Seminar: Living with(out) consequence
Friday January 9, then Monday-Thursday January 12-15
Block 2: 10:00-11:15 am (NY) / 5:00-6:15 pm (Kyiv) / 6:00-7:15 pm (St. P.)
“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed,” so goes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fragment in The Little Prince. If this is true, why do so many of us shirk responsibility to one another? Why would anyone deliberately turn from what makes them feel most alive in another person? Why is it that, emotionally and existentially speaking, “the important” is rarely fought for? It is not at all the importance of the person (or the experience) that is in question. Usually, the relation is supercharged with significance—especially for the one who fights to avoid it. Experience is not the difference between a person living with consequence and a person living without it. Responsibility is. This seminar asks, then, who is there for a poetic moment and who is there to stay. How can we understand what it means to avoid—and indeed, betray—what is significant, and oppositely, to stay with it. Too often, the poetry that formed the initial relation attempts to live on without any real life consequences. This seminar is about what we owe to one another, particularly when the experience feels difficult. Our texts will be both poetic and philosophical, as well as those examining the art of dance, including the writings of Roland Barthes, Jorge Luis Borges, Emil Cioran, Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Susan Sontag, and Simone Weil.