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1. "the flows, the systems...the field of flesh": posthuman poetics, material assemblages, and networked cartographies in contemporay irish poetry

   This presentation examines a selection of poems by contemporary Irish poets at the intersections of technology, ecology, and literary aesthetics. I argue that the discussed poems, published during the past 30 years, anticipate or comment on the emerging posthumanist paradigm, what Rosi Braidotti describes as a system of “discursive objects of exchange” within a community of “transversal ‘assemblages’ […] that involves non-human actors and technological media”. 

   The work of poets described as “neo-modernists” has been, from the 1990s onwards in particular, closely attuned to changes in technology, environment, and the media. The work of Randolph Healy draws on his background in mathematical sciences. Trevor Joyce’s career as a Business Systems Analyst at Apple has informed his approach to language as structured, fragmented, and networked transmission of data.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:32

2. Thoreau’s Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest

   It is time to liberate the forest from the anthropocentric metaphor. Donna Haraway, endorsing Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), says this clearly: “A thinking forest is not a metaphor.” Recent work by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers on “Gaia,” along with Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” demands that we reevaluate our tendency toward metaphor when dealing with trees.

   Kohn’s work, along with Michael Marder’s and Peter Wohlleben’s, suggests that we emphasize the cognitive life of trees, rather than harnessing the image of trees as metaphors for human cognition. We must view the forest as a thinking entity in its own right.

   In this paper, I examine Henry David Thoreau’s writing as a model for an encounter with trees that moves beyond mere metaphor. Thoreau draws on his position as an American Transcendentalist and an empirical naturalist to approach trees both philosophically and scientifically. As a poet, he does not make poetry out of trees, but instead sees the poetry that trees themselves create.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:36

3. Catherine Malabou, Anne Carson, and the Plasticity of Inheritance

   Catherine Malabou has pursued her philosophy of plasticity across a number of recent works, published over several decades. In books such as The Future of Hegel, The New Wounded, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Before Tomorrow, and Morphing Intelligence, she has explored the intimate connections between brain plasticity and temporality as pertaining to key figures in the modern philosophical tradition: Hegel, Kant, Freud, Bergson, Derrida, and others.

   One might think of her corpus as composed of a series of adventurous and bold philosophical retracings, where motifs such as doublings, short circuits, metamorphoses, and wormholes through time feature prominently. She is a preeminent contemporary philosopher, but her work importantly interfaces with neuroscience, cognitive sciences, and the history of artificial intelligence too. Likewise, as I wish to argue in my conference presentation, her work has important implications for literary studies. I want to discuss implications and possible styles of practical application by bringing Malabou together with the contemporary poet Anne Carson.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:39

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