Upcoming Session - Kierkegaard Circle


Topic:

Metaphysics of the Wretched: Kierkegaard and Fanon on the Colonial Annulment of the Infinite

Speaker:

Ali Aslan Ahmed
PhD 4th year student in Humanities
York University
Toronto, Canada

Time:

Friday, April 5, 2024
4:30 pm –6:30 pm (Toronto time) EDT


Place:

Trinity College Graham Library, 3rd floor, Lampman Room
Desk 416-978-5851
https://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/library-info/trinity-college-library-john-w-graham-library


Inquiry:

Professor Abrahim H. Khan
Trinity College
Tel. 416 978-3039 (O), Cell (905 706 0569 )
E-mail:khanah@chass.utoronto.ca


Ali A. Ahmed is a York Univ. 4th year PhD student in Humanities whose doctoral project is on the juxtapositioning of continental philosophy and postcolonial world struggles. The thesis project has for its background his academic interests that span from 19th C. continental literature to Sufi cosmology and the 20th C. Kyoto School. These grew out of his undergraduate and graduate studies in religion and literature, respectively, at Carleton University, Ottawa. The Kierkegaard Circle presentation is a fragment of his doctoral project. His formal academic presentations include the departmental colloquia in History and Sociology; the Undisciplined Conference, Queen’s University (2021), and the annual meeting of The Canadian Comparative Literature Association (2023) on Kierkegaard’s Notion of Self and its Misrelation.

ABSTRACT

In brief, I argue that the colonial regime inverts Kierkegaard's narrative of becoming. Under its ceiling, access to the infinite is sealed and the horizon of human possibility foreclosed. Thus, the colonized assume the aesthetic standpoint—a misrelation to and of the self—to be the highest. The resistance that Fanon invokes against that closure, to imagine the new human, can thus be read as akin to Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical.