Eric Santner: "Ecstatic Intimacies, Intimate Ecstasies: Some Reflections on the Topologies of Modernity"

The Department presents the Ninth Annual Blume Lecture, given by Eric Santner, the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.  

How is it that, as a recent author put it, capitalist modernity creates a sense that everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out? How did what Alexander Koyré characterized as the transition from the closed world to the infinite universe produce a sense of being shut in? What accounts for this uncanny convergence of open-endedness and claustrophobia?  The talk will explore this topological paradox in conversation with Heidegger, Sloterdijk, Rilke, among others.

Eric Santner's work is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, and religious thought. He originally came to German Studies by way of philosophy, which he studied in Bonn (primarily Kant and Heidegger) and Freiburg (primarily Hegel and Heidegger). Other writers who have fundamentally shaped his sense of things include: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Daniel Paul Schreber, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and W. G. Sebald.   Eric Santner's recent books include Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory, and (with William Mazzarella and Aaron Schuster) Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (both University of Chicago Press).

The Blume Lecture honors Bernhard Blume (1901-1978), Harvard's Kuno Francke Professor of of German Art and Culture until his retirement in 1966.