thank you so much thank you first of all thank you very much uh for being here today um.
Let me start with a quote from edar gisson um. He writes: “thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists but thought in reality spaces itself out into the world it informs the imaginary of peoples their varied Poetics which it then transforms meaning in them its risk is realized.”
IED many young people tell me that they fear that there is no future or that they do not know how to think about it. They think of the future not as the rolling out of progress but as a kind of void or they see the destruction of the Earth the open-ended Wars and the intensifying gap between rich and poor as conditions that will only worsen with time.
often they rightly worry about the future of the Earth the destructive effects of fossil fuels and wonder how many forms of life will be jeopardized or disappear in their lifetime or they see that work is more often available as short-term contracts and that wages cannot cover the costs of living they and we see open-ended Wars conflict s that are murderous that have the potential to spread rapidly through different regions of the World.
when they ask about the future they are also asking what Can Be Imagined if we say there is no future or that the future moves in the direction of ever more destruction then we are in fact imagining something it is a dark picture one that shows no signs of hope and yet if we are imagining something dark we are still imagining and it may be that our powers of imagination hold the hope we find missing in the more pessimistic accounts of our world.
When we say, for instance, that we are imagining the end of the world or the end of the world as we have known it, we are imagining the end to imagination itself, but we are still imagining something difficult or impossible for the imagination to do - to imagine its own ending. For it is one thing to imagine an ongoing destructive process and quite another to feel one’s own power to imagine draw to a halt, potentially destroyed by the destructive processes one sees.
However, if we are still imagining all this, then our imagination is taking form in some way, developing a picture, moving laterally through a sequence of associations, forming a cluster of images, narrating a story about how history may unfold or what landscapes now lay before us. If we have an image or story to communicate, we find a form or discover that the image or story is already taking form, and that the story took shape in one of the languages we speak.
We’re not predicting the future at such moments, since it is the unknowable dimension of the future that has us concerned. And so we find that in our fear about the future are a series of imaginings, and what we imagine is framed and formed in ways that support one kind of interpretation of what will happen over another. The frame and the form are central to the fear we feel and the imagining we do.
All this happens not only inside the mind but in the modes through which fearing and imagining take place. Specific sensuous modes of presentation, specific media serve not only as vehicles for thought but as formative powers in themselves. The media brings something to the object it represents, whether the language of story, the lost sounds of natural history, or indeed the future of democracy.
Thus the fundamental questions of the humanities concerning what and how we express a point of view or create a vision of the world is already at work when we ask about the future and try to fathom its possible forms. This is why in my remarks today I will be arguing that the most compelling and urgent questions, the existential questions, require both the arts and the humanities.
Imagining the future is part of what it means to live now, and we cannot easily inhabit the present without a sense that a future is possible and that it will preserve what we value most. In addition, I would suggest that without a way to imagine the future, there can be no democracy. Democracy is that form of rule that is by and for the people. It is the people who come together and decide how best to live with one another. They make the law under which they agree to live, and they seek through debate to produce an abiding understanding of what it means to live together.
There are, as you know, various freedoms exercised under conditions of democratic self-rule. People are free to assemble and to move, to express their views and to affiliate with political groups. By the way, all this is lost under martial law - we can talk about that. But the people are not, as it were, this or that political group or a specific organization or even a party. The people have various affiliations and they assemble in different places and for different purposes, espousing conflicting viewpoints, seeking to gain support for their vision of the world.
So who are the people? Well, they are invariably, I would say, irreducibly diverse, and under some political conditions that diversity is denied. Forms of subjugation and exclusion are developed to narrow the scope and multiplicity of the people. We see this happening under nationalism, for instance, under conditions in which citizenship is unequally distributed, suspended, or foreclosed. Then not all the people are considered to be the people, since not all the people can exercise those freedoms that are supposed to be equally shared. Some people fall outside the law, especially if they are not citizens or their rights of citizenship have been suspended at the border or in prison.
Now some have argued that imagining or the aesthetic domain more broadly is insufficient for such a task, that it is apolitical or that it is not the same as action. What we need, these critics argue, is action and of course yes we do need action, plans and new policies, there is no question there. But can we separate such actions from the imaginary and how does the imaginary relate to the kinds of anti-democratic passions that we need to defeat and to awaken those very different passions that might fuel a more egalitarian counter imaginary for our time? And let me remind you that martial law is fueled by an anti-democratic passion.
An imaginary is not just my imagination or yours, but a way of structuring the imagination in the service of political ideals, a way of coordinating time and space in the service of imagining a political future. Political action, I’m suggesting, is not fully separable from the imaginary. In particular, an oppositional stance, however negative in form, also implies an imaginary we may or may not fully be aware of.
Indeed, imagining has conscious and unconscious elements, and sometimes our imaginings are closer to reveries and to dreams. And as the philosopher Drusilla Cornell has taught us, we are also imagined all the time, working within and against the ways that others have imagined us. Only as beings already imagined do we start to do our own imagining.
But are the people in some sense also prior to the laws by which they are governed? Is there a people who pre-exist the laws that they make for themselves, the people who come together, say, to found a state, a government, or the people who come together to ask for legal access to the state are both in some sense before the law or possibly outside the law? After all, if the people then go on to make the law, the people are there preceding the law - they are, we might say, lawless, without law at the moment that they make the law for the first time.
Democracy is the rule of the people, but only some people are making the laws or debating what the laws should be. And yet democracy is not rule of some of the people by other people. Democracy requires that all people participate equally in the collective Democratic right of self-determination, and that means a democracy worthy of its name will refuse to abandon some people to a condition of nonparticipation where Democratic processes are barred or rendered impossible. The exercise of collective Freedom remains legitimate only and only if it is shared equally.
The people are interestingly enough not fully defined by the laws that they make since they can change or repeal the law that’s also a democratic precept people assemble to make new rights but when they do that for the first time at least they have no legal right to assemble or even to make the law all they have is a collective practice of Freedom that brings a new form of governance into being.
this is the account offered by the philosopher Hanah ared in these moments of founding people assemble to find a way to assert and safeguard that right their power is their freedom the freedom to make a new organization of the world and that freedom should be embodied in the laws they collectively make and follow but note founding freedom is not at first governed by law it must make itself into law in order then to become a freedom governed by law and if the people repeal a law or overthrow a regime because their freedom is no longer embodied by the laws of that regime the people are then released from that law throwing off its shackles.
what I’ve been describing is an anarchic act of founding that posits law as well as the means by which law can be reproduced and preserved or for that matter repealed and withdrawn perhaps it sounds like I’m speaking of an ideal time or that I am imagining without time and space this founding moment of law one upon which both valter Benyamin and Ja DEA reflected is not easy to imagine it’s an experiment in time and space not exactly an histor iCal period than any that anyone can actually embody or document it’s a hypothetical scene it’s an imaginary positing sometimes cast as a state of nature.
So I want to argue that as important as social and economic equality is among humans - and I hope I have made that clear in my remarks - that argument for equality is not sufficient to establish the interdependency of living processes without which climate change cannot be understood or stopped. So there’s a shift in perspective that’s required to consider the living world itself as grievable. The human can no longer serve as the center for such a task.
In these times when war, climate catastrophe, the rise of authoritarianism, and the decimation of social goods by capitalist regimes exposes our frailty and interdependency as living creatures, we need what powers we have to shape community and to expand practices of care and solidarity beyond the strictly domestic and national spheres.
Such questions require patience and imagination, which are two signal virtues of the humanities, and that form of study requires critique but also an exploration of what kind of world we can affirm for life to persist in its frail, persistent, and interdependent forms. We can no longer look away from the quotidian ways that white supremacy, militarized nationalism, gender discrimination and violence, exploitation and abandonment are reproduced across social institutions including universities, but it is time to ask how we can rebuild and renew in the face of institutional histories of error.
for those of us living within societies governed by existing law who want to understand and judge whether or not the states in which we live are legitimate we have to ask about the conditions of their very institution the process by which they came into being and we have to ask whether the law still embodies the will of the people or ever did to do that we have to imagine outside and before existing law and that seems very difficult and for those of us who grew up and were formed inside a system of laws our very way of looking at the world of Imagining the world is very much informed and structured by those laws.
to imagine outside the laws in which we were formed Demands a certain deconti tution of who we are a way of thinking outside or against the laws by which we were formed which means thinking against our own formation that is what I would call a critical perspective in the sense that critique asks after the conditions by which laws and legal institutions are constituted and seeks not to take them for granted as inevitable it is also an act of imagination which transports us outside the law or before the law to ask about its legitimacy.
how do we ask about a time prior to our own formation that lets us think about questions such as political legitimation well for the philosopher John RS the counterfactual is essential to political life in Democratic deliberations we have to consider what Society might have been like had it been founded and formed differently but there’s another way that imagining Works in Democratic deliberations the decisions we must make about the future of the world and the planet involve giving some form to that imagined future thus imagining a possible future or a different one is essential to democratic to liberations.
some of the key questions for Democratic self-determination include what world do we wish to bring about what Future do We collectively wish to see realized in the world for those tasks both of which are indispensable to democratic deliberation and self-determination there has to be a collective imagining a way of sharing fears and dreams as part of the political process a future orientation for which prediction and calculation do not suffice.
in this way both the existential requirements and the political conditions of democracy require posing questions that engage the imagination What kind of future is left what kind of future can we still imagine now some have argued that imagining or the aesthetic domain more broadly is insufficient for such a task that it is apolitical or that it is not the same as action what we need these critics argue is action and of course yes we do need action plans and new policies there is no question there.
but can we separate such actions from the imaginary and how does the imaginary relate to the kinds of anti-democratic passions that we need to to defeat and to awaken those very different passions that might fuel a more egalitarian counter imaginary for our time and let me remind you that martial law is fueled by an anti-democratic passion okay so we have one right before us fleeting but there.
an imaginary is not just my imagination or yours but a way of structuring the imagination in the service of political ideals a way of coordinating time and space in the surface of imagining a political future political action I’m suggesting is not fully separable from the imaginary in particular an oppositional stance however negative in form also implies an imaginary we may or may not fully be aware of indeed imagining has conscious and unconscious elements and sometimes our our imaginings are closer to reveries and to dreams.
and as the philosopher Drusilla Cornell has taught us we are also imagined all the time working within and against the ways that others have imagined us only as beings already imagined do we start to do our own imagining but my point here is actually relatively simple when for instance we say no to the violence at the border or the war against Ukraine or the genocidal actions in Palestine or the horrific situation in Sudan we object because we believe that Injustice is being committed and that something valuable is being destroyed in our world.
we think for instance it is wrong for human life and other form forms of life to be destroyed in this way and for such purposes in our objection and opposition our naysaying a form of imagining is already in play we are saying perhaps without actually saying we want to live in a world in which such Wars are not happening such destructive powers are not normalized where economic and ecological catastrophe can be reversed and repaired Ed there is then operative in our objections a desire to live in a different kind of world one for instance in which border and Military violence is not happening.
in saying no in tering long with the negative we are already embarking on a form of imagining we may not fully notice it but we are at such moments insisting on a different version of the world in our protest we stand for a different kind of world we may not say to ourselves this is the world I imagine we may find it difficult to even find our own imagining um but within uh Democratic deliberation we ask the question directly what kind of world do we want together to bring into being.
I think the same thing happens in social movements our pre-dic reveries and imaginings are already at work in our deliberations and they constitute the reserve from which our explicit political desires are crafted well there are many good reasons to ask these kinds of questions now for those who live in fear after the El election of Donald Trump how many people are okay that’s what I thought okay I mean you have your own fears now right.
it appears that the American people have by a clear major majority voted against democracy now that sounds like a paradox they did vote they engaged the electoral process and the electoral process is part of democracy it’s indispensable we don’t want to do away with the electoral process um to decide their future the people have to come together to vote that’s an exercise of freedom and judgment they have to agree to live by the results collectively achieved okay.
and yet if democracies to have meaning and and if it seeks to remain legitimate then the people must Safeguard the equal rights of all the people and their equal freedoms the Constitutional forms that Safeguard democracy can be dis mantled through the will of the people the people can decide that only some of them should count as the people and others should be deported that the military should come in and Deport the other people that too can be decided by electoral means especially if constitutional and Inter International rights are suspended.
the people can decide to suspend International rights international law the people can exercise their popular will their Collective freedom to elect someone who has promised to destroy the balance of powers to initiate Mass deportation and to undo constitutional protections for women and trans people for migrants and for the voting rights of black people to name a few the people have agreed to augment Presidential Power at the expense of their own rights and as rights strip in becomes an Ever more accepted political Norm the people can in exercising their Democratic rights seek to diminish or eliminate the rights of already precarious or endangered communities right and we could say the same for uh endangered environments or endangered animals species.
so in the case of the US Democratic means were honored there there was an election and yet democracy is not reducible to its parliamentary form those who seek to undo electoral institutions are clearly seeking yes to undo democracy but that’s the Paradox with which we are now confronted the electoral college in the United States for instance has always been a defense against the powers of democracy even as it is one of its parliamentary instruments it was founded on the belief that the people do not have the education or capacity to judge what is right for themselves and that a select group of electors should be invested with the power to decide what the true or best will of the people should be.
the Electoral College is an example of an anti-democratic parliamentary institution charged with the task of undoing democracy in the name of its defense and through one of its instruments it is an institution that fears and devalues the will of the people as indispensable as parliamentary procedures are to democracy they are not enough to secure its future and this question of the future is lingering here as the problem before us the one that will I hope illuminate the essential relation between democracy and the human Humanities.
for if we are asking what relation democracy has to the future of the humanities we should be prepared to find that there is no democracy without the future and no Humanities without an imagination that includes imagining Imagining the future and its possible forms when political philosophy refers to the founding of a new polity when political philosophy ERS reflect upon that moment of founding they paint a picture of a group of people freely assembling to the side upon the form of government and the rules by which they will collectively live rouso monu lock Hobbs I’ve just given you an artian rendition.
this imagining is not exactly an historical scene it’s a fiction which doesn’t make it false by the way it’s a fiction meant to underscore the Primacy of free forms of gathering the distinct operation of Freedom prior to and apart from laws right if there’s an unjust law or an unjust operation of a legal power an anti-democratic passion that has taken hold of the people and turned them against democracy itself then we have to be able to think outside the law to imagine a different form of collective life and to find a way to make that imagination into law.
what shift in perspective is required to consider the Living World itself as grievable as worthy of grief if the human can no longer serve as the center for such a task how is interdependency to be thought and in what Manner is it actually lived further what changes in our temporal understanding of life and finitude are required such that this body before any death can understand itself as living an unmarked life.
Antony objected to the prohibition that would keep her from burying her brother for his life was to be honored and acknowledged but for the life very much alive but living without honor dignity and acknowledgement the situation is at once proleptic that is grasped through the future anterior and very much present not as a death in life but rather as a distinct sense of living an unacknowledged life heading toward an unmarked death.
an attribute of a life as as it is lived or a modality of life we each have a sense a living sense of whether we are living a life that is valued and would be grieved were it to be lost or we live and see that we don’t have the basics that we need to live and we realize that the society in which we live does not consider us grievable worthy of safeguarding grievability um understood as unequally distributed differentiates those considered more alive from those considered nearly dead or already so even though all of them are living in some way.
the question of who is grievable pertains not only to those already lost but to those who are living a sense of being already an irreversibly lost within everyday life as a living body conversely those who know that everything will be done medically and socially to keep one alive protected from accidents free from zones of War experience a greater sense that their lives are grievable valued by others and that a web of Social and economic relations exist to secure for them the sustaining infrastructures of life.
if to live without a sense of being able to live further or to persist the temporal Horizon of Life collapses and the present moment does not necessarily portend the next this life can be lost and the world is arranged in such a way that this life could be more easily or less easily lost we need only think about the residents of Gaza who write about the expectation that they will die and then actually do die they leave a testimony for a world by which they were abandoned they assert their grievability at the same time that they know they are not in the eyes of those bombing them regarded as potentially grievable beings.
or maybe the Israeli air forces that bomb them know full well that whoever survives in their own communities will grieve them and they seek to plunge those communities into a grief unbearable enough that they will never rise up again against an occupying Force I do not know all that they think I do try to read to understand what they think but history would suggest that the destruction of Life at such a scale only strengthens the resolve of those who survive to resist oppression.
why is grief important for our common life even for our our ideas of democracy well I’m not sure we can understand social and economic inequality if we cannot take into account whose lives matter matter and whose do not to establish a principle that all lives are or should be equally grievable is to say that all lives are or should be equally valuable and this is where Cornell West and I definitely agree without that latter claim of equal value there can be no substantive understanding of equality.
and when we take into account the loss of lives including animal lives that takes place through war or through climate catastrophes we can be led to ask for what are we living the question what are we living for is bound up with the question of how we whether as a global or local community want to organize our shared life our interdependency and our relations to living processes similarly threatened by War the ravages of capitalism and climate destruction.
and once we ask this question we are already taken up by a radical form of imagining that would establish the grievability of all those who have lost their lives without a memorial those who have become a mere demographic item in a report that rarely sees the light of day so how might we now in the face of so much preventable loss insist upon the equal value of lives where that value in every instance is immeasurable incalculable where that value cannot be understood outside of its relations to others.
can we move the institutional imagination past calculation and self-interest to insist upon the immeasurable and interdependent value of life and of those principles such as equality that belong to us as social and living creatures in the world we who work in language that is to say we in the humanities we for whom language gives us a world know that it matters when we say this is or was a life as Primo Levy said in the context of a set of social powers that deny the living character of some lives way before those lives are actually taken these are lives this is a life none of these assertions create a life but they do seek emphatically to secure its status and value as living.
the indexical matters life depends upon that indexicality someone or something pointing out a living being this life matters the pronouns matter they Mark our social existence and legibility the name matters for both the living and the dead such operations of language are both part of mourning and part of protest crucial for rethinking who counts who can count as the people in Palestine the everpresent phrase can be seen and heard in literature and in life we exist an emphatic existential declaration Mahmud Darwish the great poet writes standing here staying here permanent here Eternal here and we have one goal one one to be.
when we refer to this life even this very human life that took a plane to meet with you today the this never strictly speaking belongs to me the indexical wanders off it could be used by anyone and is you can all say this life and point to yourselves but oddly enough we’re in a kind of Unison when we do that we’re aware that we’re doing it for ourselves and yet it could and would be used by others so we’re connected with all those creatures who can say this life right even in our Singularity we are transferable we are somewhat Anonymous great um Insight by Emil Bist.
um it marks the existence of others my phrase as easily as it marks my own and at the very moment in which even the lyrical eye seeks to establish its indisputable Singularity it is also some someone else’s Singularity so this first person pronoun disperses into an anonymous sociality who and what speaks when I this I speaks Claudia Ranken the poet asks the question in this most interesting way and I quote if I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content to the truth value of the words them eles is I even me or am I a gear shift to get from one sentence to the next should I say we is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it what does my subject mean to me end quote.
so language matters graphic and musical forms matter performance also registers life committing it to the registry of the living and so already reverberating with lives both proximate and distanced even in solitude we are more accompanied than we know perhaps more supported and overwhelmed by a Litany of voices whose origin we can neither fully know or enumerate you are already in The Language by which I point to myself I am already in your hands and taken in by your breath you whose names I do not know who share the air and the surfaces of the world requiring shelter and food that carries with it the labor of so many whose names are never known but without whose Anonymous labor we could not persist as the living creatures that we are.
of course I think we are all trying when we can to find agency connection and creative powers under conditions of duress even as those condition are not the same for all of us in finding the capacity to act to make and to connect we draw upon powers that come from elsewhere from a world in which we are hopefully nourished and supported enough to write and to act and that is why as we think about what it means for the Humanities to persist for our students to carry on with their studies or for any of us to persist in and Beyond uh the pandemic or other conditions of dur.
we are always asking about the institutional and social conditions under which persistence becomes or fails to become a possibility persisting in the academy is less the prerogative of individuals who demonstrate spectacular will than the direct consequence of conditions of work that allow for flourishing a livable wage for staff adjuncts and graduate student teachers decent and equitable fellowships at The Graduate level the Forgiveness of debt for all those students who have taken loans to study and secure a degree new forms of graduate training that affirm the wide range of positions open to phds in the humanities even if that means that Humanity’s professors have to retrain themselves to help guide students along those Pathways.
and those at least in the US who are working in adjunct positions without Health Care are living proof that our institutions are not yet Humane they are also the ones most imperiled as principles of academic freedom are being eroded it becomes increasingly the case that people do lose their positions because of political viewpoints they express outside the classroom as Democratic rights are being suspended or destroyed so too our academic freedom principles when the extramural utterances of faculty are no longer protected from retal retaliatory action by their University and state powers.
to live now is generally to live with the expectation that living will continue that a series of Nows will follow such that anticipation is built into the now the present moment this is a futural disposition the future anterior the perspective that will have looked back Upon Our Lives presupposes another life looking back on us narrating our lives and our absence in a time that no longer counts us among the living that future interior perspective is imagined from within the present and it constitutes a second way that the future time informs the present moment this will happen is replaced by this will have happened.
will someone say this was a life in the future will someone have said this is a life in some indefinite future this is not the classical question is this a life worth living but a variation will this have been a life deemed worth living considered worth living considered valuable it’s in the voice of another that the value of this life will or will not be determined if the determination happens at all but that is not the only way that the grievability of a person can be understood we each live with a sense of whether we are living a life that would be missed or mourned were it to be lost and those who feel that they have been degraded as a living being May well live with a living sense of their own UNG grievability.
grievability might be thought of as a Criterion for understanding the value of a life as I have suggested but that value cannot be determined without considering whether that living being has had access to conditions that support or further living itself legal status Health Care shelter to name but a few but if someone is living in the world as an ungrievable being that person is still alive but they’re living with the sense that one’s life is not considered by others or by Society more generally to be fully living or living in a valuable way.
this is not about imagining a future in which this life will be regarded but it is rather about the present sense of the value of one’s life UNG grievability is thus the lived sense of a devalued and dispensable life an experience of the living of the devalued sense of their own life when for instance exposed to violence and hunger by virtue of State policy or denied Health Care by virtue of its organization along in increasingly privatized Arrangements one becomes aware that what we might tentatively call the world considers the loss of one’s life to be no loss.
some would say that what is needed is to humanize the dehumanized and that seems at least partially true but not enough to address the problem at hand if human living depends on a wide range of non-human life forms or living processes then humanism will not suddenly solve the problem at hand if we object to some human beings being treated as less than human then we accept that human lives are valuable in a way that animal lives are not but if we object to the kind of loss that is affecting all life forms and life processes then human life has to be rethought in relation to those other forms of living.
in other words we can object to Some Humans being treated not as humans but if our response to that manifest inequality is to consolidate human life at the expense of all other living beings then we have reproduced the kind of anthropocentrism that sever human life from its relations with non-human life and when that connection is lost then we have no way to grasp to grieve and to resist the effects of climate destruction which affects not just the human form of life but the soil the air the other species and the geological and ecological dimensions of this world.
so I want to argue that as important as social and economic equality is among humans and I hope I have made that clear in my remarks that argument for equality is not sufficient to establish the interdependency of living processes without which climate change cannot be understood or stopped so there’s a shift in perspective that’s required to consider to consider the Living World itself as grievable the human can no longer serve as the center for such a task so how then do we rethink interdependency and the manner in which it is lived.
can such a question about how best to organize our life together be separated from the question of the future of life itself I think not but here again we see how the value of the humanities interlocks with the basic questions we pose about the form of our shared life the question that inaugurates and invigorates democracy as we know it in these times when War climate catastrophe the rise of authoritarianism and the decimation of social goods by capitalist regimes exposes our Frailty and interdependency as living creatures.
we need what powers we have to shape community and to expand practices of care and solidarity beyond the strictly domestic and National spheres such questions require patience and Imagination which are two signal virtues of the humanities and that form of study requires critique but also an exploration of what kind of world we can affirm for life to persist in its frail persistent and interdependent forms.
we can no longer look away from the quotidian ways that white supremacy militarized nationalism gender discrimination and violence exploitation and abandonment are reproduced across social institutions including universities but it is time to ask how we can rebuild and renew in the face of institutional histories of error we can no longer afford to deny where and how do we move out into public worlds without the power to physically gather to craft its newer form to press open the potentials of transformation to repair and regenerate the Earth and to affirm the ideals of Justice outside the carceral framework.
opposing violence and discrimination against women trans and queer people rebuilding as well our infrastructures so that those physically challenged are full participants and to think equality beyond the boxes that are checked and talled diversity and inclusion are indispensable but they will never quite name our Utopia we are in search of those names.
so finally then for those of us who work in the humanities it has never been more important to learn how to show how important the humanities are for understanding the world in which we live for making sound judgments interpreting words and deeds the promises of leaders their lies for imag ining ways to live together that manifest the very ideals of equality freedom and Justice we wish to make manifest in the world.
both public and private institutions would do well to help us now think through the fundamental questions of persistence and loss of living on in keeping company with those who have passed to help us understand what connects and divides humans across human communities and environments languages and regions and what role collaborative and critical imagination has during times in which crisis and Futurity are clearly the issues.
we teach language and translation literary form and technique but what if we are as we do this also developing together a Poetics for the living a technique for persisting that does not Den deny the loss the history of violence and the recurrent error but moves through and with all of them to establish a more truthful transformation one that moves us to move others toward that goal.
so often in a literature class we open a novel or we start to read a poem and the first question is where are we who is speaking in other words we begin with a disorientation where am I is there a century here um is there is there a region in the world and that disorientation allows us to reimagine the world a new we interrogate and leave the SpaceTime of that fictional world only to return with that other world Illuminating our own the Poetics of Life the techniques for living that emerge from our collaborating worlds give us the value of language and life in their vital intersection as something that happens in relations what gisson called a poet Poetics of relation the Poetics of relation for our time A Time ripped up and divided against itself is not only to make the value of the humanities known to a wider public but to answer the call emerging from so many publics for a collaborative imagining for we can hear those questions as a public cry and demand where are we who is speaking who longs to know that they exist who cries in a language the rest of us have yet to to learn thank you very much