This is the fifth workshop of five on politics and enjoyment, sponsored by The American University of Paris and the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

Speakers from AUP include: Oliver Feltham, Jerome Game and Charles Talcott.

Guest speakers include: Marc de Kesel (Advising Researcher, Jan van Eyck Academie/ Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Drew Milne (Judith E Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge) and Tom Cohen (Professor, Department of English, State University of New York, Albany).

Program

10.30 Introduction: Oliver Feltham & Geoff Gilbert

10.45 Drew Milne (University of Cambridge)

11.30 Response: Jerome Game (to be confirmed)

11.45 Discussion

12.30 LUNCH

13.45 Marc de Kesel (Jan van Eyck Academie) “Thank God, He Left. Hölderlin on Tragedy”

14.30 Response: Oliver Feltham (AUP)

14.45 Discussion

15.30 PAUSE

16.00 Charles Talcott (AUP) on Brokeback Mountain

16.45 Response: Tom Cohen (SUNY Albany)

17.00 Discussion

Simon Jarvis is Gorley Putt Senior Lecturer in English Literary History in the University of Cambridge. After doctoral work on the conflict between amateur and professional conceptions of literary study in the early history of English vernacular scholarship ("Scholars and Gentlemen", 1995), his study of "Adorno", emphasizing the latter's rootedness in classical German philosophy, appeared in 1998. His study of poetic thinking in Wordsworth, "Wordsworth's Philosophic Song", is to appear from Cambridge University Press in summer 2006. He is currently working on a philosophical aesthetics of verse.

The paper is concerned with understanding how the non-semantic aspects of language and especially of verse might nevertheless be understood as bearing a historically particular "truth-content". Marx's theory of ideology is re-read, not as miserable and literal social science, but as comic and mock-heroic criticism. It is argued to be only partially and questionably applicable to literary works. Out of this is developed a series of questions about the kind of truth which non-explicit elements of verse might be considered to bear. These are developed through an account of the importance of the work of classical scholar Marcel Detienne for poetics and literary theory in general. The talk ends with an extended consideration and defence of some of Shelley's ideas about prosody.

Professor Rose is the author of a series of influential works which hold together culture, psychoanalysis, and politics. They include Feminine Sexuality, written with Juliet Mitchell (Macmillan, 1982), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Harvard University Press, 1992), Why War: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Blackwell, 1993), Sexuality in the Field of Vision (Verso, 1996), States of Fantasy (Clarendon Press, 1996), and On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (Princeton UP, 2003; Vintage, 2004). She has edited and made available to the English world a range of key texts, including Wulf Sachs, Black Hamlet (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), and Moustapha Safouan, Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training (Macmillan, 2000). She has recently also turned novelist, with Albertine (Chatto and Windus, 2001), and has co-written and presented a series of programmes, broadcast in 2002 on Channel 4 in the UK, called Dangerous Liaison: Israel and America.

Professor Leask is the author of a range of increasingly international works on Romantic literature and culture, including The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Thought (Macmillan, 1988), British Romantic Writers and the East (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing (Oxford University Press, 2002).

The 'Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan' was written in 1803 in Calcutta, in the Persian language, and published in English translation in 1810. It represents the first significant travel account of Britain and Europe by an Indian author. This paper examines this little-known text as an exemplar of cultural translation in the romantic period, relating it to the fictional 18th-century 'Lettres Persanes' tradition, to European travel writing, and to the Indo-Muslim 'discovery of Europe' recently studied by Gulfishan Khan and others. A lively and engaging travel account in its own right, interspersed with the author's poetical effusions, it is concerned with comparing and contrasting European and Asian societies, particularly in relation to issues of sexuality, gender, and the condition of women.

Professor Rabaté is the author of some twenty books on literature and literary theory, including work on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Thomas Bernhard, and on psychoanalysis and deconstruction; recently, his publications have included The Ghosts of Modernity (University of Florida Press, 1996), Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge UP, 2001), Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature (Palgrave, 2001), The Future of Theory (Blackwell, 2002), and Logiques du Mensonge (Calmann- Levy, 2005).

Jean-Michel Rabaté has been a good friend to AUP, speaking at the President's Conference in 2003, and teaching the senior seminar in the Department of Comparative Literature a few years before that. His talk focuses on the mechanisms by which two key French thinkers? Derrida and Lacan? became part of the language of thought in the humanities in North America.

François Cusset, of l'ILERI in Paris, will respond to Professor Rabaté's talk. Cusset is the author of two works which have translated the American theoretical world for a French public, French Theory (Broché, 2003), and Queer Critics: La littérature française déshabillée par ses homo-lecteurs (Broché, 2002).

Chris Nealon teaches in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. His critical work concentrates on relations among affect, politics, and creative production (particularly contemporary poetry). He has, for example in his book, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion after Stonewall (Duke University Press, 2001), tried to trace structures of feeling as they exist in relation to sexuality, and to explore the ways that those structures of feeling open new histories and new political futures. He is also a poet, whose recent books Ecstasy Shield (2001) and The Joyous Age (2004) are published by Black Square Press.

His paper at AUP will look at what happened when Western Marxism became anti-totalizing, concentrating on the work that affect ? the melancholy of Adorno, the joy of Deleuze, the beatitude of Hardt and Negri ? does within contemporary political theory. The argument will trace the productivity of these affects through attention to two further fields: queer experience, and contemporary North American poetry. What kinds of politics, what kinds of social vision, what kind of whole, are emerging within the feelings that are building here?