"'His soul swooned slowly': What May Be Learned from the Dead?"

What happens in the "endless conversation" that we, the living, carry on with the dead? A more urgent version of this question would be: What purpose might this intercourse serve? Could the exchange somehow show our species how to evolve beyond its superstitious childhood and its murderous adolescence?

What can be said about the lag time between the perpetration of an atrocity and its recognition as wrong in whatever form, be it public memorial or collective consciousness? How should we read and interpret such delays? This belatedness should intrigue us, for it could hold the secret to complacency and indifference to the suffering of others, to the temptation to forestall recognition infinitely. What causes justice to be belated? What force can manage to break denial and silence? Perhaps convoking Kant, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and a few others can help us think through these questions.

This talk is related to our current exhibitions that all deal to some extent with the notion of the uncanny.

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus (Stony Brook University,New York). His research explores the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse, the relations between art and philosophy, and how both dynamics may inform ethics. More recent books are Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017), with French and Japanese translations forthcoming in 2023, and Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010), which appeared in French as Témoignabilité (MetisPresses, 2015). Parmi les gisants, Harvey’s latest book, appearing in January 2024 (Presses Universitaires de France), visits a few cemeteries and explores what the living think they can learn from the dead. He is completing a manuscript, tentatively entitled Semantic Perversion, for publication by Bloomsbury in 2024. From 2001 until 2007, Harvey was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris.