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The Humanities Department and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese are hosting Professor Jacques Lezra, professor of comparative literature and Spanish and Portuguese, New York University for two events:

“Trade in Exile”

Date: Thursday November 4

Time: 5 p.m.

Place: Humanities 1B90

Professor Lezra’s lecture examines exile as a structural element of theatre.  He will discuss two relations to exile: the Virgilian conceptualization of exile through which memory of the past is carried to a foreign land and an exile which lacks any physical displacement but which defines the structural possibility of an individual’s relation to society.  These two modes of exile will be analyzed in reference to a 1580’s Spanish play, the Auto de la destruycion de Troya. This play, first performed in Aragon before an audience of moriscos, Muslims who had been required to convert to Christianity but who still adhered (or were suspected of adhering) to Islam, was placed in the files of the Inquisition after this performance where it remained until its rediscovery in the mid-twentieth century.  The status of exile for this audience as well as how the play distinguishes a sense of exile in relation to the west’s mythical account, formed in the destruction of Troy, provide the basis for Professor Lezra’s argument that, in this moment in the 1580s, the mythology of Troy and its exile had a radically different function from the one that has been diffused through the political history of the west.

Wild Materialism and Terror

Date: Friday November 5

Time: 11 a.m.

Place: Old Main Conference Room (1B-85)

At this seminar, Professor Lezra will be discussing his most recent book, Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (Fordham UP, 2010). With:

• Moderator:  Professor David Ferris – Comparative Literature and Humanities
• Participants: Professor Javier Krauel – Spanish and Portuguese
  Professor Ruth Mas – Religious Studies
  Professor Henry Pickford – German and Slavic

“Jacques Lezra’s Wild Materialism combines the close reading of cultural texts with detailed treatment of works in the radical-democratic and radical-republican traditions. The originality of its closely argued theses is matched and complemented by the breadth of its focus— encompassing the debates over the “ticking bomb” scenario; the circumstances surrounding ETA’s assassination of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco in Madrid in 1973; the films of Gillo Pontecorvo; Sade’s republican writing; Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; and the roots of contemporary radical republicanism in early modern political theology (Bodin, Shakespeare, Parsons, Siliceo).”

This is a seminar with limited seating. If you plan on attending please  RSVP to Humanities@Colorado.edu. It is recommended that you read the introduction to Wild Materialism prior to the seminar.

Professor Jacques Lezra is a specialist in the literary, visual and philosophical culture of the early modern period and publishes on contemporary political philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the theory and practices of translation. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, at Yale, Harvard, and at the Bread Loaf School of English.

Lezra’s books include

• Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (2010),
• Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (1997)
• Spanish Republic (2005), editor
• Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labor of Reading (1988).

He co-edited Sebastian de Covarrubias’s 1613 Suplemento al ‘Tesoro de la lengua’. His 1992 translation into Spanish of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight won the PEN Critical Editions Award. Economía política del alma: El suceso cervantino, a collection of Jacques Lezra’s essays on Cervantes, will appear in Spanish in fall 2011.