ASLI NİYAZİOĞLU
Gardens, Stories and Pleasures of the Imagination in Early Modern Istanbul
This talk will explore the role of imagination in the formation of learned communities in Istanbul during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Where and how did poets, scholars, and artists of Istanbul gather? What did they want to share about these public places? And what do we see when we look at their gatherings through their eyes? Answers to these questions will be sought in the rich literature Ottomans produced about garden gatherings. Through a survey of various sources including biographies of poets and travelogues, the crucial but little explored role of gardens in the making of Ottoman intellectual life will be discussed.
MATTHEW GUMPERT
The Accident Waiting to Happen Has Already Happened
9/11 was, in many ways, the apocalypse we had long been waiting for: an event so spectacularly catastrophic that, for a brief moment, it appeared to transcend meaning itself. (America: a nation founded on the principle of the apocalyptic, guided by the conviction that it is destined for great things - in other words, terrible catastrophes. And the American dream? The fantasy of fashioning meaning entirely anew, upon some pristine tabula rasa or ground zero, wiped clean by cataclysm.) Until we understood it was just another event. The real lesson of 9/11 may lie, then, not in its singularity, but its banality: the terrible truth it reveals is that catastrophe is not the exception to the rule, but the rule itself. The accident waiting to happen has always already happened.
ÖZGÜR ÖĞÜTCEN
Who’s Waking Up from Sleep?
What might be the reason that reality seems so clear to us? What would happen if we couldn’t feel this way? How can we define the relation between reality and sleep as an encounter area that exceeds, corrodes and reverses this reality? If sleep and waking up from sleep cannot be explored only in biological- physiological terms, then what other theoretical tools can we employ to make sense of them? In this talk, Özgür Öğütcen will explain the role of the sleep state in the formation of reality and
the shaping of the ego.