Photo: Aseedtolife / Wikimedia Commons

How is death written into a politics of life? In a conversation between deconstruction and theories of biopolitics, the Department of Culture and Aesthetics welcomes Lynn Turner, groundbreaking Derrida theorist at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Claudia Lindén, prominent scholar of literary and gender studies at Södertörn University. Our guests will present their own recent work, exploring the limits written upon the female and the animal body (see abstracts and bios below). Following these interrogations of violence, vengeance, corporeality, and the politics of life and death, the symposium concludes with a workshop exploring foundational theoretical texts addressing these themes.

The symposium is open to the public, but there are a limited number of places, and PhD students are given priority. Apply by emailing maria.trejling@littvet.su.se no later than May 10th. Please provide your institutional affiliation (if applicable), email address, phone number, and any dietary requirements or allergies.

Schedule

Reading List

Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998 (extract to be specified).
Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ trans. Annette Kuhn, in Signs, 7.1 1981 (pp. 41–55).
Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume II, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Chicago UP, 2017, “Ninth Session” (pp. 214–243).
Optional: Selma Lagerlöf. “Gudsfreden,” in Osynliga länkar, 1904 (129–147).

The texts will be distributed to all participants two weeks before the symposium.

Lecture Abstracts

Lynn Turner: ‘Sanguine Resistance: Dreaming of a Future for Blood’

Photographs of human skin inscribed with tattoo-like texts, Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord series was first published in 1993, showcased in the Sunday magazine supplement of the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung. Diane Elam drew attention to this work in her chapter on ‘Feminism in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000), largely focusing on it as a linguistic performance between senders and receivers. She noted the blood used in the ink on the magazine’s cover – blood donated from Bosnian women raped by Serbians in the Bosnian War – primarily in the context of its hypocritical reception: the public recoiled from the impropriety of blood on the paper, not the systematic rape from which the series took leave.

Between 1999 and 2001, Derrida’s seminars focused on the Death Penalty. There, blood drew material, thematic, poetic and conceptual analysis. While the cruelty of making blood flow (cruor) flooded the first volume of published seminars, the ‘Ninth Session’ in the second volume begins with the question ‘How to conceive of blood?’ subsequently repeating a refrain that asks after a possible future for blood. If the ‘concept’ is the ‘end of blood’ as Derrida argues, this chapter returns to Holzer to ask how the gift of blood in Lustmord might bypass this transubstantiation. Opening a future for blood might here offer a counter-path to lex talionis.

While the mortification exhibited in the reception of Lustmord can be read as a reactive abjection that also staunches a future for blood, in this chapter it will lead to Freud’s misplaced transposition of the masculine and ‘primitive’ fear of defloration onto the feminine compulsion to castrate and to steal the penis that she is otherwise denied. Freud finds this ostensibly eternal condition repeated most strongly in the ‘emancipated’ writerly women of his own time. Yet rather than frontally refute Freud, Derrida joins in deconstructive alliance with these women in echo of resistance to the red thread of the death penalty historically offered not by philosophers or politicians but by poets and writers. In light of her invocation for women to write themselves, ‘Sanguine Resistance’ reads the Cixous of ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ within this alliance. Moreover, where Cixous offers to ‘relieve man of his phallus’, this chapter finds a displacement of retribution in favour of another ‘erogenous field’ that, in supplanting concept, contract, and castration, might dream of a future for blood.

Bio

Originally trained as an artist, Lynn Turner is a writer working between continental philosophy (especially deconstruction), feminist theory, psychoanalysis, animal studies and visual culture. She is the author of Poetics of Deconstruction: on the threshold of differences (Bloomsbury, 2020); co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); editor of The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and co-author of Visual Cultures As… Recollection (Sternberg, 2013). Her new collection, Erotics of Deconstruction: Autoaffection After Derrida, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024. She is the co-Head of Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.  

Claudia Lindén: ‘Ursus sacer. The Bear as Man’s Neighbour in Selma Lagerlöf’s “The God’s Peace”’

By the end of the 19th century, the bear was on the verge of extinction in Sweden. Public opinion began to turn against the state's bounty, and authors such as Selma Lagerlöf wrote stories about the ethical connections between man and bear. Until the Middle Ages, the bear was an element of various cults throughout Europe. In the Nordic region, these cults lasted for a much longer period. When Lagerlöf opens up the religious realm for the bear by intertextualising the Gospel of Luke, it resonates with the long, ancient, never-ending religious relationship which man has maintained with the bear. Using Agamben's concept of homo sacer, I will show how the bear as ursus sacer in Lagerlöf's story can be understood as bare life, pointing to the always already crossed line between human and non-human animals, nature and culture, which according to Agamben is the ur-phenomenon of politics.

Bio

Claudia Lindén is Professor of Comparative Literature at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research interests include the modern breakthrough, Gothic literature, animal-human relations, the theory of history and historical fiction. She has just completed a research project “Bear traces: a study of the bear in national romantic literature around the Baltic Sea” and is currently finishing a book on Karen Blixen and the Gothic.