Points of Departure: Topos, Temporality, Method
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Literary and cultural history are strewn with departures. In theatre, a dramatic exit is no less important than making an entrance. In epic, we might think of the departure of Hector from Andromache, Aeneas from Troy, or Dante (with the help of Virgil) from the thicket of sin. In lyric, whole genres are devoted to parting from towns, lovers, or the dead (elegy, alba, Tagelied, poésie du départ). As Auden made clear in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, these genres are both intensely generic—full of rhetorical commonplaces that detach them from local habitations—and dependent on the common places and everyday affects of particular groups: thus in the new ‘poésie de départ’, he fears, the ‘antiseptic objects’ of ‘the aerodrome’ will replace ‘the chiaroscuro of the railway station’.
As a topos which describes an exit from a topos, departure as a location is structurally enigmatic. So too is its temporality. It is not only that the moment of leave-taking can be missed, botched, blurred, endlessly deferred, or endlessly repeated. Even when apparently punctual, the moment of departure is Janus faced: it suggests an ending and a beginning; a beginning which opens up from what is left behind. Departure seems to be poised between crisis and origination; between a now which divides past from the future and a now as a point of origin from which time flows.
The ambiguity of departure may go some way toward explaining the methodological significance it has assumed in the work of theory and criticism, especially in comparative and postcolonial contexts. Edward and Maire Said used the phrase ‘point of departure’ to translate Erich Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt (literally, approach-point): a literary object defined by its ‘concreteness and precision’ on one hand and its ‘potential for centrifugal radiation’ on the other. In Said’s Beginnings, the Ansatzpunkt is a methodological principle aligned with beginnings: unlike ‘origins’, these are secular, contingent, and projective. For Werner Hamacher, meanwhile, departure (Abschied) forms something like the subliminal condition of linguistic transmission, describing the way linguistic occurrences take place insofar as they take leave of themselves in and as their transmission to others.
Speakers include Lindsay Goss, Josh Barnes, Andrew Benjamin, Clara Tuite, Justin Clemens, Jeremy George, Cam Hurst, Scott Kirkland, and Ryan Johnson. Full program on the registration website.