"The Absurd"
Department: European Languages and Studies
Date and Time: May 4, 2018 | 9:00 AM-6:30 PMEvent Location: HG 1030
Event Details
A workshop organized by Professors Catherine Malabou, Peter Frei, and Christophe Litwin of the Department of European Languages and Studies.
We call absurd a system in which the inferences we draw from a certain set of premises contradict those very premises. Yet, what would happen if human existence were itself part of such a system? How would the life and the condition of humans be any different from the one we experience? In post-WW2 France these questions became so central in art, literature and philosophy, that the substantive “the absurd” was invented to refer to the works of a heterogeneous set of writers which featured among others Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet. Indeed, they did not and could not rally around a cause that was not one, and therefore they did not form a movement. Yet they did take part in a diverse philosophical, literary and aesthetic moment, which was marked by the traumaticexperience of the two world wars and characterized by a profound sense of collapse of all the metaphysical foundations of the European continent's self-defining ideals of religion, culture, civilization and historical progress. They shared a somewhat common experience of impossible metaphysical reconciliation between the brutish factuality of existence and the human desire for meaning — a common experience of the inherent absurdity and irremediable sense of alienation of the human condition. What would be the point of living if life was absurd, if it has no meaning?
Please note the room is HG 1030, not 1010 as indicated on the flyer
Poster Design by Christophe Litwin