Join the Program in Comparative Literature for light refreshments and a talk, in which Siarhei Biareishyk will discuss the obsessive taxonomization of intellectual currents as systems (e.g., dualism, idealism, dogmatism etc) that emerges in the eighteenth century, and reflect on the proliferations of -isms in European intellectual history still continuing today. Against “systems,” Biareishyk will advance the concept of “tendency” for thinking about literary and intellectual history. The opposition of materialist and idealist tendencies, in particular, will yield a latent tradition of “materialism without matter” spanning from Spinoza to Marx, from Heine to Tynianov.
Siarhei Biareishyk is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. He is currently completing his book, Spinozan Mediations: The Limits of Materialist Thought in Novalis and His Contemporaries.
Cherpak Lounge | Williams 543
All Welcome