Institutes
Descartes' Devil: Durs Gruenbein
Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Durs Grünbein, one of the world's great poets and essayists, presents Descartes’ Devil, three beautifully wrought meditations from a poet's perspective on the import of René Descartes' legacy. The Descartes in question here is not the architect of mind-body-dualism, the arch-villain of Rationalism, but an inspired and courageous dreamer, explorer, and fabulist. Grünbein discloses the profoundly humane and poetic underpinnings of the legacy of this "modern man par excellence," and, by extension, of modernity as a whole. Uncovering the poetic foundations of Descartes' rationalism, Grünbein, shows us that reason is never more alive than when it is most poetic.
In conversation with Durs Grünbein is publisher Michael Eskin of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., which recently released Descartes’ Devil: Three Meditations, translated by Anthea Bell.
Durs Grünbein, poet, essayist and translator, was born in Dresden in 1962, and has lived in Berlin since 1986. After the fall of the Berlin Wall he travelled throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States, where he has been a guest professor at New York University, Dartmouth College and, in the spring of 2010, Washington University in St. Louis. Grünbein is the recipient of the Georg-Büchner-Preis, the Friedrich Nietzsche-Preis, the Berliner Literaturpreis 2006, and the Pour le Mérite medal for Science and Literature, a.o. He holds the Chair for Poetics and Artistic Aesthetics at the School of the Arts in Düsseldorf and lives in Berlin. Durs Grünbein’s works have been translated into dozens of languages.
Michael Eskin, co-founder of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., and vice-president of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, has taught at the University of Cambridge and at Columbia University. His works include: Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky (2008); 17 Vorurteile, die wir Deutschen gegen Amerika und die Amerikaner haben und die so nicht ganz stimmen können (2008); The DNA of Prejudice: On the One and the Many and he is editor of The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays, by Durs Grünbein (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010). He lectures regularly in the US and Europe.
Copies of Descartes’ Devil: Three Meditations will be available for purchase on this evening.
Free admission.
