Nathan Brown: Alas, Poor Yorick!
Dienstag, 20. April 2021 - 18:00 Uhr
Universität für angewandte Kunst
Die Abteilung Philosophie an der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien lädt herzlich zu einem Gastvortrag ein.
ZOOM-Link: https://zoom.us/j/96650494706
Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt, im Rahmen der Lehrveranstaltung „Tragedy and Psychoanalysis 2“ von Dr. Amanda Holmes.
“Alas, Poor Yorick! The Being of Spirit is a Bone"
Shakespeare's Hamlet and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit include two of the most recognizable enunciations in Western culture: "Alas, poor Yorick!" and "The being of spirit is a bone." What is it that we recognize when we hear or read these words? This lecture takes the conjunction of these phrases as an occasion to meditate on the mere fact of occupying space as the minimal dimension of existential drama. Working through the relation of Hamlet's graveyard scene to other elements of the play's complex structure wherein figures of spatial existence are at stake, we will designate these as the crux of the play's physical and metaphysical concerns, and of the relation between spirit and matter. This will enable us to specify the peculiar modality of being of drama and to grasp the historical and artistic stakes of Hegel's infinite judgment.
Dr. Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montreal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique, and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics.
philosophie.uni-ak.ac.at