When: Friday, 28 April, 3:00pm-4:30pm (UTC+3).
Where: Room 247, Unioninkatu 33 Building. You can also join us online via the Zoom link below: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/67230008219?pwd=WC84dmNZQ0Q3aW10WGgxUTgzK1R4…
Meeting ID: 672 3000 8219
Passcode: 389577
Abstract:
ᴍᴎᴘᴄᴋᴏнца and οὐροβόρος: Avant-garde temporalities in European interwar scholarship
The seminar talk will explore three interwar intellectual groupings – Russian formalism, Romanian ‘generationists’, and German-Swiss dialectical theologians – and the ways in which they sought to radically rethink human temporality and historicity. They all made significant contributions to the emerging post-World War anti-teleological timescapes, in which changing understandings of the human world and methods for its study became inseparably entwined. So, for these mostly young thinkers, anti-historicism as a cultural, philosophical or methodological critique would always remain insufficient. Instead, the talk will argue, they felt compelled to attempt a more radical intervention with the perceived circular structure between (1) the methodological and epistemological claims of the historical nature of all knowledge, (2) the ontological framework based on the idea of History as continuity and causality, (3) political ideology of progress, (4) and the ethics of historical relativism. In this endeavour, their ideas were often linked with and influenced by concurrent avant-garde attempts to explode the "Old World", including its spatial and temporal norms.