Multi-Tentacled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Preposterous History through Semiotic Thinking

Abstract:

When I discovered the idea of semiotics, now decennia ago, my excitement about it concerned the integration of philosophy (thinking) and (close) analysis (doing), as well as the resistance against media-essentialism and disciplinary constraints, with their methodological dogmas. Semiotics offers the possibility and tools to facilitate that integration, so that my passion for both, with teaching as an important third, could ease in as an activity that made sense – to use a semiotically relevant phrase to be taken literally as well as figuratively. On the side of philosophy, in addition to especially Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze, Theodor Adorno has accompanied my thinking. That attachment is due to his integration of socio-political wisdom with philosophical rigour. But on the side of analysis and art-making, with my long-term specialization in narratology and my commitment to feminism, the mythical story of Cassandra struck me as an antique case of #MeToo. This enabled me to create a cinematic account of the doubts and struggles of a female figure whose loneliness was produced by the fate imposed by her employer Apollo, whose sexual advances she rejected. She would see the future but never be believed.


About the Speaker:

Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic and video artist. She works on feminism, migratory culture, psychoanalysis and the critique of capitalism. Her books include a trilogy on political art: Endless Andness (on abstraction) and Thinking in Film (on video installation), both 2013, and Of What One Cannot Speak (2010, on sculpture). There is also A Mieke Bal Reader (2006). In 2016 she published In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays (Hatje Cantz), and in Spanish, Tiempos trastornados on the politics of visuality (AKAL 2016). Her video project, Madame B, with Michelle Williams Gamaker, is widely exhibited, in 2017 in Museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova in Turku, and combined with paintings by Munch in the Munch Museum in Oslo (with a book). Her most recent film, Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina, premiered in Kraków, Poland, on 23 April 2016.

Date/Day: 20 October 2023, Friday

Time: 4.00pm - 5.30pm

Join the lecture on Zoom: https://ntu-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwsdO6orz0tEtBFQJJrrjzaj3efjYM69sIq

Livestreaming on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/h59SMpGiOIw?feature=share