An Aesthetics for the End

2 本书

Whether we’re talking about climate change, genocide, nuclear war, or millenarianism, there tends to be an assumption that the end of the world is something extraordinary - a leap out of the everyday we currently inhabit. This is followed by the claim that we have no language or genre by which to express this end and must invent. Yet these assumptions are contestable. When we look more closely at our current forms of life, we find an aesthetics of the end embedded within them. It is through our discourses, gestures, affects, even silences, by which we enact various ends and cuts in ordinary life. But the central knot of envisioning the end as such is that of course it cannot be experienced, making these ordinary endings suffused with denial and elaborate claims of infinity, melancholia over the limits of knowledge, extensions of perception and exertions of prophesying. This seminar will explore the central tension between the assumption that the end must be extraordinary and simultaneously that the end cannot be fully experienced through articulations, signs, traces, and aesthetic forms that are present in the ordinary and our ecologies. It will combine a recent spate of meditative writings on the end of the world or worlds, notably Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, David Scott’s Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History and Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World, with ethnographies that explore various ends (of an political system, kinship, or a habitable world), specifically: Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Stefania Pandalfo’s Impasse of Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory and Adriana Petryna’s Horizonwork: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change to explore how such an aesthetics of the end finds expression within the ordinary and even risks unintelligibility, or madness, in calling back a world in retreat. We will end by reading Èdouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation for its hopeful perspectives on traversing such abysses.

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation [图书] Goodreads 豆瓣

作者: Jonathan Lear Harvard University Press 2006 - 9 其它标题: Radical Hope

Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” It is precisely this point that of a people faced with the end of their way of life that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope . In Jonathan Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’ story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse?
This is a vulnerability that affects us all insofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the story of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questions and these questions as they bear upon our own place in the world. His book is a deeply revealing, and deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.

Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation [图书] Goodreads 豆瓣

作者: Alexei Yurchak Princeton University Press 2005 - 10 其它标题: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of “late socialism” (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.

The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie — and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

创建日期: 2025年5月24日