Upcoming Session - Kierkegaard Circle
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Topic:
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“Existence Itself Adjudicates”: Arendt after Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard after ArendtSession Synopsis
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Speaker:
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Ada Jaarsma
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Department of Humanities
Mount Royal University
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Time:
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Friday, March 6, 2015
7:15 pm –10:00 pm
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Place:
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Combination Room
Trinity College, Univ. Of Toronto
6 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto
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Inquiry:
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Professor Abrahim H. Khan
Trinity College
Tel. 416 978-3039 (O), 416 978-2133(off. asst)
E-mail:khanah@chass.utoronto.ca
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Ada Jaarsma (Ph.D, Purdue Univ., 2005) teaches in the areas Feminist Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Existentialism, and Critical Theory. Her publications include “Kierkegaard, Biopolitics and Critique in the Present Age” (2013), “Queering Kierkegaard: Sin, Sex and Critical Theory” (2010), and “Habermas’s Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular” (2010). She is currently completing a monograph on Kierkegaard, evolutionary theory and materialist existentialism.
SYNOPSIS Existence Itself Adjudicates: Arendt after Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard after Arendt
Friday, March 6, 2015, 7:15 pm - 10:00 pm
Combination Room
Trinity College, Univ. Of Toronto
6 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto
Ada Jaarsma
Abstract
"Existence itself adjudicates" and "In the world of spirit, cheating is not tolerated."
These claims, asserted by Kierkegaard and his pseudonym Silentio, suggest that there is a power, found within the world of spirit, that exerts a force of judgment. Rather than pinning our hopes for adjudication on reason or insight, we are advised to consider a kind of judgment that exceeds the bounds of individual agency. But what is the world of spirit, why does it not tolerate cheating, and what kind of cheating is on the hook for adjudication by existence? As one way to answer these questions, I look to materialist accounts of evolution, arguing that existence adjudicates because of the supernormal tendencies of instinct, as Brian Massumi puts it, those tendencies that blaze new paths and invent variations of becoming. The cheating undermined by the world of spirit concerns any stubborn, intransigent refusal to improvise (what Kierkegaard calls despair). The world of spirit, on these terms, affirms expressive enthusiasms of life, and it judges harshly what Massumi calls the "infectious conformal germs" of apathy.
If instinct has a constitutive tilt towards the new, then Hannah Arendt invites us to be horrified, anew, at the intransigence of the given: at any acquiescence to the inherited, or the banality of evil. In turn, Kierkegaard, read in light of Arendt, invites us to reflect on how choosing not to choose is spiritually enervating, deserving of intolerance by the world of spirit. A materialist rendering of existentialism, in this way, intensifies rather than detracts from the vital and vitalist import of judgment.
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