Programme of Events 2025-26

IAS Visiting Fellow Mario Telò will give a paper drawing on part of his book, currently in production, on Edward Said (The Late Animal: Edward Said, Classicism, and the Limits of Humanism, under contract with Oxford University Press). What does it mean to read Apuleius’s Metamorphoses in the current global crisis? How do images of Palestinian donkeys—moribund yet carrying the burden of transporting people and food in Gaza—change our view of this novel, in which a human turned into donkey is subjected to unceasing physical abuse? This paper answers these and other questions by reading for and with the donkey’s beaten corpus. It considers the necropolitics of form, proposing that we read against the novel’s plot (against its futurist teleology) and focus on the constantly self-renewing present of abuse, and that we interpretively embrace the linguistic difficulty of the text, its burdensome untranslatability (which is disavowed by classicists’ obsession with linguistic mastery) in order to push against our own desire for the abuse to continue. Apuleius’s novel is placed in dialogue with Edward Said’s idea of “bristling” lateness, with Adorno’s notion of musical late style, with recent theoretical work on necropolitics and, especially, with Afropessimism. These approaches help us understand why it matters to read and re-read Apuleius now.

"Kafka’s Double Bind: Freedom and Predestination in The Trial"

 Abstract: The Trial is delightfully mysterious in a whole host of ways, but none more than this: the protagonist is both responsible for what happens to him and not responsible for what happens to him. While the Court is cruel and capricious, there’s plenty of evidence that Josef K. is not entirely innocent either. So what’s going on here? The solution, on my proposal, involves an innovative take on Christian theology, in which we’re responsible for making our souls ready for Grace, but in which no amount of preparation will guarantee its arrival. This is not a “message” sent by the novel; it is, instead, a shape for thought, a framework through which even secular readers can inspect a host of phenomena, from love to art, from inquiry to vocation. In more ways than one, we are all in Kafka’s world.

CRPLA Talk Wed 13 May, 4pm S0.17 

Daniel Star (Boston University)

Appreciation as a Process, and Well-being (from a coauthored project with Joel Van Fossen)

Aesthetic appreciation is here understood to be an at least partly conscious process, with respect to which agents exercise a significant degree of intentional control, that involves attending to objects and their aesthetic properties, where such are objects are taken to be worth appreciating aesthetically, and cognitively and affectively engaging with them. There are significant differences between this process and two other mental processes about which more has been written: practical deliberation and epistemic inquiry. Some of the similarities and differences between these processes concern the metaphysics of them, but some concern the value and role of the processes. One important conclusion reached is that appreciation, unlike the other two processes, is primarily to be valued in itself as a process, rather than merely instrumentally in relation to the value of its outcomes. And the fact that this is how appreciation is to be properly valued is closely related to what appreciation does for us, so far as our well-being is concerned. A key alternative for what might be thought to be of primary value as a product of appreciation — correct aesthetic judgment — is considered and rejected.