Signs of the Unrepresentable

Signs of the Unrepresentable is a crosslisted Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies/Social Science class taught by John Drabinski.

Course Description
In the broadest terms, this course is concerned with the intersection of theories of signification with an ethics of representation. In particular, this course examines the plausibility of the concept of "the unrepresentable" and the ethical questions it might raise. The idea of the unrepresentable takes on particular urgency when intellectuals and artists begin coming to terms with the astonishing and often genocidal violence of the long twentieth century. Is it possible to put catastrophic violence into language and image, or does that effort in fact repeat one and the same violence? Is "representation of the unrepresentable" a contradiction or an imperative? To investigate these questions and many companion issues, we will read theoretical works by Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and Levinas alongside poetry by Celan, Sachs, Glissant and others. At the center of our conversations will be a viewing and close reading of Claude Lanzmann's exercise in the unrepresentable - the tour-de-force documentary film Shoah. From these readings, viewings, and conversations, we will come to terms with the ethical question lying at the heart of any work of representation: what does it mean to speak for another? And how is that speaking ever responsible?