Arche-ticture of a caress
Spring 2023 Seminar Imaginary Lab 4: Sensations - Ineffable archaeologies
The caress, like contact, write Levinas (Totality and Infinity), is sensibility. But the caress transcends the sensible. It is not that it would feel beyond the felt, further than the senses, that it would seize upon a sublime food while maintaining, a relation with hunger, as though the caress would be fed by its own hunger. The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible.
This spring 2023, IMAGINARY LAB 4: Sensations – Ineffable Archaeologies proposes the theme of research CARESS – a Trope of Impermanence, with some affinity for Hölderlin’s Tenderness (die Zärtlichkeit), or Anne Dufourmantelle’s concept Gentleness. It is a search for an impossible TOUCH, an ineffable archaeology or, rather, a forage into the Arche–ticture of its tenderness. Arche-ticture is Krell’s definition of the ecstasy of khôra space instrumental for such preposterous spatial containment of a caress. We might therefore find our-selves under the vault of the choric arch constituted by the “chiasm” of some mutual traversal between my flesh and the flesh of the world (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible).
Rodin’s Cathedral (originally entitled The Ark of the Covenant) will be the visual logo this Spring – a metaphor of the untouchable gentle stroke of hands, or the paradoxical virginal embrace, both of contact and non-contact – the gestural arche-ticture of the Gentle kiss of the Virgin of Oxymoron. This is both, the Virgin Of Non-Contact (Platutera) “khôrêton kai akhôrêton,” the space of that which has none (the akhôreton); as well as the Virgin of Tenderness (Glucophilousa), which illustrates the areas of maximum contact.
About this seminar
This seminar invites senior scholars, as well as MA and PhD fellows working with a problematic related to that of this Laboratory of research in order to share their own projects and contribute with short presentations and lectures and debates within a large forum of that will be inspirational for all.
Contributions of participation in any form are most welcome. Please, send them to: Isar Nicoletta at isar@hum.ku.dk.
The meetings might be conducted online or in a hybrid form due to the eventual international participation of both students and guest speakers. If there are participants outside Europe, a new time for meetings will be negotiated to accommodate them.