Jean-Luc Nancy Colloquium: A Breath for Nothing... Approaching the Limit

The poetic instance is when the artist and thinker acts through “a breath for nothing...” describes Martin Heidegger. This one-day colloquium will investigate critical responses to performance through gesture and its arrest. Can theoretical or linguistic terms, such as ‘separation’ and ‘division‘, be applied to a state when the body approaches a limit of creating and thinking? As a follow-up to a workshop hosted by The University of Dundee, entitled ‘Jean-Luc Nancy: Writing Upon the Limit’, this colloquium will extend from Nancy’s notion of ‘exscription’: a mode of inscribing the limit of writing traced outside the text. The aim now is to explore this ‘outside’ beyond writing and language. Considering how for Nancy the experience of space is felt and thought within as much as without the body suggests an internal and non-representational condition, or ‘spanne’. Could this notion be elaborated, or critically presented through performative interventions, which do not necessarily presuppose the primacy of text and image? Bearing in mind Maurice Blanchot’s claim that conventional forms of writing cannot represent the limit as a literary ‘trace’, even by inscribing/drawing it literally, we can also consider this as a proposition for alternative approaches to representing the limit.

Programme

11.30am – 11.45am Registration

11.45am – 1.00pm Welcome Remarks & Session 1:

• Adrienne Janus (University of Aberdeen) ‘Soundings: The Secret of Water and the Resonance of the Image'
• Carrie Giunta (University of Dundee) 'A Question of Listening: Nancean Resonance, Return and Relation in Charlie Chaplin'

1.00pm - 2:00pm Lunch 

2.00pm – 3.20pm Session 2:

• Yve Lomax (Royal College of Art) ‘Figure—Gesture—Pure means’
• Martin Crowley (Queens’ College, Cambridge) TBD

3.20pm – 3.35pm Break

3.35pm – 4.45pm Session 3:

• Paul Harrison (of artist group Harrison and Wood) 'To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself' (Perec)
• Philip Warnell (Kingston University) ‘Outlandish: A Conversation With Filmmaker Philip Warnell and Robert Luzar’

4.45pm – 5.00pm Closing Remarks

This colloquium is free to attend. To book your place or for more information please email either Robert Luzar ([email protected]) or Carrie Giunta ([email protected])

To find Granary Building: From Kings Cross Station, follow York Way north; Take the first left onto Goods Way and cross at the lights. For a map and detailed directions, please visit: