Abstract

The central claim of this lecture is that the distinctively modern error of anachronism, both as a concept and as a technique, offers a productive framework for analysing the post-Enlightenment regimes of subjectivation. Focusing on the tensions between the philological-historicist abjuration of anachronism and its aesthetic-political endorsement in certain quarters, this lecture wishes to point at the enduring preoccupations of metropolitan and colonial modernities with entities out of place in linear time. Sifting the histories of artistic and juridical primitivism, I contend that empire as a mode of management of the anachronistic subjects of global modernity had much more to do with the European avant-garde aesthetics than is usually presumed.

Discussant: Alexis Wick, American University of Beirut

The public lecture is part of the Summer Academy “Language, Science and Aesthetics – Articulations of Subjectivity and Objectivity in the Modern Middle East, North Africa, South and Southeast Asia”, which takes place from 11 - 19 September 2014 in Beirut.

It is jointly organized by Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) and Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin.