Simon Ryle

Associate Professor, Department of English, Filozofski Fakultet, University of Split

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simon Ryle's research focuses on intersections between literature, cinema and theory, in particular concerning expressions of animal life, bodily materiality and its commodification, ecocriticism, media technology and desire.

​​

Alterity, negation & the unthinkable

This presentation explores the French encounter with Japan in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Roland Barthes Empire of Signs (1970), and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983). The presentation focuses on how French cinema’s encounters with Japanese post-WWII reconstruction, Zen Buddhism and nuclear atomic devastation redefine the central position that negation takes in poststructuralist philosophy. In a broader sense Alterity, negation & the unthinkable seeks to show how this series of poststructuralist encounters with Japan, though historically specific, remains significant, foreshadowing in a vital way contemporary existence by exemplifying the harrowing difficulty of living a meaningful life in the shadows of unthinkable atrocity.

 

3 Questions:

- What is the role of the encounter with alterity, negation and unthinkability in poststructuralist thought, and how might theory’s explorations of these problems continue to have aesthetic and ethical significance?

​

- How and why might art and theory continually be impelled towards the impossible or unspeakable “night in the night” as Maurice Blanchot allegorically describes Orpheus’s mythical impulsion to face Eurydice in the place of death?

 

- How is it possible, and why might it be vital, to approach the “writing of the disaster,” in Blanchot’s words, whose catastrophe itself calls into question the grounding of the possibility of meaning?

How does one live a meaningful life in the shadows of unthinkable atrocity?

 

Links:

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/xenoflesh-vegan-poetics-and-capitalocene-meat/

https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-abstract/47/4/63/167009/XenofleshA-Zoepoetics-of-Meat

https://www.hippocampus.si/ISSN/2630-4082/55.215-236.pdf

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14797585.2019.1590917

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137332066

​

Simon Ryle published recently and has forthcoming work on vegan poetics, flesh in David Lynch’s cinematography, ecocide in W.S. Merwin’s poetry, and Capitalocene symbiosis in the fiction of Octavia Butler.

​