On April 17 at 16:30 we invite you to an online lecture by Zachary Reina, PhD in Political Sciences from Johns Hopkins University, professor at Tumen University, School of Advanced Studies (SAS). The title of the speech is “On the way to the politics of limits: Sacher-Masoch, Bruno Latour and Intentional communities”.
- Abstract
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Bruno Latour's Gifford lectures, given in 2013 and published in 2017 under the title Facing Gaia, are perhaps the most trenchant exploration of the necessary, even politically positive, aspects of limits since Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1932). Rather than shy away from the reactionary and nationalistic connotations that beleaguer most discussions of limits today-just think of Trump's wall-Latour pursues something akin to a revitalization of a discourse of limits for our contemporary ecological era. While Latour tackles head on the dangerous sympathies that have emerged between emancipatory politics and the rhetoric of limitlessness — "only reactionaries insist on limits; they don't want us to be emancipated; they want to drag us back to the land, to an era of restrictions and misery from which we have finally so successfully migrated" (107) — and even goes as far as to call for the invention of new political practices that generate limits, his lectures leave woefully underdeveloped what it might mean to actually practice a politics of limits or produce subjects who love limits. In contrast to the "modern" limit-abhorring subject, Latour dreams of the new "Earthbound" subject who loves limits, yet he gives very little insight on how such a subjectivity might be produced. Instead, Latour simply suggests that such practices and subjectivities are "fascinating to imagine" (136).
This paper turns to the work of the nineteenth-century writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to fill in Latour's lacuna. Perhaps more than any other Western thinker, Sacher-Masoch was captivated by the idea of the limit, of literally being bounded, and his writings present a sustained meditation on the production of subjects who love limits. His stories abound in imagery of limits, from the contract (or self-imposed limit) and rope, to the bounded lover. In this paper, I argue that Sacher-Masoch is best read in conversation with social contract theory. Sacher-Masoch began his career as a scholar of political thought before relinquishing his university post to pursue story-writing fulltime. In Venus in Furs, his most famous story, Sacher-Masoch dwells at length on the concept of the contract. Returning us to the etymological origin of contract as that which draws or binds together, Sacher-Masoch plunges deeper into the contract as self-imposed limit in order to rethink the contract from the inside as the technology par excellence of limits. Sacher-Masoch thus helps provide the missing link in Latour's evocative call for new political technologies of the limit and gives us insight into how the production of this limit-loving subject might proceed and what its critical goals could be. - Meeting link
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BlueJeans meeting link: https://bluejeans.com/363328828.
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