Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Department of English, the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), German, Nordic, and Slavic+ (GNS+), the Department of French and Italian, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH).
Everybody knows that Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return is a fiction: for we will not be living our life over and over again, exactly as we are living it now, into eternity. So why, when it comes to the world, do we seem to believe this kind of fiction, as if reality were constant? Sure, we accept the occurrence of unexpected events—but only to the extent that they can be folded back into science. In the era of ever more frequent extreme weather events, such a position has become untenable. In this lecture, I consider how humanistic disciplines like philosophy and literature—in particular science fiction and detective fiction–can help us develop the wild thought that is needed to confront the inconstancy of the real that is evidenced in realms as diverse as the state of the climate and finance. What if, to rewrite Nietzsche’s story, a demon showed up in our loneliest hour, telling us that tomorrow, the world will be radically different from today—that by tonight even, it may no longer be the same? Would we be terrified? Or would we take this proposal in stride, eager to generate fresh ideas and cultural forms in response? Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard” will provide part of the answer.
Arne De Boever (PhD, Columbia University, 2009) teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies and the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts (USA), where he directed the MA Aesthetics and Politics program from 2011 until 2023. Arne’s research focuses on the contemporary US novel in an internationalist frame. His writing and teaching take place at the crossroads of literary criticism and critical theory. At CalArts, Arne’s undergraduate courses have dealt with the novel after 9/11, the novel and the biopolitics of care, posthumanism, the relations between finance and fiction, vulnerability, unexceptional art, and silent music. His graduate courses have focused on the concept of sovereignty and more broadly the problematic of exceptionalism in both political and aesthetic theory.
