Queer Rigidity

S. Pearl Brilmyer, ‘Queer Rigidity’, talk presented at the workshop Margins of Error, ICI Berlin, 30–29 June 2015, video recording, mp4, 23:08 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e150630_08

Toward an Inessential Theory of Form: Ruskin, Warburg, Focillon

This essay excavates a lineage of formalist analysis that stretches from the Victorian art critic John Ruskin to the early twentieth-century art historians Aby Warburg and Henri Focillon, proposing that a fascination with what Ruskin had called “inessential form” drives these three thinkers’ attempts to conceive of form as immanent to both matter and time. The theories of form developed by these three thinkers, while little cited in literary studies, destabilize many of our field’s present-day assumptions about the role of form in literature, from recent debates about surface versus depth to the longstanding distinctions between historicist and formalist approaches to literary texts. From these art historians we learn that close attention to form is close attention to affect, that is, how emotionally charged energies crystallize, throughout time, into pictorial and sculptural details—flowing hair, intricately sketched earlobes, or billowing garments, for example. Building on their work, we advocate for an approach to form in literature not as a fundamental pattern or shape to which the text can be conceptually reduced, but as the capacity of language to be affected by the reality it also shapes

The Invention of Defect:Disability, Femininity, Technicity

As the shadowy other to normative conceptions of health, productivity, and capacity, the defect marks the limit of our expectations about what a body can do. In the history of Western thought, both the female and the disabled body have been aligned with such corporeal deficiency, seen as less capable than their male, able-bodied counterparts. Such conceptions of the defect(ive) frequently draw on an association between the organic and the mechanical, the natural and the artificial, the spontaneous and the automated. But these slippages and crossovers are far from one-sided in their invocation of a distinction between living bodies and machines. For the history of the defect is also a history of bodily potential—of figures whose apparent dysfunction is easily converted into a source of invention, generation, and productive change. Far from merely signaling the interruption or breakdown of a healthy bodily system, the defect has also emerged historically as its creative force, the seed or motor of its persistence. This two-day symposium explores this multi-faceted nature of the defect, starting from two distinct, but subtly related epistemological and social sites—one ancient, one modern. In addressing the gaps and overlaps between biological and technical conceptions of deficiency, error, and impairment, we will have occasion to consider the complex imbrications of medical discourse and imagery with its philosophical, social and technological registers. We will ask whether and how the category of the defective might be reclaimed as a source of errant potential, rather than remaining confined within teleological frameworks of development, necessity, and reproduction.Mara Mills is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her first book project details the significance of phonetics and deaf education to the emergence of “communication engineering” in early twentieth-century telephony. Her second book project, Print Disability and New Reading Formats, examines the reformatting of print over the course of the past century by blind and other print disabled readers. Emanuela Bianchi is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, with affiliations in Classics and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, at NYU. She is the author of The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (Fordham, 2014). She works at the intersection of ancient Greek philosophy, contemporary continental philosophy, and feminist and queer theory.The Invention of Defect: Disability, Femininity, Technicity, symposium, ICI Berlin, 11–12 June 2015 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e150611

Queer (Non)ontology:Thinking with the Zero

Traditionally understood as the philosophical study of being, ontology, especially as it has been taken up in more recent critical theory, has tended to privilege notions of existence, presence, and affirmation. What is lost, repressed, or forgotten in ontological frameworks that, in so far as they do address nonbeing, understand it to be the negation of a being that is supposedly always primary? This workshop will address the potential and limits of the ‘ontological turn’ for queer studies, a field long concerned with what is excluded or negated in systems of relation. In their introduction to the recent issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ‘The Ontology of the Couple’, S. Pearl Brilmyer, Filippo Trentin, and Zairong Xiang chase after a ‘zero’ that, they argue, must always be eliminated or dialectically synthesized in order for ‘two to become one’. Drawing on early psychoanalytic theory, Daoist cosmology, and critical race studies, they work to reconfigure a series of binaries that have divided the field of queer studies over the past few decades: normativity versus antinormativity, future versus no-future, negativity versus optimism, relationality versus antirelationality, West versus non-West. Proceeding from a reading of this introduction, this workshop will ask whether ‘queer’ stands always at the threshold of ontology, a (non)ontological leftover that allows being, life, and relationality to cohere. Programme 16:00 Introduction 16:10 &#8211; 17:10 Part I 17:10 &#8211; 17:30 Coffee break 17:30 &#8211; 18:30 Part IIQueer (Non)ontology: Thinking with the Zero, workshop, ICI Berlin, 24 June 2019 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e190624-1

Feminicide and Violence Against Women

Femi(ni)cide is defined as the homicide of women and girls. This extreme form of gender-based violence is often associated with certain regions of the world, rather than being recognized as a global problem. The true dimensions of these crimes, such as the frequency of domestic offences or the particular risk level associated with separation from a partner — as well as the societal acceptance of violence against women — remain largely unknown because of a lack of in-depth analyses and because these crimes are usually not statistically recorded. In this discussion, four activists from different contexts share experiences from their work: Hannah Beeck and Aleida Luján Pinelo, with their initiative Feminizidmap, document the murders of women in Germany; Valeria España focuses on court verdicts and criminal prosecution in various South American countries; and Meena Kandasamy is an author whose work is dedicated to trauma and violence against women, especially in India. They seek to raise awareness of the complex issue of extreme violence against women and they demand greater public debate and the development of strategies in order to prevent crimes and obtain consistent criminal prosecution.Feminicide and Violence Against Women, discussion, ICI Berlin, 20 May 2022 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220520