Lecture by Jaime Rodriguez Matos (CSU Fresno)

Department: Comparative Literature

Date and Time: March 10, 2017 | 12:00 PM-2:00 PM

Event Location: HG 1010

Event Details


University and State invites you to a talk by Jaime Rodriguez Matos (CSU Fresno) entitled "Archives, Voids, Nihilisms: State and University",  on Friday March 10th, noon in HG 1010.

We will meet to discuss Jaime’s recent book, Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time, (Fordham, 2017) on Monday March 6th at 11:00 AM in HIB 257.
 
(The book is available online through the UCI library)

In Writing of the Formless, Jaime Rodríguez Matos proposes the "formless" as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. Thinking through both literary and political writings around the Cuban Revolution, Rodríguez Matos explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments that have sought to give form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of representation. In doing so, he proposes the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics while exploring the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality for the critique of metaphysics. Rodríguez Matos takes the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima as the guiding thread in exploring the possibility of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition-a time of the absence of time, in which the absence of time no longer means eternity.

About University & State:
Emerging from a grad-initiated reading group on “The idea of the university and its histories”, this Humanities Commons research cluster attempts to push questions about the university as an institution, as an idea, as a model and symptom of various iterations of the state, and as rhizomatic histories of institutions and ideas, spanning geographic and intellectual traditions but never in simple or obvious ways, that ought to be engaged as such. Although in part provoked by rhetoric of crisis, the group aims to excavate existing discussion that privileges consideration of the relation between the university and the state and to further this line of inquiry through guest lectures, collective reading and writing, and by highlighting work across the UC system that emboldens theoretical exploration, especially in conjunction with efforts to interrogate the history, legacy, and politics of public institutions around the globe.