Sophie Eager

Vivre ensemble: seulement peut-être pour affronter ensemble la tristesse du soir’. Loners alone and together with Roland Barthes 

This paper will explore Roland Barthes’s ideas on community and solitude from the latter part of his career. In particular, I will challenge the utility of these ideas for encouraging ‘real-world’ interactions between individuals, proposing alternately the idea that the literary model of self Barthes propounds in 

his later work encourages narcissism and decreases the possibility of successful intrapersonal relationships. The status of Barthes’s writing as a mediating object will also be discussed to speculate on ways that texts bring loners together; whether they indulge self-interest or enable us to transcend our solitude and transport structures from texts into our shared empirical reality. 

Joey Hornsby

Je suis le seul qui ait osé écrire ce chef-d’œuvre: Marinetti’s fantasies of solitude and invisible labour 

Marinetti’s Futurism revolves around the figure of the superuomo, his own take on the Nietzschian übermensch, the superman defined at least in part by their being absolutely alone - because of their superiority, they exist on a level apart. What’s more, they are never represented as communing together on that level. This figure is embodied by the mechanical man Gazourmah at the end of Mafarka le futuriste, flying amongst the wind and clouds as the earth collapses in rubble and fire below him. In this seminar I propose to investigate how far this fantasy is invested not just in the erasure of community in the sense of that community’s being consumed in the superuomo’s explosive birth, but also in a certain community’s literal invisibility - namely, the workforce. The myth of the self-sufficient superman who survives by will alone is not compatible with an acknowledgement of human survival as a question of mutual dependence; as such, that mutual dependence must be vehemently denied. I will explore Marinetti’s strategies for this denial in Mafarka, as well as the connection between such an ideology and an aesthetic which privileges a bombardment of images so overhwhelming that they seem almost to produce themselves, withdrawing even creative labour from the creative scene.

This is a free event and open to all, registration is not required.