"Don't Fade Away": Reverie, Trance, Translation - Bachelard, Narcissus and the Law
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Professor Adam Geary (Law) will give the first talk of the CFFCS seminar series on "Reverie, Trance, Translation - Bachelard, Narcissus and the Law".
Abstract:
If we want to know anything about law we must find it in poetry, in trances, dreams and fascination. Our guide to this strangest of jurisprudences will be Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard took seriously the peculiarity of philosophising about the trance and the dream; the kind of thinking that would find acceptance from poets rather than philosophers. The ‘grounds’ of the trance are in a peculiar ‘structure’ through which we are bound in fascination to our world. There are clues to this condition in the etymology of fascination. One understanding traces it back to a Proto Indo-European (PIE) root word meaning to band or bundle together; to create a bond or a vinculum. Further echoes can be traced into both saying and singing, words that emanate from PIE radicals for fascination and enchantment. These themes take us to the Narcissus myth. Following Bachelard, we will read the myth of Narcissus and Echo as illustrative of transformation, a “flare up of being” that takes place in profound reverie. This takes us back to trance. The word derives from the Old French transir ‘depart, fall into trance’, which derives from the Latin transire ‘to go across.’ Trance translates. Trance translates us and creates a superfluity of meaning rather than a fading away. We will conclude with the poet HD. HD, like Bachelard, provides a jurisprudence of dreaming that is entirely absent from the noon-day world of conventional legal philosophy.
Contact name:
Nathalie Wourm