Foundations II: What is the relationship between waywardness and speculation?

READING

DAY 2

Foundations II: What is the relationship between waywardness and speculation?

In the following chapter, keywords from the texts of Hartman and Retallack are discussed in various ways, and in different genres. For instance, through a symbolic dialogue between Télos and Genesis, Clara discusses Insurrection and the nature of resistance. Two other fictional texts are written by Xenia and Elisa; whilst Xenia’s discussion of Composition is set in the mind of a character on a yacht crossing the mediterranean, Elisa’s looks at the shoes of Esther Brown while discussing Beauty. Contrary to these fictional texts, both Shardenia and Balint use a more academic prose to discuss Clinamen and Utopia and Catastrophe, yet in two very different ways. To enrich the thinking around Clinamen, Shardenia uses Epicurius as an intriguing case. Balint takes his starting point in a quote from Luis Borges and creates a piece of writing filled with metaphors. Another text in the genre of prose is the transcribed discussion on The right to opacity by Noortje, a discussion that deals with the experiences of queer life.

Omid and Rosa have two very different essaistic styles, this is very clear in Rosa’s more fragmentary essay on the topic of Vagrancy and Omid’s more fictional essay about The Possible. It’s fascinating to see how most texts in this chapter contain poetic parts, yet only Geometries of attention by Renata is a poem. In the poem, attention is sewn together with the sewing movements of the hand, and this presence of the hand in the poem creates a parallel between the use of punctuation, and the use of the needle and thread in sewing: ‘Thread Stab. Pull -’

Based on:

Saidiya Hartman, “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments”

Joan Retallack, “The Poethical Wager”

Film screening: Marianne Lambert, I Don't Belong Anywhere: Le cinéma de Chantal Akerman, 67 mins