Towards a Physiological Novel / Wednesday, 4th of May at 7pm / Speaker Isak Winkel Holm

Søren Kierkegaard on Trauma: The Concept of Anxiety as a Theory of Traumatic Time
Speaker: Isak Winkel Holm.
Wednesday 4th of May at 7pm.

In The Concept of Anxiety, Søren Kierkegaard presents his dense and demanding theory of “the moment” – a fragment of time “in which time and eternity touch each other”. This paper will argue that the concept of the moment must be understood not in theological or philosophical, but, rather, in psychological terms. The theory of the moment is, in fact, a proto-theory about what was later to be known as a traumatic experience: a violent wounding event which is incomprehensible for the person experiencing it and which breaks down the chronological order of time. The paper will focus on Kierkegaard’s complicated web of metaphors and literary images in order to show that The Concept of Anxiety is, among other things, a book about the relationship between art and trauma, between aesthetic representation and psychic breakdown.

Isak Winkel Holm is a Ph.D, Associate Professor at Department for Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of: Thinking in Images: The Poetics of Søren Kierkegaard(Tanken i billedet. Søren Kierkegaards poetik). He has written on Rousseau, Schlegel, Kleist, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Musil, Kafka, Kundera, DeLillo, Sebald, McCarthy, etc. In his current research he focuses on: “Disaster Fiction”, and “Kafka: Forms of Injustice”.

(BL)

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’ is a series of 8 bi-weekly talks and screenings initiated by Sidsel Meineche Hansen on the subject of communication and Angst, and the production of noise and nervousness in an electronic era. The talks will operate as a mode of research for a physiological novel that examines how information circulates – how it, in physiological terms, is embodied, and consumed in our current society. The series will bring together a diverse range of theoreticians, artists and fiction writers whose works’ provide a flexible foundation for dealing with these ideas. The events are free. .

1. Dissonance at the Threshold; or Interfering in Systems Thinking. Speaker: Matt Clemments.
Wednesday 23 March, 2011.
2.  Medieval Scandinavianism: Asger Jorn’s search for a Vandalist Aesthetics. Speaker: Niels Henriksen.
Wednesday 6th of April, 2011.
3. The Artistic Dérivative, or Some Things I Learned About Life and Labor from a Dead Hare Speaker: Stevphen Shukaitis.
Wednesday 20th of April, 2011.
4. Søren Kierkegaard on Trauma: The Concept of Anxiety as a Theory of Traumatic Time Speaker: Isak Winkel Holm.
(Wednesday 4th of May, 2011.)