“The Time of Pathos”

The Avant Garde Interest Group [AGIG] welcomes Mikhail Iampolski [New York University]. Mikhail Iampolski is a Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Russian and Slavic studies at the New York University. He moved to the United States from Russia in 1991, first as a researcher at the Getty Center and then as a faculty member at NYU. His interests include Slavic literatures and cinema, theories of representation, and the body in culture. He is the author of 300 articles in several languages, has written ten books, and has edited or translated as many others. His most recent book is about the indeterminacy in culture. Co-sponsored by: Slavic Languages and Literatures, CREES, Comparative Literature, Screen Arts and Culture
Walter Benjamin claimed that history could be non-narrative, non-chronological, but based on affects, pathos. Pathos has been an important element of Kandisky’s and Eisenstein’s poetics. Eisenstein introduced affect, pathos into his sketch of the history of cinema, and of the image in general. Could pathos be temporalized and historicized? The lecture will treat Eisenstein’s attempt to appropriate pathos to the theory of fi lm (in which he followed Kandinsky) and to understand how pathos is used by him to construct a strange “dialectical” temporality on the basis of Hegel and Marx.