PROF. ELEANOR KAUFMAN’S LECTURE: THE PARTY AND THE DIALECTIC IN SARTRE, BRECHT, AND BADIOU

4 Mar 2011 - 15:00 / 4 Mar 2011 - 17:00

NF 004
The Northrop Frye Centre
Victoria College

ELEANOR KAUFMAN, UCLA

This paper will examine the fraught dynamics of the party and the group in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason alongside some of his earlier dramatic works and in juxtaposition with Brecht’s “learning plays” or Lehrstücke.  Despite the differences between Sartre’s self-reflexive and emotively developed characters and Brecht’s express emphasis on the didactic quality of his scenarios through the omittance of all such literary devices, there is a remarkable similarity of plot between Sartre’s The Victors (1946) and Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1930), especially as it concerns the dynamics of the party.  The contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou is drawn to the drama of Sartre, Brecht, and also Beckett, and it will be argued that this is because all of the works in question concern a problem of counting. 

Eleanor Kaufman is professor of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies at UCLA and is co-editor of Deleuze and Guattari:  New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (Minnesota, 1998) and the author of The Delirium of Praise:  Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001), At Odds with Badiou:  Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press), and Gilles Deleuze: Dialectic, Structure, and Being (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins)

 For more information please contact Rebecca Comay  (comay@chass.utoronto.ca)