New public lecture: Lars Iyer

The PACT Division of the EGS has introduced a new format in the context of its “Public Lectures” series. We are undertaking discussions with EGS faculty and other guests on recently published research.  We hope that these encounters will help bring attention to important work pursued in our community. All discussions are being live-streamed on Zoom and they will normally start at 8 pm Paris time/2 pm New York time.

Our next discussion will be devoted to Lars Iyer’s My Weil.

September 21, 2023

8 pm Paris time/2 pm New York time.

Zoom link can be found HERE.

Lars Iyer’s latest novel My Weil follows a group of twenty-something Ph.D. students in the Disaster Studies programme in Manchester. They spend a lot of time together pondering the impending apocalypse, senselessness of the life in academia, and the state of the art after its death. All these reflections happen on the rich background of Manchester’s musical history (Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Happy Mondays, etc.). At one moment, a new student arrives in their lives, Simone Weil, a version of the twentieth-century philosopher, who becomes the unlikely star of their film. In this talk, we will not only discuss Lars Iyer’s self-irony which lies at the foundation of his artistic endeavors but also about the influence of his theoretical background and the relationship between literature and philosophy in his artworks.

This and further discussions of this kind will be conducted in collaboration between the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade and The European Graduate School, Switzerland.

Participants 

Lars Iyer is a novelist and philosopher. He is a Reader in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, where he previously also taught philosophy. Iyer’s philosophical research interests revolve around aesthetics (especially philosophy of literature and philosophy of music) and political philosophy. He has published two books on Maurice Blanchot (Blanchot’s Communism and Blanchot’s Vigilance). After that, he published the “Spurious trilogy” which consists of Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus (all published by Melville House). In 2014, Iyer started another trilogy with Wittgenstein Jr (Melville House); in 2019, Nietzsche and the Burbs (Penguin Random House) followed. My Weil is his sixth novel.

Christopher Fynsk is President of The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His work is closely involved with that of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, and several contemporary artists, including Francis Bacon and Salvatore Puglia. His works are Heidegger, Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1986), Language and Relation: that there is language (Stanford, 1996), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford, 2000), The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minnesota, 2004), Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (Fordham, 2013).

Aaron Aquilina is a resident academic with the University of Malta’s Department of English. Before that, he was an Associate Lecturer and Assistant Director at Lancaster University. Aquilina has published various academic articles and chapters, interviews, and some creative writing. His most recent publication is The Ontology of Death (Bloomsbury, 2023), a monograph based on his doctoral studies. His main research interests include the many intersections of literary theory and continental philosophy (with a particular focus on queer theory), the politics of conceptual and speculative fiction, and creative writing.

Moderator

Nemanja Mitrović works as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade. His research interests are literary theory, the relationship between ethics, philosophy, and literature, and the work of Maurice Blanchot. He completed his Ph.D. study at the University of Aberdeen under the direction of Professor Christopher Fynsk (2014). In 2017, he published a reworked version of his doctoral dissertation entitled The (Im)Possibility of Literature as the Possibility of Ethics (Delere Press, Singapore). In 2023, he published his second book, Several Definitives on the Infinitive (MostArt Jugoslavija, Beograd). From 2018 until 2022, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty for Media and Communications Belgrade. Together with Maja Bajić, he translated the works of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.