Climbing Down: 4-Week Intensives
What is an “intensive”? Not quite a writing workshop, not quite a philosophy or literature course, but some other, third thing.
For the past few years, I’ve looked for ways to combine my love of teaching, shared inquiry, and collective commitment to writing projects with my interest in strange, “hard to teach” books. Philosophy and creative writing should not be locked away in the ivory tower, they should not be kept separate if/when they want to mingle, and above all, they are pursuits (only sometimes professions).
My years of teaching have shown me that while I probably can’t teach you how to write, I can help you sharpen your mind and your senses through close textual analysis—if that’s what you want—and the writing you produce will be informed by this in unpredictable and exciting ways.
Registration is closed until 2025.
Session 1
The Search for Lost Intimacy: reading Georges Bataille
Together, we’ll read Theory of Religion and selected essays from Visions of Excess. We’ll examine Bataille’s claims about religion as the search for lost intimacy; the relation between humanity and animality; violence and destruction; the origins of capitalism; gnosticism and some mystics; and the nature of writing and other forms of communication.
Our guest for this session will be Stuart Kendall. Stuart is the single most prolific translator of Bataille’s writing. He is a writer, editor, and independent scholar. His extraordinary work has made the (anglophone) study of Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard, Debord, Baudrillard, and René Char possible.
Session 2
Disgust, Despair, Courage: reading Clarice Lispector
Focusing on Near to the Wild Heart and The Passion According to G.H., we’ll think and feel our way through questions related to authorship, subjectivity, love, death, knowledge, and transcendence. We will also read selections from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Hélène Cixous.
Our guest for this session will be Canadian poet, philosopher, and master gardener Karen Houle. She specializes in issues of animality, plant ontology, micropolitics, friendship, copyright, and reproductive technology. She is the author of three critically-acclaimed books of poetry, numerous essays on art, philosophy, and literature, and a singular work of theory: Toward a New Image of Thought: Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion (Lexington 2013). She is also a translator. She runs The Art of Soil Collective in Guelph, Ontario.
Session 3
My Soul, Where Are You? reading Carl Jung’s The Red Book
Focusing exclusively on The Red Book, we’ll examine the book’s conceptual framework, its emphasis on meditation and “soul-retrieval,” its understanding of creativity and expression, and its singular, obsessive nature. We will explore techniques and methods used in the book. This will be a month of digging deep and seeing what emerges.