Human beings, it has been said, prefer to represent their overall condition in the world in terms of a sea voyage. The uncanny aspect of this insight has rarely been described more intensively than in Melville’s novel from 1850. The Neversink, as he provocatively named the warship on which his narrator Whitejacket is travelling, subjects the lives of its crew to a form of total domination, which the ship has stood for since its political conception in antiquity. At the same time, as one could say with Erving Goffman, who was an attentive reader of Melville, the ship opens up an “underlife” in which surprisingly different writing and reading practices flourish. What it means to pursue poetry on board a warship and how poetic practices relate to the “code” that regulates the crew's life on board, down to the last detail with terrorizing consequences: these are the questions the lecture will explore.

About the participant:

Friedrich Balke is the Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair Visiting Professor for the Fall 2024 semester. He is a Professor for Media Studies at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He completed his habilitation on figures of sovereignty in philosophical and literary discourses from antiquity to modernity. His books and articles focus on the cultural history of political sovereignty and modern biopolitics, interrelations of media and literature, the history and theory of mimetic practices, media philology, and French theory. He is currently preparing a book that deals with oceanic feelings and the conceptual displacements they produce in cultural and media theories.

Date and Time: Monday, November 25, 5:30-7:30 PM.

Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10002

More Information: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSea0qKtIVY9634peRivVFLdS9xvT4fuNeDNMMGow4UcnVz1RQ/viewform