Theorist Eric Santner, visiting Hurst professor in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will speak on “The People’s Two Bodies: Modernity and the Endgames of Sovereignty” at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11.
Santner, the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies and chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, works at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and religious thought. He is a leading theorist on the ethics of cultural practice within the contexts of contemporary forms of authority.
Santner’s 2001 book, “On The Psychology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig,” received honorable mentions from the Koret Jewish Book Prize in Philosophy and Religious Thought, the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Rene Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. He has written numerous other books, most recently “On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald” (2006), and also is the author, with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard, of “The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theory” (2005), a major reconsideration of the ethics of Lacan and Levinas.
The lecture, sponsored by the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, is free and open to the public and takes place in Duncker Hall, Room 201, Hurst Lounge. For more information, call 935-5190.