Rachel Aumiller: Walking in Circles. Hegel avec Smole on the Historical Repetition of Nothing

Kategorija: Prireditve za odrasle
Datum: 07.09 2017
Lokacija: Trubarjeva hiša literature, Stritarjeva 7, Ljubljana

Združenje Aufhebung v sodelovanju s Trubarjevo hišo literature vabi na predavanje Rachel Aumiller z Univerze v Hamburgu. Prireditev bo potekala v četrtek, 7. 9., z začetkom ob 19. uri v Trubarjevi hiši literature na Stritarjevi 7 v Ljubljani. 

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This lecture will illustrate the Hegelian theme of historical progress/circling through a study of Dominik Smole’s celebrated Antigona in the context of postwar Yugoslavia. Smole’s play was first performed in 1960 three years after Ljubljana’s first annual walk around the Path of Remembrance and Comradeship. Smole’s characters are also caught walking in circles as if doubling the newly implemented memorial walk. While Smole’s characters are themselves split and doubled—at times played by two actors—Antigone never appears on stage. Antigone’s repeated silence/absence drives the other characters to a point of madness in their frenzied circling. In contrast to a memorial event that offers us a repeated opportunity to peacefully reflect upon events and personas of our past—in order to continue to move forward—dialectical circling returns to a negative (non)event that failed to occur at the beginning.

Rachel Aumiller received her doctorate in philosophy from Villanova University in 2016 and is now a research associate at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg and an editor of De Gruyter’s Studies and Texts in Scepticism. She is currently collaborating with the Ljubljana based research team and project The Language of Touch and was a 2014-15 Fulbright scholar to Slovenia where she wrote her dissertation, The Laughing Matter of Spirit. As a postdoc, she continues to develop her own comic metaphysics of Being and Nothingness, which is in dialogue with Hegel’s philosophy and the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis.