Literary Dimensions Seminar

Whenever the human being steps back from its everyday contexts of involvement to turn its gaze toward the totality of existence — whenever it adopts a cosmological perspective — it invokes, interacts with, steers, and produces multiple and heterogeneous feelings. This talk treats cosmologies, from Ancient Greece to Anglo-American Pragmatism, as experiments with feeling that are still ongoing, even when historically obsolete: as laboratories for producing new feeling interfaces. It pursues the questions: what feelings stimulate cosmological perspectives; how does feeling become part of cosmology's deep structure; and what feelings do cosmologies produce? What energies do they mobilize, what moods do they make available, and what effects can cosmological thinking have on individual and collective patterns of existence?