2024-25 Speaker Series

Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.

Upcoming speaker:   

Thursday, October 24, 2024
4:45 p.m. EST

Stevenson Hall 3165

Roundtable on Adam Rosenthal's book

"Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life"

(University of Minnesota Press, 2024) 

With Adam Rosenthal (Texas A&M University), Derek Woods (McMaster), Antoine Traisnel (University of Michigan), Joshua Schuster

Friday, October 25, 2024
10:30 a.m. EST

Stevenson Hall 3165

Adam Rosenthal

Life as Lineage, or: Literary Apocalypse and the Text of Evolution

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Reading Derrida's theory of literature, as it is put forth in "No Apocalypse, Not Now," this paper asks how literary understanding forces a novel interpretation of biological "lineage." In short, I argue that no lineage is thinkable without apocalypse, which is both the condition of possibility and impossibility of what we call life.

 

Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube

Past Speakers:

Dr. David Roden
Nietzschean Hyperagents
September 18, 2024

Dr. Alenka Zupančič
The Logic of Fantasy
May 3, 2024

Dr. Mariana Ortega
Carnal Light and Border Crossing, Sensing a Photographic Archive of Feeling Brown
November 6, 2023

Gabriel Rockhill
Ideology, Art & Class Struggle
October 5, 2023

Rocío Zambrana
Metamorphosis of Value: Epistemic Protocols in the Long 17th Century
April 3, 2023

Alia Al-Saji
Making the Colonial Past Hesitate: Fanon, amputation, and a politics of refusal
March 13, 2023