Lectures by Andrea Timár

Reading with Hannah Arendt

Does Arendt’s political philosophy have general implications for literary studies? Can an imagined conversation between Arendt and her 21st-century interpreters (e.g. Honig, Cavarero, Rancière, Esposito, S. Hartman) inspire new Arendtian readings of literary texts? In this talk, Andrea Timár will consider the usefulness of Arendt to questions of representation, storytelling, language that inflect some contemporary literary studies.

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Modernity as Addiction in S. T. Coleridge and Walter Benjamin

It is well known that Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was addicted to opium. In this talk, Professor Timár discusses how the conservative Coleridge theorized his opium habit in the context of his post-Enlightenment take on what it means to be “human,” and she argues that independently from his discourse on opium, another discourse emerges from Coleridge’s writings, which she calls the discourse of addiction. Taking Walter Benjamin’s analyses of modernity and the addict as a “traumatophile type” for her starting point, Professor Timár shows how Coleridge relates his contemporaries’ craving for stimuli to the emergence of a “civilization in excess,” which poses a political threat to his Romantic ideal of “cultivated” humanity.

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