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Witnessness posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination. Harvey pursues this ethics by staging a speculative reading of Samuel Beckett’s ‘untranslatable’ text, Worstward Ho, alongside Dante’s Purgatorio and Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved and If This Be a Man. Many of the thirty concise chapters that compose Witnessness are built upon notions whose names (e.g. dimness, lessness) take inspiration from Beckett’s unique and precise vocabulary. Harvey explores the particular experience of the witness-as recounted in Dante and Levi-for signs of a general, common, and innate witness-like attitude that protects the other and that we see expressed in Beckett’s penultimate prose piece.
Robert Harvey is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Professor of French and Comparative Literatures at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. He is the author or editor of fifteen books and is one of the very few US academics to have held the position of Directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, France, founded by Jacques Derrida et al.
(Robert Harvey: "Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility", London: The Continuum International Publishing Group 2010, 176 p., ISBN: 9781441124241)
Information on participating / attending:
Date:
01/05/2011 20:00 - 01/05/2011 22:00
Event venue:
Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Schützenstr. 18, Berlin-Mitte, 3. Et., Trajekte-Tagungsraum 308
10117 Berlin
Berlin
Germany
Target group:
Scientists and scholars, Students
Email address:
Relevance:
regional
Subject areas:
Cultural sciences, Language / literature, Philosophy / ethics
Types of events:
Presentation / colloquium / lecture
Entry:
11/30/2010
Sender/author:
Sabine Zimmermann
Department:
Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZFL)
Event is free:
yes
Language of the text:
English
URL of this event: http://idw-online.de/en/event33482
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