Event overview
A public lecture by Fanny Söderbäck
In this paper, I look at how Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, on the one hand, and Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, on the other, offer narrative practices as a form of care-work or wake-work (as reparative) in the aftermath of violence. If the crimes of the Holocaust and the Middle Passage consisted in a refusal to attend to the singular uniqueness of Jewish and Black life respectively (reducing them to racial tropes and disfiguring them to render them unrecognizable as human), I will examine how the thinkers I engage perform forms of refusal by insisting that we tune into the life stories of those who have been burned and drowned and silenced, to bring them into view, or audibility, as irreducible to such burning and drowning and silencing. I pursue this task by tracing their use of the subjunctive mood – a grammatical tense that seeks not the truth about the past but rather to produce a possible futural otherwise on the basis of an impossible might-have-been. We might say that the might is not a marker of what has indeed happened but rather a reminder of what remained impossible within the confines of the past – what exceeded its frames. It serves a performative and aspirational function that allows us to imagine an otherwise and a yet-to-come – indeed, the possibility that results from the very act of amplifying impossibility, through narration.
Fanny Söderbäck is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University and the co-founder and co-director of the Kristeva Circle. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and has held positions at Siena College and DePaul University. She is the author of Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray (SUNY Press, 2019). She has edited Feminist Readings of Antigone (SUNY Press, 2010) and is a co-editor of the volume Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is currently working on a project that examines Jewish and Black women’s narratives in the wake of violence, titled Between the Jewish Baltic and the Black Atlantic.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 May 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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