - this talk attends to the cultural, political, and affective matrix of anticolonial possibilities and limits emergent from across the African diaspora. This emphasis on how Black anticolonial practice draws upon the unsettled spatial orientation of the diaspora, which informs Black anticolonial epistemologies, does not presume that racial identity itself is fixed, or that meanings made from identity and experience constitute an anticolonial politic in and of itself. Rather, the ever shifting, "undecidable blackness" that instructs and shapes particular anticolonial pursuits towards the horizon of decolonisation make legible a set of radical subjectivities that embolden anticolonial sociality beyond the "authenticating geography" of the nation-state.

Sophia Azeb is an assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UCSC. Her book, tentatively titled "Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab," follows the circuits of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North and West Africa and Europe. 

 

Mysticism, Practice, and the Materiality of the Imagination with Niklaus Largier, UC Berkeley

Monday May 19 at 1pm PST

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In recent years, a specific form of critique has been rediscovered in so-called mystical texts. In this talk, I will focus on the character of this critique, its anchoring in practices that focus on the undoing of sedimented perceptual orders, and on the importance of a materialist understanding of the imagination in this context. 
Niklaus Largier is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of German and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. He works on mysticism, the history of the senses, and of the imagination. His most recent book is Figures of Possibility. Mysticism, Aesthetic Experience, and the Play of the Senses (Stanford UP, 2022).

  

Making Death Meaningful: On Journalism's Humanitarian Desire with Isaac Blacksin, Texas A&M University

Monday June 2 at 1pm PST

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Lauded journalism from the 2016-17 battle for Mosul, Iraq, revealed gross underestimates of US-caused civilian harm from anti-Islamic State operations, exemplifying journalism’s ability to “speak truth to power.” Yet in questioning official death tallies, journalists failed to challenge the rationale offered for this harm: an accidental exception or necessary excess to justified violence. By focusing on individuated and corporeal suffering, by categorizing violence as lawful or extreme, and by attending to immanent violence – rather than the structures perpetuating violence – as the central problem of war, journalism emphasized the moral dynamics of militarism while mystifying its political logic. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in and around Mosul during the battle, this talk assesses war reportage in its contemporary humanitarian mode. It tracks a transformation in the journalistic representation of war from the effects of policy on populations to the effects of violence on the innocent, with implications for popular understandings of violence from Ukraine to Palestine.

Isaac Blacksin is Assistant Professor of Critical Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Conflicted: Making News from Global War (Stanford University Press, 2024) and co-editor of a recent issue of boundary 2 on the life and thought of Norman O. Brown. Isaac’s work – on violence, fantasy, and the politics of representation – appears in journals such as Public Culture, Media, War & Conflict, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.