Tuesday 20 November 2012, 5.30PM to 6.15pm
In one of the last papers that she gave before she died, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described a âstill unrealised projectâ that she had recently had in mind, âfor a conference or an essay anthology whose title would be something like Critical Theory, Buddhist Practiceâ. Sedgwick thought of the project as a âway of marking and trying to understand the successive discovery that one after another of the criticsâ she was really interested in turned out to have been, âat some stage, whether early or advanced, in an exploration of some form of Buddhist practice or thoughtâ. Sedgwick also speculated on the way that many âaspects of Buddhist thought that seem initially counterintuitive to many people â its rigorous nondualism, for an obvious example â can seem already self-evident and invitingly haimish to anyone whose motherâs milk has been deconstruction or, say, systems theoryâ (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust (Duke University Press, 2011)).
This short, informal Lightning Rods seminar, open to all, takes up Sedgwickâs intuition and extends it to wonder whether âTheoryâ tout court has even been secular, and raises questions about how best we might think about the inter-relationship, and supposedly discrete periodisation, of a number of more or less âcontemporaryâ theoretical perspectives and âearlierâ theological positions from across history and the globe. Four speakers from two disciplines will provide 5 minute position papers to get the discussion going:
For more information, please contact Jason.Edwards@york.ac.uk
Location: The Treehouse, Humanities Research Centre, Berrick Saul Building
Admission: All welcome
Email: jason.edwards@york.ac.uk