Lecture. “Poetic Critique of Reason: Lipavsky and Considerations of Temporality in Kharms’s Circle.”

Branislav Jakovljevic, professor of drama, Stanford University. Sponsors: Avant-Garde Interest Group, CREES.

Avant-Garde Interest Group website

Many of Leonid Lipavsky’s philosophical tracts can be best described as a Platonic Symposium in decay: a group of strange characters sit around the table in a tavern, drinking vodka or eating apples, and reflecting on some of the most perplexing philosophical questions. This narrative philosophy can be tracked to the daily transactions of Lipavsky and his friends. Daniil Kharms’s and Alexander Vvedensky’s poetic philosophy of time was informed by their participation in a discussion group that Lipavsky convened in the early 1930s. Starting from striking similarities between this underground circle and the contemporaneous Bataille circle in France, Branislav Jakovljevic also looks at their differences in order to examine the ideas about time and temporality in the work of Daniil Kharms and his close friends.