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Papers by Christina Kkona
Androgynous and a foreigner: Orlando’s revolt
Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism
Migrating Minds Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (book to be released in December 2021)
Routledge, London and New York, 2021
The introduction (only) can be read, but NOT downloaded on google books. See link. Migrating Mind... more The introduction (only) can be read, but NOT downloaded on google books. See link. Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with twenty innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures, Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations. The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres and media, under different modes of production and reception. In the de-territorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.
Amour jaloux et jalousie amoureuse : entre croyance et doute
En opérant une distinction entre l'amour jaloux et la jalousie amoureuse qui explique l'o... more En opérant une distinction entre l'amour jaloux et la jalousie amoureuse qui explique l'oscillation du jaloux entre lucidité et crédulité, l'article explore les effets antagonistes de la jalousie et démontre comment les deux côtés se rejoignent dans l'expérience de Swann et du narrateur.
Proust dans la bibliothèque des femmes anglophones
La question d'écrire encore, et comment, des fictions de soi après Marcel Proust s'est po... more La question d'écrire encore, et comment, des fictions de soi après Marcel Proust s'est posée de façon particulièrement aiguë à plusieurs écrivaines anglophones qui entrent en dialogue avec la Recherche, en citant, paraphrasant, pastichant Proust, ou en lui répondant. Virginia Woolf, Jacqueline Rose et Anne Carson, chacune à sa manière, puisent dans l'épisode d'Albertine l'inspiration pour s'interroger sur la différence féminine ou réécrire l'histoire du point de vue d'Albertine.
Schmid, Marion. Proust Dans la Decadence
Nineteenth Century French Studies, Mar 22, 2012
The Ambivalence of the Sacred in Julia Kristeva
Philosophy Today, 2012
Je vais te dire pourquoi le sacre, pour moi, c'est aussi cela, et peut-etre seulement cela: l... more Je vais te dire pourquoi le sacre, pour moi, c'est aussi cela, et peut-etre seulement cela: l'imaginaire. Le feminin et le sacre Julia Kristeva's early work La Revolution du Langage Poetique, frequently mistaken for her doctoral thesis,1 addresses from the beginning the author's epistemological project, which mainly concentrates, next to her linguistic and semiotic background, on a parallel, indeed intertwined study of literature and psychoanalysis. Kristeva's turn to psychoanalysis is conveyed by the idea that creative singularity is not accessible without resorting to the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, audible through a comprehension of language that is not limited to a code-object of linguistics but understood as a "loving discourse," actualized through the transference/ counter-transference relationship during the psychoanalytic therapeutic process.2 With the introduction of some of the major concepts in her work (chora, semiotic, thetic), Kristeva expands her interrogation to the understanding of the sacred building upon anthropological researches related to the origins of religion. In her constant dialogue with the father of psychoanalysis, Kristeva not only discusses his major ideas but also recapitulates his methodology: following Freud's example, she integrates psychoanalysis with anthropological findings, using of course a more updated corpus compared to the one used by her predecessor. Diane Jonte-Pace deserves the credit for emphasizing Kristeva's rethinking of Freud's conception of religion in Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and its Discontents in her works Powers of Horror, In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, and Strangers to Ourselves.3 However, the importance of religion in Kristeva's work, repeatedly emphasized, is not to be reduced to methodological premises. She subscribes from the beginning to one of the most decisive Freudian discoveries, that the origins of subjectivity, society, and culture share intrinsically the same fantasies and fears. It is on the basis of the fundamental resemblance between the infancy of the individual and the one of the human race that the question of religion arises in Kristeva's thought. Thus, a concern with the sacred can be traced in all of Kristeva's work, revealing every time the imaginary as a structural element of the psyche and the culture. This intrinsic relationship between the sacred and the imaginary leads to the ultimate question of human creativity and more precisely to the art and literature. But it comes also as a response to the secular universe of modernity which inscribes transcendence in the immanence. I believed, thus I talked It is commonplace that scholars writing on Kristeva are almost always concerned with the clarification of the author's constitutive terms, as if it were necessary to summarize her entire theoretical system in order to discuss a specific issue it addresses. However, it is true that Kristeva is not content to introduce new concepts; she also borrows and redefines notions that have previously been articulated and somewhat established, starting with the Lacanian imaginary. It is thus needed to draw the archaeology of this concept and determine its place within the Kristevan theoretical system. In the first pages of La Revolution du Langage Poetique, Kristeva advances the hypothesis that the foundation of what she calls signifiance, considered in the primitive era as the sacred, is within the capitalist system either disguised into art or condemned as schizophrenia;4 that is, the loss of the symbolic function.5 Signifiance, which includes both the semiotic and the symbolic aspects of the signifying process, is to be found in marginalized, though most frequently collective phenomena witnessing to what the "official" discourse represses: the process that goes beyond the subject and its communicative structures. …
Simon. Lettres d'un voyageur (review)
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2011
Le « narrateur informé » ou le roman de l'aimé(e)
http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document464.php
Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto New migratory movements are one of the processes of globalization ai... more Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto New migratory movements are one of the processes of globalization aiming to transform the organization of socio-economic relations. When immigration from the global South to the North is forced on the more vulnerable social classes, both authorities and media talk about a “refugee crisis”. The global flow of refugees constitutes one of the greatest challenges of today inasmuch as it revives identity questions. This very ‘crisis’ translates a clash with the applicability of the postmodern discourse of the other. This paper addresses questions of (im)migration, in order to examine their ethical implications. Secondly, it explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics on a global basis by examining a cinematic work that reveals unexpected encounters, hardships and hidden possibilities of the immigration experience. Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a day (1998) discloses the beauty that emerges in hardships and it rearticulates ethical questions that appe...
Le désir ou l'art du mensonge dans "A la recherche du temps perdu
From the first lie, that of the hero to his mother, to the lie which marks the end of his relatio... more From the first lie, that of the hero to his mother, to the lie which marks the end of his relationship with Albertine, the tricks played by Odette with Swann, the lies of the young ladies of Montjouvain, of Charlus and Morel, everything occurs in A la Recherche as if the lie, as a language of otherness, implies generates a semantic level which escapes the liar as well as the investigator. This level is based on the double meaning of the word invention: at the same time creation and discovery. Storytelling encourages the author of the story to create what was always there, in waiting, to be discovered. The numerous resemblances between the description of certain lies of Albertine and the artists' mysterious world, suggest that it is necessary to seek in the double movement of creation/discovery the truth of art, including the art of Proust. Perhaps the proustian paradigm of the lie constitutes the best illustration of fiction in its early state and it is in this direction that th...
Revue d’études proustiennes. 2017 – 1, n° 5. La Bibliothèque mentale de Marcel Proust
Xenophilic Queerness in Virginia Woolf and Reinaldo Arenas
Migrating Minds
The elusive woman Login/Register to submit a paper for this seminar. Organizer: christina kkona... more The elusive woman Login/Register to submit a paper for this seminar. Organizer: christina kkona Co-Organizer: Sébastien Doubinsky Contact the Seminar Organizers Scholarly interest in portrayals of female errancy has mainly focused on works of previous eras, from Ariosto's women wanderers to Francisco López de Úbeda's La picara Justina (1605) to Frances Burney's The wanderer, or Female difficulties (1814). Barbara Antoniazzi's The Wayward Woman. Progressivism, Prostitution, and Performance in the United States, 1888-1917, despite its narrow scope, has the merit of being one of the rare works recasting the gender question at the turn of the century while addressing the association of female mobility with female sexuality. From early 20 th century modernism to postmodern, African-American and postcolonial literature, the revival of representations of female errancy, fugitivity and rebelliousness compose a great specter of antihegemonic poetics across different ethnic literatures, genres, and media. From Colette's The Vagabond (1910) to Proust's The Fugitive (1925) and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936), and from Kateb Yacine's Nedjma (1952) to Tony Morisson's Beloved (1987), female wanderers and runaways reveal the literary, cultural and political relevance of a hitherto unstudied "character," the male variants of which peopled the picaresque novel. Deprived of property, social respectability, and imperialistic drives, female wanderers embrace precariousness, liminality, and willfulness in movies such as Jane Campion's
Roulette chinoise : jeu de vérité et handicap
Recherches En Psychanalyse, Feb 1, 2008
... 16 Il revient à Angela de nous révéler le sens de l'œuvre et du sujet. ... Retour. [ 4] ... more ... 16 Il revient à Angela de nous révéler le sens de l'œuvre et du sujet. ... Retour. [ 4] El Angel Exterminator. Film de 1962. Réalisation de Luis Bunuel, scénario de Luis Alcoriza : adaptation d'une pièce de théâtre de José Bergamin. Retour. [ 5] Rimbaud A., Lettres dites du voyant. ...
Le désir ou l'art du mensonge dans "A la recherche du temps perdu
Http Www Theses Fr, 2008
Le « narrateur informé » ou le roman de l'aimé(e)
Textuel, 2007
Roulette chinoise�: jeu de v�rit� et handicap
Recherches En Psychanalyse, 2006
Androgynous and a foreigner: Orlando’s revolt
Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism
Migrating Minds Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (book to be released in December 2021)
Routledge, London and New York, 2021
The introduction (only) can be read, but NOT downloaded on google books. See link. Migrating Mind... more The introduction (only) can be read, but NOT downloaded on google books. See link. Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with twenty innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures, Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations. The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres and media, under different modes of production and reception. In the de-territorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.
Amour jaloux et jalousie amoureuse : entre croyance et doute
En opérant une distinction entre l'amour jaloux et la jalousie amoureuse qui explique l'o... more En opérant une distinction entre l'amour jaloux et la jalousie amoureuse qui explique l'oscillation du jaloux entre lucidité et crédulité, l'article explore les effets antagonistes de la jalousie et démontre comment les deux côtés se rejoignent dans l'expérience de Swann et du narrateur.
Proust dans la bibliothèque des femmes anglophones
La question d'écrire encore, et comment, des fictions de soi après Marcel Proust s'est po... more La question d'écrire encore, et comment, des fictions de soi après Marcel Proust s'est posée de façon particulièrement aiguë à plusieurs écrivaines anglophones qui entrent en dialogue avec la Recherche, en citant, paraphrasant, pastichant Proust, ou en lui répondant. Virginia Woolf, Jacqueline Rose et Anne Carson, chacune à sa manière, puisent dans l'épisode d'Albertine l'inspiration pour s'interroger sur la différence féminine ou réécrire l'histoire du point de vue d'Albertine.
Schmid, Marion. Proust Dans la Decadence
Nineteenth Century French Studies, Mar 22, 2012
The Ambivalence of the Sacred in Julia Kristeva
Philosophy Today, 2012
Je vais te dire pourquoi le sacre, pour moi, c'est aussi cela, et peut-etre seulement cela: l... more Je vais te dire pourquoi le sacre, pour moi, c'est aussi cela, et peut-etre seulement cela: l'imaginaire. Le feminin et le sacre Julia Kristeva's early work La Revolution du Langage Poetique, frequently mistaken for her doctoral thesis,1 addresses from the beginning the author's epistemological project, which mainly concentrates, next to her linguistic and semiotic background, on a parallel, indeed intertwined study of literature and psychoanalysis. Kristeva's turn to psychoanalysis is conveyed by the idea that creative singularity is not accessible without resorting to the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, audible through a comprehension of language that is not limited to a code-object of linguistics but understood as a "loving discourse," actualized through the transference/ counter-transference relationship during the psychoanalytic therapeutic process.2 With the introduction of some of the major concepts in her work (chora, semiotic, thetic), Kristeva expands her interrogation to the understanding of the sacred building upon anthropological researches related to the origins of religion. In her constant dialogue with the father of psychoanalysis, Kristeva not only discusses his major ideas but also recapitulates his methodology: following Freud's example, she integrates psychoanalysis with anthropological findings, using of course a more updated corpus compared to the one used by her predecessor. Diane Jonte-Pace deserves the credit for emphasizing Kristeva's rethinking of Freud's conception of religion in Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and its Discontents in her works Powers of Horror, In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, and Strangers to Ourselves.3 However, the importance of religion in Kristeva's work, repeatedly emphasized, is not to be reduced to methodological premises. She subscribes from the beginning to one of the most decisive Freudian discoveries, that the origins of subjectivity, society, and culture share intrinsically the same fantasies and fears. It is on the basis of the fundamental resemblance between the infancy of the individual and the one of the human race that the question of religion arises in Kristeva's thought. Thus, a concern with the sacred can be traced in all of Kristeva's work, revealing every time the imaginary as a structural element of the psyche and the culture. This intrinsic relationship between the sacred and the imaginary leads to the ultimate question of human creativity and more precisely to the art and literature. But it comes also as a response to the secular universe of modernity which inscribes transcendence in the immanence. I believed, thus I talked It is commonplace that scholars writing on Kristeva are almost always concerned with the clarification of the author's constitutive terms, as if it were necessary to summarize her entire theoretical system in order to discuss a specific issue it addresses. However, it is true that Kristeva is not content to introduce new concepts; she also borrows and redefines notions that have previously been articulated and somewhat established, starting with the Lacanian imaginary. It is thus needed to draw the archaeology of this concept and determine its place within the Kristevan theoretical system. In the first pages of La Revolution du Langage Poetique, Kristeva advances the hypothesis that the foundation of what she calls signifiance, considered in the primitive era as the sacred, is within the capitalist system either disguised into art or condemned as schizophrenia;4 that is, the loss of the symbolic function.5 Signifiance, which includes both the semiotic and the symbolic aspects of the signifying process, is to be found in marginalized, though most frequently collective phenomena witnessing to what the "official" discourse represses: the process that goes beyond the subject and its communicative structures. …
Simon. Lettres d'un voyageur (review)
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2011
Le « narrateur informé » ou le roman de l'aimé(e)
http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document464.php
Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto New migratory movements are one of the processes of globalization ai... more Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto New migratory movements are one of the processes of globalization aiming to transform the organization of socio-economic relations. When immigration from the global South to the North is forced on the more vulnerable social classes, both authorities and media talk about a “refugee crisis”. The global flow of refugees constitutes one of the greatest challenges of today inasmuch as it revives identity questions. This very ‘crisis’ translates a clash with the applicability of the postmodern discourse of the other. This paper addresses questions of (im)migration, in order to examine their ethical implications. Secondly, it explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics on a global basis by examining a cinematic work that reveals unexpected encounters, hardships and hidden possibilities of the immigration experience. Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a day (1998) discloses the beauty that emerges in hardships and it rearticulates ethical questions that appe...
Le désir ou l'art du mensonge dans "A la recherche du temps perdu
From the first lie, that of the hero to his mother, to the lie which marks the end of his relatio... more From the first lie, that of the hero to his mother, to the lie which marks the end of his relationship with Albertine, the tricks played by Odette with Swann, the lies of the young ladies of Montjouvain, of Charlus and Morel, everything occurs in A la Recherche as if the lie, as a language of otherness, implies generates a semantic level which escapes the liar as well as the investigator. This level is based on the double meaning of the word invention: at the same time creation and discovery. Storytelling encourages the author of the story to create what was always there, in waiting, to be discovered. The numerous resemblances between the description of certain lies of Albertine and the artists' mysterious world, suggest that it is necessary to seek in the double movement of creation/discovery the truth of art, including the art of Proust. Perhaps the proustian paradigm of the lie constitutes the best illustration of fiction in its early state and it is in this direction that th...
Revue d’études proustiennes. 2017 – 1, n° 5. La Bibliothèque mentale de Marcel Proust
Xenophilic Queerness in Virginia Woolf and Reinaldo Arenas
Migrating Minds
The elusive woman Login/Register to submit a paper for this seminar. Organizer: christina kkona... more The elusive woman Login/Register to submit a paper for this seminar. Organizer: christina kkona Co-Organizer: Sébastien Doubinsky Contact the Seminar Organizers Scholarly interest in portrayals of female errancy has mainly focused on works of previous eras, from Ariosto's women wanderers to Francisco López de Úbeda's La picara Justina (1605) to Frances Burney's The wanderer, or Female difficulties (1814). Barbara Antoniazzi's The Wayward Woman. Progressivism, Prostitution, and Performance in the United States, 1888-1917, despite its narrow scope, has the merit of being one of the rare works recasting the gender question at the turn of the century while addressing the association of female mobility with female sexuality. From early 20 th century modernism to postmodern, African-American and postcolonial literature, the revival of representations of female errancy, fugitivity and rebelliousness compose a great specter of antihegemonic poetics across different ethnic literatures, genres, and media. From Colette's The Vagabond (1910) to Proust's The Fugitive (1925) and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936), and from Kateb Yacine's Nedjma (1952) to Tony Morisson's Beloved (1987), female wanderers and runaways reveal the literary, cultural and political relevance of a hitherto unstudied "character," the male variants of which peopled the picaresque novel. Deprived of property, social respectability, and imperialistic drives, female wanderers embrace precariousness, liminality, and willfulness in movies such as Jane Campion's
Roulette chinoise : jeu de vérité et handicap
Recherches En Psychanalyse, Feb 1, 2008
... 16 Il revient à Angela de nous révéler le sens de l'œuvre et du sujet. ... Retour. [ 4] ... more ... 16 Il revient à Angela de nous révéler le sens de l'œuvre et du sujet. ... Retour. [ 4] El Angel Exterminator. Film de 1962. Réalisation de Luis Bunuel, scénario de Luis Alcoriza : adaptation d'une pièce de théâtre de José Bergamin. Retour. [ 5] Rimbaud A., Lettres dites du voyant. ...
Le désir ou l'art du mensonge dans "A la recherche du temps perdu
Http Www Theses Fr, 2008
Le « narrateur informé » ou le roman de l'aimé(e)
Textuel, 2007
Roulette chinoise�: jeu de v�rit� et handicap
Recherches En Psychanalyse, 2006
_Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (ISSN 2993-1053) is a new peer-reviewed, ... more _Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (ISSN 2993-1053) is a new peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal devoted to interdisciplinary research on cultural cosmopolitanism from a comparative perspective. It provides a unique, international forum for innovative critical approaches to cosmopolitanism emerging from literatures, cultures, media, and the arts in dialogue with other areas of the humanities and social sciences, across temporal, spatial, and linguistic boundaries. By placing creative expressions at the center of a wide range of contemporary and historical intercultural relationships, the journal explores forms of belonging and spaces of difference and dissidence that challenge both universalist and exclusionary paradigms.
_Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ is hosted by Georgetown University, Washington D.C., and co-supported by the “Plurielles” Research Group, Bordeaux Montaigne University, France.
The Inaugural Issue is scheduled to appear in Fall 2023.
The journal invites submissions for its first regular issue, Vol. 1 (1), Spring 2024.
For inquiries about proposals, please contact the editors-in-chief at migratingminds@georgetown.edu by October 13, 2023.
Submission deadlines:
December 15, 2023 for full-text articles;
January 19, 2024 for book reviews and review articles.
Please visit: migratingminds.georgetown.edu
Twitter @MigratingMinds_
Le féminin errant/l'errant féminin L'errance n'est pas le voyage, car elle ne vise ni destination... more Le féminin errant/l'errant féminin L'errance n'est pas le voyage, car elle ne vise ni destination ni retour ; elle se livre au hasard, sans direction précise et sans chemin fixé. L'errant n'est pas le nomade, à proprement parler, car dans sa pluralité singulière, il reste un individu et non pas un groupe de personnes (un peuple, une population ou une tribu) en déplacement continuel. L'errant féminin ne renvoie donc pas au sujet nomade de Rosi Braidotti, car l'intersectionnalité propre au féminin errant ne peut tenir dans l'image à la fois matérielle et historique du nomadisme. La féminité errante n'est pas non plus associée à l'exil au sens de l'expatriation forcée ou à l'immigration par nécessité. Il s'agit plutôt du féminin vagabond, fugitif, rebelle et par là même transgressif. Sa mobilité, sa mutabilité est son seul enracinement, un enracinement déraciné, car c'est une manière d'habiter le monde en franchissant constamment les frontières des nations, des races, des classes, des sexes, des genres, des espèces. L'errance opère comme un moyen de résistance ou de lutte contre les formes hégémoniques de pouvoir ou de prescription culturelle. C'est une rébellion en action, une politique de l'être déplacé impliquant l'absence d'un espace propre ou la non-fixité dans un espace.
to submit a paper for this seminar. Organizer: christina kkona Co-Organizer: Sébastien Doubinsky ... more to submit a paper for this seminar. Organizer: christina kkona Co-Organizer: Sébastien Doubinsky Contact the Seminar Organizers Scholarly interest in portrayals of female errancy has mainly focused on works of previous eras, from Ariosto's women wanderers to Francisco López de Úbeda's La picara Justina (1605) to Frances Burney's The wanderer, or Female difficulties (1814). Barbara Antoniazzi's The Wayward Woman. Progressivism, Prostitution, and Performance in the United States, 1888-1917, despite its narrow scope, has the merit of being one of the rare works recasting the gender question at the turn of the century while addressing the association of female mobility with female sexuality. From early 20 th century modernism to postmodern, African-American and postcolonial literature, the revival of representations of female errancy, fugitivity and rebelliousness compose a great specter of antihegemonic poetics across different ethnic literatures, genres, and media. From Colette's The Vagabond (1910) to Proust's The Fugitive (1925) and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936), and from Kateb Yacine's Nedjma (1952) to Tony Morisson's Beloved (1987), female wanderers and runaways reveal the literary, cultural and political relevance of a hitherto unstudied "character," the male variants of which peopled the picaresque novel. Deprived of property, social respectability, and imperialistic drives, female wanderers embrace precariousness, liminality, and willfulness in movies such as
The Unexpected. A necessary embrace of Contingent futures
Liberal politics is based on promissory agendas of a better world displaced onto a continually di... more Liberal politics is based on promissory agendas of a better world displaced onto a continually differed future. At the same time, planetary obliteration and climate change discourses predict an already known and inevitable outcome. In both cases, future is proclaimed as determinate and therefore it is annulled. As an alternative, I propose a politics that would no longer be a future-oriented promise, but a present-oriented action embracing unpredictable events and generating “new beginnings.” This seminar aims at demonstrating the political and aesthetic relevance of this concept.
Routledge, 2022
_Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-edited by Didier Coste,... more _Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu; winner of the 2023 American Comparative Literature Association 'René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Collection") is a collection of innovative interdisciplinary essays on cosmopolitanism, written by leading scholars from different continents who engage with paramount aesthetic, ethical, political, historical, and pedagogical issues.
As the title implies, the volume discusses cosmopolitanism as an attitude and a thought process, but also as an object of fictional, documentary, and social representations, trying to move away from the divisive premise of radical difference, and implying, instead, that all communities are traversed by differentiations, oppositions and contradictions. Authors propose a solidarity of reason, able to craft interpretive norms and teaching methods that transcend exclusive localisms.
The documenta 14 Reader (R) is a 700-page anthology and one of the two main publications of docum... more The documenta 14 Reader (R) is a 700-page anthology and one of the two main publications of documenta 14 (d14), a major contemporary art exhibition that took place in 2017 between the cities of Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece, for a duration of 100 days in each city. The Reader was made available in German, Greek, and English and was co-edited by Quinn Latimer (editor-in-chief of publications for d14) and Adam Szymczyk (the artistic director of the exhibition). Refl ecting on the theoretical companion to an exhibition while paying less attention to the artworks themselves might sound like a paradoxical enterprise. Nevertheless, the Reader is a vital part of a thought-provoking curatorial process and a key element of a broader theoretico-political experiment. It introduces d14 as a haunting reappearance and conceptualizes it through the duty of radical openness. Indicatively, it is framed by two exhibited quotes (I will explain this term soon): in the fi rst pages one reads Szymczyk's assertion that, "an elusive and haunting apparition, documenta is a phantom of sorts" (28), while the book almost closes with Derrida's phrase, "let us say yes to who or what turns up , before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identifi cation " ("Hospitality" 662). Additionally, the Reader develops through reminiscent voices that have never been heard or are still waiting to be heard. The latter are eloquently evoked in the fi rst text of the book, Darwish's "To the Reader": "My hands are anger / my mouth is anger / the blood of my arteries a juice of anger. / O my reader / do not ask me to whisper, / do not expect musical delight" (15). A Book in/ as Context 1 The Reader comprises 3 diff erent types of material: fi rst, 25 theoretical, critical, or literary texts, either newly commissioned or foundational (Lotringer, Preciado, Flaubert, Birrell, Bennett, Negri, and others), the last excerpt being from Dufourmentelle and Derrida's Of Hospitality ; second, 7 "folios" containing visual elements (paintings, drawings, and photographs) accompanied by short descriptions and organized around topics such as race and hunger, gold, revolution, or Greco-German