Taunting the Useful
A talk by Emile Fromet de Rosnay
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 | 7:00 PM 鈥� 8:30 PM | FREE
Room 2270 鈥� 丁香园AV Harbour Centre, 555 W.Hastings St., Vancouver
In an epoch driven by hyper-consumption and marvelously destructive futility, and in the context of a hegemonic utilitarianism where one goes to university to work rather than to 鈥渄evelop a meaningful philosophy of life,鈥� the concept of the useful is perhaps one most in need of interrogation. (Punctum, 2024) seeks to unsettle notions of usefulness and uselessness, not merely by deconstructing these terms, but by sidetracking them. It doesn鈥檛 reverse things by saying that what is useless is useful. Rather, taunting is teasing, heckling, tickling, scratching the useful. By elaborating a notion of the 鈥渧irtual useless,鈥� Taunting the Useful seeks to tease the dimensions of wonder, use, and play, through modalities, contingencies, and potentialities of the useless-useful. An experimental book, it (un)does what it tells, and is as much an object taunting and taunted as it is a description of taunting the useful.
Biography
Emile Fromet de Rosnay teaches literature, film and culture in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at University of Victoria, and a former director of its program in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought. He has published work on poet St茅phane Mallarm茅 (惭补濒濒补谤尘茅蝉颈蝉, 2011), postcolonial Mauritian fiction, Critical Digital Humanities, the theory of the useless, on the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and on the linguist 脡mile Benveniste. His new book, Taunting the Useful (Punctum, 2024), develops a theory of the 鈥渧irtual useless.鈥� He is developing another research-creation project on 鈥淪eaweed Discourses鈥� (鈥淟e discours des algues鈥�) that seeks to understand language and discourse in the context of posthumanism. His research-creation name is Loumille M茅tros, which is his passport name with missing syllables.
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