Literature stands in the chasm that divides philosophical consciousness from itself. Since the expulsion of the tragic poets from Plato’s republic, literary thinking occupies no place, or rather, an atopos in the calamitous history of western metaphysics and the self-colonization of the European psyche.
How are we to excavate this no place, delineate the contours of its absence and of its forgetting within the territoriality that is western philosophy, to re-enact the atopic, or utopian force of a form of thinking always already moving at its own frontiers and recognizing its own aporias?
How might this no place of a non-site preserved and afforded by literature nonetheless transfix the self-understanding of philosophy and the philosophical understanding of the self as present to, identical as, contemporaneous and synchronized with itself?
Organizer and Contact: Yi Wu (yi.wu@dartmouth.edu).
The hermeneutic series, No Places: Thinking on Frontiers, Passages and Impasses are generously supported by the Society of Fellows and the Comparative Literature Program, Dartmouth College.