Facing the fall: humanism after nihilism in Christos Tsiolkas’s writing

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Date: THURSDAY 23 September 2021 @ 7:00pm AEST (Melbourne) | 12:00pm EEST (Athens) | 5:00am EDT (New York)
Presenter: Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis

Language of Presentation: English | No knowledge of Greek required
Entry: FREE

Synopsis

The novels of Christos Tsiolkas provide a powerful portrayal of the hollowing out of radical political ideologies and the disaggregation of cultural bonds. The struggle of living in a world where both Marxism and multiculturalism are seen as failures has been expressed through a narrative form that at first resulted in nihilism and more recently led to an evocation of a form of embodied solidarity with the other. In this lecture I contrast the ambivalent resort to nihilism in Tsiolkas’s work with the theoretical commentary by Sloterdijk and Zizek.

Bio

Nikos Papastergiadis Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He studied at the University of Melbourne and University of Cambridge. Prior to returning to the University of Melbourne he was a lecturer at the University of Manchester.His sole authored publications include Modernity as Exile (1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Metaphor and Tension (2004) Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012), Ambient Perspectives (2013) as well as being the editor of over 10 collections, author of numerous essays which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwanju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki and Documenta 13. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and co-chair of the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture, and Chair of the International Advisory Board for the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore.

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