Upcoming Events

Thursday, March 12, 2020 at 2 p.m.
Friday, March 13, 2020 at 10 a.m.
Friday, March 13, 2020 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

In these three seminar sessions, we will hold an extended discussion with the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon, 2019), where Martin Hägglund challenges received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions. What ultimately matters is how we treat one another in this life, and what we do with our time together. Hägglund develops new existential and political principles while transforming our understanding of spiritual life. His critique of religion takes us to the heart of what it means to mourn our loved ones, be committed, and care about a sustainable world. His critique of capitalism aims to demonstrate that we fail to sustain our democratic values because our lives depend on wage labor. Explaining why capitalism is inimical to our freedom, the book argues that we should instead pursue novel forms of democratic socialism.

TBD

Professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale University and a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, Martin Hägglund is the author of three highly acclaimed books, and his work has been translated into eight languages. In his native Sweden, he published his first book, Chronophobia, at the age of twenty-five. His first book in English, Radical Atheism, was the subject of a conference at Cornell University and a colloquium at Oxford University. His most recent book, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, was hailed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as a “revolutionary” achievement. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Comparative Literature Program, Department of English, and Graduate Center for Literary Research.

Friday, February 21, 2020 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

In recent years a growing number of thinkers from a variety of disciplines (e.g. philosophy, geography, anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities) have begun turning their attention to the phenomenon of atmosphere. Indicating the characteristic tone or pervading mood of a surrounding environment or object, atmospheres (e.g. of a room, a neighborhood, a party, or an artwork) are an ordinary feature of everyday life, even as their elusiveness poses a challenge to conceptualization. And in spite of their hazy immateriality, atmospheres can have very real effects. As forms of affective air condition, they prime us to act in particular ways, making some things sayable or thinkable while foreclosing other possibilities. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, this seminar will consider what atmospheres are, what they can do, and what we can do with them. We will be particularly concerned with the question of how atmospheres are produced, the challenges they pose to our notions of causality and agency, and the political possibilities of what we might call “affective climate change.”

Dora Zhang, “Notes on Atmosphere” Qui Parle 27:1 (June 2018): 121-155.

Diana Coole, “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities,” Political Studies 53 (2005): 124-142.

Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect,” Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004): 57-78.

Jonathan Flatley, “How a Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made,” New Literary History 43:3 (Summer 2012): 503-525.

Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Dora Zhang is author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, which is forthcoming in 2020 from the University of Chicago Press, as part of the “Thinking Literature” series. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and her BA in philosophy from the University of Toronto. With research interests in Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, literature and philosophy, novel theory, affect theory, visual cultures, aesthetics, and ecocriticism, she has published on topics including Proust and photography, Woolf and the philosophy of language, Roland Barthes’s travels to China, and the role of atmosphere in everyday life. Her work has appeared in Representations, New Literary History (where her article “Naming the indescribable” won the 2013 Ralph Cohen Prize), Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and Qui Parle, as well as Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Comparative Literature Program, Department of English, and Graduate Center for Literary Research.

Friday, February 7, 2020 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

Based on her forthcoming book of the same title, this talk makes a case for “attachment” as a key word for the humanities. The word directs our attention to what carries weight: it has both affective and ethical force. Drawing on a range of examples, Felski discusses two important aesthetic ties: identification and attunement. Finally, she clarifies how the language of attachment is relevant to pedagogy and interpreting in the classroom.

To prepare for the lecture and discussion, participants are invited to read the second chapter of Hooked: Art and Attachment, “Art and Attunement.”

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Rita Felski is author The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015), on the role of suspicion in literary criticism, which was widely reviewed and the subject of forums in PMLA, Religion and Literature, and the American Book Review. She has recently completed Hooked: Art and Attachment, which will be published in fall 2020 by The University of Chicago Press, and she is starting a new book on the contemporary Frankfurt School and its relevance for literary studies. Felski has longstanding interests in feminist theory, modernity and postmodernity, genre (especially tragedy), comparative literature, and cultural studies. In 2016 she was awared a Niels Bohr Professorship by the Danish National Research Foundation to lead a large research project on “Uses of Literature: the Social Dimensions of Literature.”

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Comparative Literature Program, Department of English, and Graduate Center for Literary Research.

Lecture: “Driving as a Humanism”

Wednesday, January 29, 2020 at 4 p.m.
Mosher Alumni House, Alumni Hall

In the much-hailed driverless future, we’re told that human beings are to become passengers. If this is to be our fate, let us ask what we are being asked to give up. Driving requires a form of intelligence that is socially realized; the road is a place where we have to accommodate one another and learn to cooperate. It is in such small-bore practical activities that we acquire the habits of collective self-government, according to Tocqueville. Automation promises to replace trust and cooperation with machine-generated certainty, on the supposition that human beings are incompetent. Ultimately, this entails a transfer of political sovereignty to a cadre of technocrats, allowing a more isolated picture of the human subject to be operationalized. For this to go smoothly, human beings must be re-educated toward greater passivity and dependence, and less pride.

Seminar One: “Automation as Moral Re-education” and “Street View: Seeing like Google”

Thursday, January 30, 2020 at 2 p.m.
Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

Readings can be obtained by emailing lmatnip@ucsb.edu

Seminar Two: “The Motor Equivalent of War”

Friday, January 31, 2020 at 2 p.m.
Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

Readings can be obtained by emailing lmatnip@ucsb.edu

An alumnus of UCSB, where he majored in Physics, Matthew Crawford is author of the bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin Books, 2009) as well as of The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) and the forthcoming Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (Harper Collins, 2020). Having received a PhD in Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Committee on Social Thought, he is currently a Senior Fellow in the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.