For this fourth and final seminar we’ll concentrate on the figure of the Daydreamer. The act and experience of daydreaming will allow us to follow poetics into what Gaston Bachelard highlights as the “oneiric”: the phantasmic yet no less real shimmering of consciousness. Following Bachelard’s work, daydreaming will lead us into exploring the relation between poetics and love, reverie and childhood, human to nonhuman sharing, and further, into the productive “cosmos” opened up by the small nap that is daydreaming. In addition, the figure of the Daydreamer can be mobilized to query the social conditions of precarity, vulnerability and weakness, allowing us to ask: how might poetics be positioned as the basis for states of non-violent resistance? Can we understand the poetics of the imagination as a general framework for fostering what bell hooks calls a “loving community”? We’ll conclude the seminar by reflecting on a number of artists whose practices capture poetics as a labor of love and commingling, including Erdem Gündüz, Womanhouse, Alice Chauchat, Robert Filliou, Jonas Mekas, and Palle Nielsen.
Bibliography:
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie
Judith Butler, Precarious Life
Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love
Franco Bifo Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance