THE WAGER

Der Entschluß zu philosophieren wirft sich rein in Denken… wie in einen uferlosen Ozean. (Hegel)

So viele Berichte. So viele Fragen. (Brecht)

Ruda and Yeung present in philosophical-poetic counterpoint a series of meditations on the wager of thought and of the speculative possibility of thought‘s own impossible objectification (in language as a given position or mode). In so doing they address as concepts or potentialities a suite of ideas that allow the exposure of a given symptom of speculation – capital, the stuck, foreignness, the absolute, the break. Can the poet, can the philosopher speak to this (to each other)? This question, the site of experiment. The counterpoint’s possibility, the wager.

Heather H. Yeung 楊希蒂 is Reader in Literature (poetry and poetics) at the University of Dundee, and is currently also literature lead and literature scholarships chair at the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. She is the author of Spatial Engagement with Poetry (2015) and On Literary Plasticity (2020) as well as numerous essays, poems, and edited collections in poetics and art theory. Substantial archives (some recently digitized) of her poetic and artists book works are held in the Scottish Poetry Library and the National Library of Scotland.

Frank Ruda is Chair of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Dundee. His most recent publications include Reading Hegel (with Slavoj Žižek and Agon Hamza, Polity 2021), The Dash – the Other Side of Absolute Knowing (with Rebecca Comay, MIT Press 2018), Gegen-Freiheit. Für einen komischen Fatalismus (Konstanz University Press 2018). The English translation of his Indifference and Repetition, or Modern Freedom and its Discontents is forthcoming with Fordham University Press in 2023 (including a new preface by Alain Badiou). He is currently working on the manuscript of a book tentatively entitled “Stuckness and Courage. On Modes of Absorbing Historical Time and How to Counter Them.”

Jeff Dolven is a poet, professor and chair of English at Princeton University.

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Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM)