The distinction of these two types of evil owes much to a separation between the human-made, intentional, and political from the unintentional, material, and contingent, which is a signature of eighteenth-century thinking. As Susan Neiman has argued, this separation of “evils” is in part the product of enlightened counterreactions to the late-baroque revival of the theodicy problem. But the intentional and the human-made are hardly stable, and they rest on an exclusion of a third party, the divine, which continues to participate subliminally.
In the workshop we want to discuss the shifting ground and the hybrid forms that emerge on the axis of violence and accident, and to probe the extent to which this axis can actually be regarded as central to modern historical writing. Does historical writing, for instance, fetishize violence, or does it on the contrary downplay it for the sake of regarding everything as accidental? What are the continuing meanings of violence and accident, e.g. through sacrifice and catastrophe, in history as an expression of relations between humans and the (super-)natural?
Programme
Monday, June 15
- 10:00 – 10:45: Welcome and Introduction (Henning Trüper)
- 10:45 – 11:00 Coffee break
- 11:00 – 12:15 Jonathan Sheehan: Enlightenment Sacrifice and the Violence of History. Chair: Henning Trüper.
- 12:15 – 13:30 Lunch (University Cafeteria)
- 13:30 – 14:45 Henrik Gustafsson: Gems Wrought by Blizzards: Denaturalizing the Image in Susan Schuppli’s Not Planet Earth. Chair: Henning Trüper.
- 14:45 – 15:00 Coffee break
- 15:00 – 16:15 Olivia Custer: Can Mushrooms Help Us Avoid Paranoia and Despair? Chair: Henning Trüper
- 18:30: Dinner, Café Tekehtopa, St Olavs Plass 2.
Tuesday, June 16
- 9:30 – 10:45 Sotera Fornaro: The Banality of Tragedy: (Greek) Tragedy and Narrating the Events after October 7. Chair: Henning Trüper.
- 10:45 – 11:00 Coffee break
- 11:00 – 12:15 Henning Trüper: Exchanging Evils: Revisiting the Raft of the Méduse. Chair: Jonathan Sheehan
All welcome!
There is no registration.