Literature Research Seminar
Resilience and Fragility: David Jones and the Poetics of Austerity, a talk by Prof. Benjamin Noys
Resilience and Fragility: David Jones and the Poetics of Austerity, a talk by Prof. Benjamin Noys
Thursday 25 October, 18:00
Engineering Building, Room 3, University of Malta Msida Campus
Abstract
I want to examine the problem and discourse of resilience, the capacity of a system to recover from crisis or trauma, through the notion of fragility. Resilience is a highly contested term, often seen as consonant with the neoliberal agenda that holds individuals responsible for their well-being and capacities. In this sense austerity, which imposes shocks and traumas, and resilience, as the capacity to ‘bounce back’, seem to go together. I want to explore fragility as the other side of resilience. To do so I want to turn to an unlikely figure, the Anglo-Welsh modernist poet and painter David Jones (1895–1974). Jones was hardly a radical, his politics tending to a reactionary Catholicism, but his painting and his poetry offer something to a thinking of fragility. His own mental suffering, largely as a result of his service during the First World War, haunted him throughout his life. Here I want to speculatively reconstruct Jones’s work as a practice of fragility that can speak to our moment of austerity. My aim here is not to recommend or endorse such a practice of fragility, but rather to explore Jones’s writing and painting as attempts to negotiate through institutional, social and artistic forms to articulate a fragility that might engage us.
Bio-note
Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. His research focuses on critical and literary theory, with particular interest in the avant-garde, film, and the cultural politics of theory. His recent work includes the books The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh University Press 2010) and Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero Books 2014), both dealing with the state of contemporary theory. Recent and forthcoming articles and chapters include ‘Happy like Neurotics: Roland Barthes, Ben Lerner, and the Neurosis of Writing’, College Literature 45.1 (2018), ‘Matter against Materialism: Bruno Latour and the Turn to Objects’, in Theory Matters: The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today (2016), and pieces on drones, libidinal economy, intoxication and accelerationism, the ontologies of life, American literature, and the philosophy of art. He is currently completing a book on contemporary politics and developing a future project on neurosis. He is External Affiliate of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London, contributing editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, a member of the advisory editorial board of Film-Philosophy, and a corresponding editor of Historical Materialism.
