This event is sponsored by The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz
This talk begins with a discovery – an old faded photocopy that fell off from my copy of Derrida’s Specters of Marx as I was moving offices in 2020. The photocopy was of a page in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) describing a condition wherein patients experience parasites or insects infesting their surroundings and crawling on their skin. Where did this note come from? How did it find its way to that book in particular? And was its revelation during an office move at the height of Covid an accident, a coincidence, or a message from another time and place and experience? I investigate the provenance of this note, embarking on a journey that leads me to the birthplace of the image and photocopying technology with companies such as Xerox and Kodak in Upstate NY. It also leads me to confront the ghosts and monsters of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) that crawl into suitcases and possess tightly packed books and items of clothing as they cross oceans and go up rivers and canals. In the process, I reflect on hauntology and theory more generally, questioning its potential as a system of meaning that can access the past and reveal the hidden.
Tarek El-Ariss is an author, a scholar, and the James Wright Professor at Dartmouth College, where he teaches Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature. Born and raised in Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990) and trained in philosophy, literary theory, and visual and cultural studies, his work deals with questions of displacement, modernity, and the somatic in literature and culture. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers, and characters with complicated relations to home, tribe, nation, and power. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (2018). In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a forthcoming book entitled, “Homo Belum: An Autobiography of War.”
Date | Time
March 1, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, March 1, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.