PIGOTT HALL, ROOM 216
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Guest speaker: Jacques Lezra (NYU, Spanish and Comparative Literature)

“Objects,” writes Graham Harman, in an essay titled “I am also of the opinion that materialism must be destroyed,” “are not a gullible fetish resulting from a sad, reactionary obsession with the manifest image. Instead, individuals are needed in philosophy due to the futility of all other options” (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010: 28, 772-790). The claim is characteristically bold; the allusion in the essay’s title, to the need for destroying Carthage, typically both claimed (Harman does indeed wish to do away with materialism, at least on the description he offers of the concept) and disavowed (Harman acknowledges that “materialism” can, for some thinkers, encompass positions he finds in some ways congenial—like Jane Bennett’s, or the arguments advanced by speculative materialism). In this talk, and by way of Harman’s throw-away, but symptomatic, use of the term “fetish” (strangely but tellingly modified though it is: a “gullible fetish,” as though fetishes in themselves—but is there such a thing as a “fetish in itself”?—, rather than the holders of the fetish, could be “gullible” or not), Lezra will address the slippage among the terms “objects,” “images,” and “individuals.” This slippage has different, contrasting shapes: it is not the same in Harman, in Meillassoux, in Bennett, in Badiou. Tense and dynamic in every one of its shapes, the slippage between “objects,” “images,” and “individuals” inhabits the distinction between object-orientation, seemingly always to be constructed numerically (one object, the object as one), and matter-orientation, never seemingly a question of numeration. Lezra’s own polemical claim will be that philosophy’s unsatisfiable “need” for “individuals” (inasmuch as “individuals” stand in contradistinction to “manifest images,” and are synonymous with “objects”) is a useful definition of its “materialism”—a materialism that variously-oriented contemporary philosophies disavow rather than (as the fetishist should more properly do) joyously assume.

Jacques Lezra is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at New York University. His work focuses on the literary and visual culture of early modern Europe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, philosophy and literary theory, as well as contemporary and early-modern translation theories and practices. He is currently preparing a monograph entitled On the Nature of Marx’s Things. His most recent books are Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (Fordham, 2010) and Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-editor, Princeton, 2014).

In preparation for the discussion, please read the short selections by Freud, Harman, and Meillassoux available below.

Event Sponsor:
Department of Comparative Literature

Contact Email:
pvalderr@stanford.edu, monicavb@stanford.edu