Dartmouth Events

Prof. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (Cornell University and Distinguished Professor of French Literature and Gender Studies, Université de Paris 9, Director of the Institute for Gender Studies, CRNS) is a specialist of comparative literature, literary theory and continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies whose publications and edited volmes include: The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities and the Theatre of Gender, Qui a peur de la deconstruction? (Who’s Afraid of Deconstruction), Algeria in Others’ Languages, Déménageries: Thinking (of) the Animal after Derrida, Genres et postcolonialisme: dialogues transcontinentaux (Genders/Genres and Post-Colonialism), Scènes d’aumône and Le Banquet de Rimbaud. The Leslie Center for the Humanities, the program in Comparative Literature, and the Department of French and Italian are pleased to welcome Prf. Berger, as well as the wider Dartmouth community, to a lecture titled: A Topolitics of Safe Space. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s commitment to thinking through the aporias of ethical, political, and epistemological spaces (or topoi), this talk proposes a reflection on the political topology of “safe spaces” today and the logics of their advocacy by minoritized and oppressed groups. Safe spaces can be described as immunitary structures built or called upon against real and/or perceived threats, whose modes of defense might well, however, threaten, if not their undoing, at least the defeat of their purpose. A certain politics of immunity may turn into an auto-immune mechanism, whereby, in Derrida’s terms, the defense against the perceived external danger turns upon itself and, as such, attacks itself, thus jeopardizing, in the case in point, the democratic ideal it means to uphold. Derrida’s political topology and his thinking about democracy can help us tackle the aporetic structure of the safe space as well as the complications — but also the promises— of such political gestures. Conversely, contemporary demands for safety emanating from stigmatized minorities, whether sexual or racial, can help us read Derrida anew by locating his emphasis on immunity and auto-immunity within the trauma-induced politics of resistance to injury. Wednesday, April 24, 5pm: Dartmouth Hall, Leslie Center Conference Room, 104.