Tuesday 24th November 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Rebecca Rosenberg (King's College, London) - Nelly Arcan's Autopathographies

Quebecois writer Nelly Arcan (1973-2009) is known for her first work Putain (2001) in which the autofictional narrator writes of her sex work in addition to her alienation from others due to a patriarchal logic of female competition. She simultaneously participates in this competition of beauty and youth while also criticising it. Subtending her implication in this logic is an increasing sense of alienation while signs of psychological suffering are revealed throughout the text. She also writes of an illness and suicide determinism throughout the text, which is further elaborated in her second autofictional work, Folle (2004), an extended suicide note to an ex-lover before her self-determined suicide date at the age of 30. This determinism that runs through the two texts is retrospectively shadowed by Arcan's suicide at the age of 36. In this paper, I will investigate the extent to which Arcan's two autofictions are autopathographies (patient-authored narratives) and what they autofictionally reveal about psychological suffering.

Joanne Hornsby (King's College, London) - Sex Work and Subjectivity in George Bataille's Madame Edwarda

Georges Bataille is an ambivalent figure; he has exercised an enormous influence over deconstructive theory, been celebrated for his 'transgressive' theory of waste and excess as the fundamental truth of humanity, and his rejection of the 'restricted' utilitarian economy of investment and return (Baudrillard, Hollier, Stoekl). However, he has also been criticised as obsessed with masculinity, dangerously attached still to a masculine ideal which keeps him rooted within a heterosexist hierarchy of value (Carolyn Dean, Susan Sulieman). What I intend to explore in this paper is the connection between these two positions, understood through the deployment of the sex worker as a figure in Bataille's texts, particularly Madame Edwarda. Edwarda herself, who embodies the figure of the mad and nymphomaniacal prostitute, acts as the vector for the 'impossible', excessive experience the narrator of the text seeks; but that experience, which declares itself anti-utilitarian, therefore depends on the utilisation of Edwarda to signify the 'prostitute', on her material labour as a sex worker (she is there because she is being paid) and on the absence of her recognition as an 'autonomous desiring subject' (because she is given a priori as 'mad'). This, I will argue, raises serious problems for the credibility of any deconstructionist understanding of Bataille's work, and must furthermore cause us to ask if deconstruction itself invariably comes at the cost of a certain subjectivity or 'voice consciousness' (Spivak).

This session was recorded for those unable to attend.

 Tuesday 10th November 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Nora Baker (Jesus) - "Distingués par leur piété": The Social Value of Suffering in Huguenot Memoir

The late seventeenth century saw a renewed wave of hostilities against Protestantism in France, culminating in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. State persecution led a large number of French Protestants, or 'Huguenots', to escape their homeland and start new lives elsewhere, though some were captures during their attempts to flee and then subjected to lengthy periods of confinement. Many Huguenots wrote memoirs detailing their experiences during these troubled times. My work looks at accounts penned by those who faced three different kinds of hardships: women imprisoned in convents, men forced to work as galley slaves, and refugees who struggled to negotiate their identities after settling in new lands. We know that these 'life stories' were often read aloud in refugee and social spaces or circulated to the wider Protestant community in Europe thanks to clandestine networks such as that of Pierre Jurieu's Lettres Pastorales. My work investigates the identities the authors sought to establish for themselves when composing their autobiographical accounts. I argue that these memoirs could be used as tools to win the approval of co-religionists, as they showcased their authors' intelligence, charisma, and dedication to their faith, even in traumatic circumstances. I will contend that the form and content of the memoirs discussed in this paper were influenced not only by Biblical exegesis, but also by the continuing legacy of early Huguenot martyrological writing.

Caroline Godard (University of California, Berkeley) - Being Time-Bound: Montaigne on Touch, Contagion, and the Contemporary

In this presentation I will read from a portion of my MSt dissertation, which looks at how various forms of touch and temporal presence illuminate the intersubjective nature of Montaigne's Essais. Working against the assumptions towards individuality that often emerge in readings of Montaigne, I ask how the confluences of contemporaneity, contagion, compassion and community can offer alternative ways of understanding the relations between self and other. Ultimately, the essay questions how Montaigne does (or does not) perceive himself to be part of his contemporary moment, as well as what it means to read Montaigne now in a contemporary way; in so doing, it amends existing definitions of the contemporary as an individual concern.

Finally, I will end this presentation by discussing how and in what ways this work at Oxford is following me into the first year of my PhD program at UC Berkeley.

This session was recorded for those unable to attend (please see below):

Tuesday 27th October 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

McNeil Taylor (St John's) - "Marcher au désert": Claire Denis' Perverse Ecologies

Summarizing Deleuze's aesthetic philosophy, Jacques Rancière states, "L'œuvre est marche au désert." The artwork reformulates time and relationality, as narrative desire for an object is replaced by an impersonal drift. Deleuze most strikingly outlines this orientation in the essay "Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui", in which the geographical isolation of a desert island enables the complete dismantling of Freud's anthropomorphic model of narrative desire. Cutting out the detour of desire for the Other, bodies regress to a perverse intertwining with the "Terre-Mère" as boundaries of self and other, animate and inanimate collapse.

This aesthetic mode is exemplified in Claire Denis' Beau Travail (1999) a film that stages its own literal and figurative march into the desert. The hermetic community of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti becomes a petri-dish experiment with new modes of inhuman desire, as subjective intentionality gives way to the distillation of deep ecological time. My reading will therefore bring together two approaches to the film -- psychoanalytic and ecological -- that have yet to be put in conversation with one another. I will argue that the legionnaires' diffusion into the landscape functions as an impersonal rebirth, as the snuffing out of neurotic, Freudian desire enables a new perverse sociality.