Chariotless: The Poet in the Anthropocene

FEBRUARY 19 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

The author, we know, is long dead. The subject, sous rature, has both disintegrated into and been subsumed by a “given” affective whole. The nature of this giveness remains unaccounted for and (its various constituents) unaccountable. This lecture seeks to engage the difficult and understudied relationship between Hegel’s and Husserl’s “subjectivity” by overstepping the former’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in order to explore Hegel’s later formulation of lyric subjectivity. Taking cues from both Hegel (that is the Hegel of the Aesthetics) and Husserl (that is the late Husserl informed by Eugen Fink), I retain the Posthuman formulation of “a complex field of forces”, but simultaneously recover Plato’s conception of an immortal subject as self-moving—a Hegelian lyric subjectivity, or a Husserlian self-constuting subjectivity—which may ride these corporeal and incorporeal fields of forces, may act ethically and relationally, by way of a pre-linguistic intuition of unthought forms, a self-governing and creative synthesis, rather than by way of an integration that is always already disintegration. These phenomenological traces of a linguistic reframing work through, over and against the enframing (the reduction of beings to entities of a system) in any number of symbolic orders. I call this the poet in the Anthropocene in order to articulate the différance of an immortal subjectivity (unconditioned and unconditional) within a collectively constituted world.