Dr Rebecca Comay, March 2022
Distinguished Visiting Speaker
Dr. Rebecca Comay
"Dialectic, Tragedy, Revolution"
March 21 to April 01, 2022
Dr. Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto, will deliver three lectures drawn based on her book-in-progress, Dramaturgy of the Dialectic, which explores the constellation of dialectics, theatre, and politics in –and in the wake of – Hegel’s philosophy of art. The point of departure will be Hegel’s notorious proclamation of the “end of art.” Dr. Comay asks why does Hegel affirm that “art no longer counts” as a manifestation of truth, how does art collaborate in its own obsolescence, and what does all this drama entail for philosophy, politics, and everyday practice?
Schedule of Major Events:
Monday, March 21, 2022, 3:30 PM MST
"Hegel: The End of Art and the Endgame of Theatre"
After considering the various ways in which to make sense of Hegel’s enigmatic pronouncement of art’s ending, we’ll turn to his discussion of dramatic poetry. Hegel takes drama be the “highest” (and the final) art form in his system of the arts. Why does the Aesthetics stop here, and how does the end of theatre coincide with the end of art? All art wrestles with its own finitude, but there is a peculiar way in which theatre is involved in the demonstration of its own self-fracturing, self-limitation, and self-cancellation. How does a play come to an end, and how does drama, as an art-form, negotiate its own ending?
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 3:30 PM MST
"Lumpendialectic: Tragedy and Revolution in the Eighteenth Brumaire"
This lecture will explore Marx’s revisionary appropriation of Hegel’s dialectic in the Eighteenth Brumaire as he searches (in vain?) for a new revolutionary subject amidst the “farce” of the post-1848 counterrevolution. Is there a connection between tragedy, revolution, and dialectic? We will be thinking about what is tragic about revolution and the revolutionary kernel of the tragic: the explosive power of its collisions; its catastrophic reversals; its belated recognitions and blinding insights; its rituals of purification; its temporal and spatial condensations; its intractable contradictions--freedom and necessity, singular and universal, individual and collective, subjective agency and objective process. Does the “end of tragedy” imply the end of revolution, and does this also mean the end of dialectic?
Friday, March 25, 2022, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM MST
Dr. Comay will hold office hours
To book an appointment email: artsevents@ualberta.ca
Monday, March 28, 2022, 3:30 PM MST
Town and Gown Lecture: "'Senile, demented dialectic’: Beckett and Tragedy"
Samuel Beckett’s scanty –often distracting, reluctant, and sometimes misleading -- allusions to his philosophical precursors and contemporaries conspicuously do not include Hegel as a significant interlocutor. In this final lecture, focusing on Endgame, we’ll be exploring some of the Hegelian resonances of Beckett’s dramaturgy, and in particular insofar as these elucidate the problematic of the end of theatre and theatrical endings. Could there be political implications?
Thursday, March 31, 2022, 12:00 - 2:00 PM MST
Seminar with Graduate Students
This ninety-minute seminar will use Dr. Comay’s essay, “Resistance and Repetition: Freud and Hegel,” as a basis for discussion. The essay might be described as the artful reading of a single “primal word”: “An oppositional and repetitive stance and standing (there’s an “again” lurking in every “against,” just as there’s a Wieder spilling out of every Wider), resistance straddles the line between persistence and insistence. Resistance points at once to a kind of conservatism—a reluctance, inertia and even paralysis—and to a restlessness that needs to push every situation to breaking point and to leave nothing standing.” The essay will be made available in advance so that participants arrive prepared.
Resistant and Repitition Essay
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/
Youtube Live Streaming
https://youtu.be/tg8K70RM3qM
Friday, April 1, 2022, 2:00 - 4:00 PM MST
Colloquium on "Temporality"
Previous visitors & speakers:
Distinguished Visitor Dr. John Burrows, March 2021
Distinguished Visitor Dr. Lisa Gitelman, March 2018
Distinguished Visitor Dr. Julia Reinhard Lupton, October 2016
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Dr. Rebecca Comay
Rebecca Comay is a professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she is also a core member of the Literature and Critical Theory Program and an associate member of the German Department and the Centre for Jewish Studies. She is also a philosophy professor at the European Graduate School. She has published widely on European philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary art. Recent books include Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford University Press) and The Dash—the Other Side of Absolute Knowing (MIT Press), co-authored with Frank Ruda.
