lystn

This talk explores the double movement of memory raised by Afro-Jews on Passover, where Jewish identity is ritualized as memory of trauma and liberation in a context where black identity is pressured toward acts of forgetting. The contradictions of national memory, where modern life, exemplified especially in American doubled conceptions of self, pose problems of remembering and listening. The result is a demand for cultural ruin, a form of disaster, through the elimination of continuity, which hides deeper, existential challenges of maturation: ruin, after all, is a portended feature of human existence, where, in the face of nothing lasting forever, humanity faces the deeper anxiety of how to live with the eventual realization of the end of the world. Lewis R. Gordon is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Temple University. With a diverse background of Jamaican, Cuban, and Jewish ancestry, Gordon has applied himself to the task of articulating the interconnectivity of our world, beyond the strict binaries of Western cultural mores. With many written works in publication concerning post-colonial phenomenology, existentialism, race theory, and cultural studies, Gordon embraces the full breadth of his heritage, striving to engage in the infinite entities that blend to create the human identity. About his own writing, Gordon says in an interview with Linda Alcoff, “I write books to generate critical exchange and to learn from critics. People have always asked me how I write so much, but it is because I do not take the view that one writes a perfect text. I see my writing as part of the social world, so I write to get the discussions going.” His most recent publication with Jane Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age, examines the force of cultural icons and symbols to offer a theory of disaster in modern and contemporary life.