On Caesura (Zäsur, Césure)
This workshop / seminar will involve the presentation of two intersecting readings of the problem of the figure (philosophical and poetic, passive and active) of the caesura, Zäsur, césure via Lacoue-Labarthe’s readings of Hölderlin’s formulations of a what we can describe as a caesural dilemma.
The dilemma is in short that a too effective caesura loses all its force, the purer the cut, the more it is bound to disappear. This will have repercussions for our thinking and thematization of what it means to break, of what constitutes a break (and what does not).
The caesura is commonly conceived of as a pause or break in a line of poetry, known since the Greeks, often disturbing and throwing off or dashing through a consistent meter, and sometimes embodied in a punctation mark (a dash, an ellipsis, a period, or even a comma). Yet, the caesura has also repeatedly been read as a model for conceiving of (the intricacies and the conceptual-systematic demands) of ground-breaking and in this sense fundamental transformations: genuine novelty (in politics, love, science or the arts) appears as a caesura. But how does a caesura appear? How to think through the radicality of a break, which might leave signs and traces behind, without romanticizing its unexplicacability or without in advance reintegrating it through the assumption of structural explicatability? How to discriminate between a caesura that breaks and one that underlines a larger (rhythmic) principle?
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Heather H. Yeung 楊希蒂 is Reader in Literature (poetry and poetics) at the University of Dundee, and is currently also literature lead and literature scholarships chair at the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. She is the author of Spatial Engagement with Poetry (2015) and On Literary Plasticity (2020) as well as numerous essays, poems, and edited collections in poetics and art theory. Substantial archives (some recently digitized) of her poetic and artists book works are held in the Scottish Poetry Library and the National Library of Scotland.
Frank Ruda is Chair of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Dundee. His most recent publications include Reading Hegel (with Slavoj Žižek and Agon Hamza, Polity 2021), The Dash – the Other Side of Absolute Knowing (with Rebecca Comay, MIT Press 2018), Gegen-Freiheit. Für einen komischen Fatalismus (Konstanz University Press 2018). The English translation of his Indifference and Repetition, or Freedom and its Vicissitudes is forthcoming with Fordham University Press in 2023 (including a new preface by Alain Badiou). He is currently working on the manuscript of a book tentatively entitled “Stuckness and Courage. On Modes of Absorbing Historical Time and How to Counter Them.”