Department of English

Our lives depend on our receptivity: from the very beginning, to the air we breathe, to the food we ingest, to the sleep we submit to.  We will consider modes of receptivity to both external and internal stimuli.
-Sexual receptivity: sex and love; sex and exchange; pleasure in suffering pain and inflicting pain.
-Receiving our identity from networks of power.  Agreeing to being psychically and socially named.  Resistance.
-How might receptivity function outside the subject-object model of relations with the world?
-Receiving death.  What do we gain by continuing to live?
-Plato, Freud, Bourdieu, Sloterdijk; Proust, H.James, Duras, Melville; films: Bergman (Persona), Dumont (Humanité), von Trier (Breaking the Waves and Melancholia); Pasolini (Salò).