Ian Balfour (York) and Rebecca Comay (Toronto)
First Persons
This seminar addresses the complexities of the first person (both singular and plural) in philosophical, literary, and political discourse of the Romantic era.  We will be working with a selection of (probably a half dozen) very short passages which we will make available in advance (e.g. Hegel, Rousseau, Charlotte Smith, Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, Coleridge, Burke, Hazlitt). We want to take the measure of first persons and personae in different kinds of texts, some written under the direct or indirect pressure of the French revolution and its aftermath. We want to think about how these pronouns work, grammatically, rhetorically, politically, and conceptually, and to think about the ambiguous categories of both “person” (persons-vs-things, personal identity, persona(e), personality, personification, corporate-vs-individual) and “first” (pragmatic, logical, hierarchical, sequential, chronological, genealogical). The seminar leaders will offer brief approaches to the selected passages before opening up the session to discussion.

Julie Carlson (UC Santa Barbara) and Felice Blake (UC Santa Barbara)
Just Relations?:  White Romantic Imaginings and the Black Radical Tradition 
Though focusing on different historical eras and national traditions, both of our book projects (Felice's book is Intimate Antagonisms:  Black Love, Black Hate, and the Paradox of Intraracial Conflict in African-American Literature; Julie's book-in- progress is Friendship and Creativity:  A Radical Legacy of British Romantic Writing) explore literary portrayals of close interpersonal relations as these relations are depicted as a) necessary, b) fractured, sometimes irreparably, and c) vital to a vision of social and political reform.  Both projects also consider how these portrayals depict recourse to literature and expressive culture generally as a mode of human relating that interacts with and often mediates among psychic, interpersonal, and socio-political arenas.   Julie's project focuses primarily on friendship as explored in British Romantic-era writing, whereby "friend" is promoted as the optimal relation in efforts to achieve justice and is a designation that encompasses a person's relation to intimates (best friends), others (friend of man), and beloved texts (books as friends).  Felice's project focuses on depictions of coupling and couples in African-American novels from the 1920s to the present in order to show how their explorations of the difficulties of intraracial intimacy are central to these writers' visions of Black liberation.  In highlighting relational difficulties, both of our books mean to demonstrate that the interpersonal cannot be jettisoned in attempts to reform the political (and vice versa) and that cultural expression often is a witting as well as unwitting agent in committing psychic, interpersonal, and societal harm.   At the same time, each of us believes that how these texts posit a relationship with their readers is part of how imaginative modes effect political change.   
          These similarities highlight the difference that we invite seminar members to help us explore.  Felice's focus on intraracial antagonism, and her accompanying argument that depictions of it have been overlooked as the result of preoccupation with the color line and to the detriment of viable notions of Black community, underscore that the "friend" prized by New Philosophical writers for being more capable of expansions of heart than "husband," "mother," or "child" remains circumscribed by the white mythology of Western philosophy, even as it expands friend to encompass certain women.  In contrast, the intimate antagonisms that Felice's texts explore work out from under histories of enslavement and trauma that practices of closeness seek to amend, even as the capacity for and desirability of intimacy is severely challenged by that history. So where do these failures and impasses leave the relational aspirations associated with each tradition, and where does Black radical thought leave White Romantic imaginations?  Does, or under what conditions does, Romantic-era imagination escape its liberal trappings to enter into something akin to the collectivities, spirituality, and under-commons sociability inherent in Black radical thought?How does the reality and experience of interpersonal fracture differ if the fractured subjects start from the presumption of identity or are presumed incapable of having one?  Does the "hope" that underlies White British Romantic visions of futurity extend to current critiques of Afro-pessimism? When is a Black radical a friend rather than a brother or sister, and when would or should they want to be? 

​Alan Liu (UC Santa Barbara) and Jacques Khalip (Brown)
Romanticism and Critical Infrastructure Studies
​What can a critical infrastructural studies approach to romanticism--one that takes the perspective of materials, structures, systems, and their human and labor impact--allow us to see and think that other methods of reading cannot? If infrastructure, by one common definition, is that which is the “invisible” support of life and death, freedom and constraint, knowledge and work, information and art, and many other facets of modern existence, how can such invisible structures serve as an instrument for making new or other dimensions of romanticism visible? This seminar will draw on selected strands of the emerging “critical infrastructure studies” field, including: “large technical systems” research in science-technology studies; Susan Leigh Star's ethnographical approach; media and information infrastructure studies; feminist infrastructural approaches; and the “care and repair” critical movement. Designed as a think tank for incubating directions of research and theory, the seminar will supply participants with a small "starter kit" of readings and romantic infrastructural artifacts to think about. Then the goal will be for participants during the seminar to generate a set of possible research ideas, projects, and methods that the seminar's co-leaders will write up as a report from the event.

Forest Pyle (Oregon) and Claire Colebrook (Penn State)
Truth, Images, Worlds
How does the concept of world rely upon the experience and sense of images?  There is something peculiarly modern and Western about the concepts of lifeworlds, end of the world, possible worlds and the essential meaning and humanity of the world.  In many respects current fictions regarding the end of the world are ultimately thought experiments about the end of images.  By contrast, one of the ways we might think about artworks after Romanticism is by way of a conception of images that survive what we understand as ’the world.’ This strain in Romanticism would cut against the grain of the dominant way in which the artworld views images,  regarding them as fragments of a world. "The image comes from the sky," writes Jean-Luc Nancy, "not the heavens, which are religious, but from the skies, a term proper to painting." Taking Nancy's claim as our point of departure, we want to consider how the image is not "of" the world. Can we entertain the possibility that the vitality of the "true image" resides in its disappearance? We want to examine the flashings and vanishings of the romantic image as it circulates and flees, yesterday and tonight, in artworks of the period and after. If the true image comes from the sky which will be its destination, how is the special world called "art" the "proper term" of its special currency?

Joan Steigerwald (York University) and Gabriel Trop (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Philosophy and Poetry of the Copula
This seminar proposes to read and discuss a brief essay by F.W.J. Schelling: the “Treatise on the Relationship of the Real and the Ideal in Nature.” Schelling included this essay as an introduction to the 1806 edition of his seminal text of nature philosophy, On the World Soul. This essay is a critical text that could be read as one of the most significant treatises in the philosophical tradition; yet it is still underappreciated, and only recently translated. It touches not only on the philosophy of nature, but encompasses issues of aesthetics, ontology, theology, science, spatiality and temporality, and ruminations on the ethical consequences of a conception of life that is rife with tensions and paradoxes. In this essay Schelling returns to the problem of the copula or das Band that haunts his philosophy in its varied iterations, as a space in which to explore questions of judgment, metaphysics and linguistics. It was published at the end of the period commonly described as Schelling’s identity philosophy, in which he attempted to bring his preoccupations with nature philosophy and transcendental idealism into a systematic relationship. Yet in his philosophy of art and later works, Schelling turns to expressing his philosophy in mythical and figurative terms, the traces and germs of which can be found in this essay. Schelling’s 1806 text thus touches on aspects of many of his philosophical systems, without being clearly located in any one, and indicating the work of both constructing and deconstructing systems that is characteristic of his mode of philosophizing. It will be our goal to examine what light this text throws on the most pressing issues of the early nineteenth century that are still with us today, as it calls into question and seeks to reposition the usual binaries of the philosophical tradition: identity/difference, matter/form, organic/inorganic, infinity/finitude, reason/feeling, to name just a few.

Orrin Wang (Maryland) and Luka Arsenjuk (Maryland)
Loose Romanticism: Philosophy of Contemporary Art
In the beginning of his Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Peter Osborne cites the inexplicable but not at all surprising train wreck of a dinner get-together between Gilles Deleuze and Francis Bacon, shortly after Deleuze had written his book on Bacon, and the philosopher and artist had professed their mutual admiration of one another.  In Anywhere or Not at All Osborne attempts a more productive encounter between philosophy and art through the conscious deployment of a post-Kantian inquiry into contemporary art, by way of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s own probings into twentieth-century art and culture, since mutated and conditioned by, and now responding to, the specifics of twentieth-first century late capital and neo-liberal life.
         Taking seriously Osborne’s description of his enterprise as “loosely Romantic,” this seminar will consider whether a loose Romanticism can actively supply the means by which a truly generative philosophical intervention into contemporary art can occur.  Our sense of a loose Romanticism refers not only to the fragmentary, non-totalizing essay form of the Jena School that Osborne explicitly cites as a model for his study.  We also take as some of our theoretical coordinates how loose Romanticism views any candidate of contemporary art as itself criticizing the vagaries of its historical moment, as well as necessarily the conceptions of history and historical time structuring its contemporaneity; how also art does not mean aesthetics; and the proposition in Anywhere or Not at All that contemporary art today is post-conceptual art.  To these portions of Osborne’s argument we would add two other spurs we find in the concept of a loose Romanticism: an openness to (the problem of) the contemporaneity of Romanticism most recently practiced by the collection of essays gathered by Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle in their Benjaminian inspired Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism; and how the “loose” in loose Romanticism intimates a necessary volatility or unbinding of any concept undergirding any method, including the very proposition of the encounter between the entities known as philosophy and art.  This sense of unbinding could converge with Osborne’s own intent to follow Adorno’s characterization of Benjamin’s thinking as a “philosophy beyond philosophy,” though it very well may also lead to more aporetic deterritorializations of our, and the seminar participants’, own making.
                 We will proceed by reading portions of Anywhere or Not at All alongside samples of other competing anatomies of contemporary art, such as Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible and Alain Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics with the goal of ascertaining how much a loose Romanticism is either a pivot or an elision in any substantial understanding of contemporary art.  We will also consider this proposition by way of discussing works of one of Osborne’s test cases, Robert Smithson, as well as perhaps some of our own: Pierre Huyghe’s video art, Theaster Gates’s installations, or Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Histoire(s) du cinéma.

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