CartThe Void Writes Instructor: Angelos EvangelidisProgram: WorkshopCredit(s): 1Date: June 14, 21, 28, July 5Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: This Workshop examines how writing is engendered by the void, and writing as the site where the void unfolds even if unfolding is its only doing. Drawing on literature and philosophy, it asks what happens when form is not assumed to impose upon nothingness but to arise from, and through, it. The Seminar explores how the void necessitates form: why there is nothing that precedes creation, or rather, that nothing precedes creation and must itself be understood as something creative.
The Workshop begins with the concept of the crushed narrative, developed through a close reading of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, where writing is engendered by the shadow of a lost companion, through the very inability to account for them. It is this void that becomes text in not becoming text.
We then turn to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where chaos becomes both the origin and driving force of transformation in the emergence of new forms. The impossibility of narrating chaos directly creates a contradiction that generates endless variations of form, stories that are actual material forms.
The third session turns to urban suicides and examines their potential, not as mere corpses, not as reduced to “society,” but as horizons through which a necessary destruction or abandonment, and a founding of a new polis, become possible. The suicides are openings to be translated into (human) language and space, while also remaining as voids within it.
The final session considers Kafka’s “The Burrow” and Bernhard’s Correction and discusses the impossibility of creation alongside the possibility of creation through correction. Correction is not only a destructive but a generative force, precisely in remaining destructive. Correction is the total elimination through which a text, body, or world becomes possible, an elimination that is registered as text, body, or world. This problematizes the notion of gender as a site that can only be corrected.
Participants are asked to produce a hybrid project (a theoretical reflection and a creative project) demonstrating that what cannot be said in either medium may only be addressed in a space between: a void that is not articulated but opened. The void in this sense is reshaped as a possibility for unexpected interaction.
Session 1: Crushed Narrative / Theme: Narrative and the ethical void as an embodied experience
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (selections), Emmanuel Levinas, “There Is: Existence Without Existents”
Session 2: Quem dixere chaos / Theme: Chaos as the generative principle of metamorphosis
Ovid, Metamorphoses (Books 1–8; selections)
Session 3: Dwelling as Falling / Theme: The swirling of the polis; the dialectic between dead and alive
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (selections), Jean-Luc Nancy, “Blanchot’s Resurrection”
Session 4: Korrektur / Theme: Impossible creation; generative correction; the denial to pass and transition
Thomas Bernhard, Correction (selections), Franz Kafka, “The Burrow” (selections), Jacques Derrida, “Fors”
Final Project /The space between theory and practice; void as method, Participants produce a dual project (theoretical + creative), articulating the in-between space where meaning and embodiment emerge, attempting to articulate something within a topos of a new void, beyond (or even against) what is actually articulated.
Jean Genet, What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet
IMAGE: Graham Gillmore, Untitled (Glossary 2002), 2002
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