Description
In this lecture, I explore the interplay between dynamics of vulnerability and resilience as they are played out in contemporary art practices that attend to subjective and collective experiences of trauma. Whilst our perpetual ever-present experience of trauma produces us as vulnerable subjects , the lecture seeks to query the relationship between vulnerability as an ontological condition of our being and becoming in the world, and vulnerability as an effect of lived or historical trauma. In doing so, the lecture seeks to intervene in debates on the ethics of positive affect (potentia) as a way of overturning pain and suffering (Braidotti 2006) inflicted by the violent event. The lecture raises questions about the potentiality of this ethical stance when confronted with the insurmountability of trauma, both as an unknowable and inaccessible condition, but also as a permeant condition of life in ongoing conflict zones or settler colonial states. The lecture thus introduces resilience as a strategy of survivability that combines a politics of resistance enacted in the desire to live against all odds, and a reparative ethics of living enacted in the (im)possible forgetting/overcoming of trauma. With reference to artistic practices, the lecture seeks to investigate the ways art confronts the 'wounding' through strategies of resilience to traumas that paradoxically continue to possess and inhabit us (Pollock 2013)| Period | 20 Feb 2018 → 23 Feb 2018 |
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| Event title | InterGender Intensive PhD course: Politics of Vulnerability |
| Event type | Course |