Abstract

In this lecture, the speaker reframes literary discourse through Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language as a dynamic process of signification rather than representation. Focusing on works by Franz Kafka and Laurence Sterne, the speaker argues that literature operates not as a vehicle for fixed meanings but as an open-ended interplay of comparisons that resist definitive interpretation. Central to this analysis is the tension between singularity and individuality, a distinction that the speaker positions as pivotal to understanding modern politics, theology, economics, and psychoanalysis. By understanding literary language as a site of generative instability, this lecture illuminates how texts unsettle the binaries of cognition/affect and individual/collective, offering new pathways to rethink power, representation, and the politics of meaning.

About the Speaker

Prof. Samuel Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and Director of its Paris Program in Critical Theory. He studied with Paul de Man and Theodor W. Adorno, whose book Prisms he co-translated into English. The translation of and introduction to Adorno's most important book of cultural criticism helped define how the work of the Frankfurt School would be read and understood in the English-speaking world. He has also published books on Balzac, Lacan, and Freud, as well as on the relation of institutions and media to interpretation.

In the 1980s, Prof. Weber worked in Germany as a dramaturge in theater and opera productions. Out of the confrontation of that experience with his work in critical theory came the book, Theatricality as Medium, published in 2004. His two most recent book publications are: Singularity: Politics and Poetics (2021) and Preexisting Conditions: Recounting the Plague (2022). He is currently working on two book projects, Reconsidering the Uncanny: Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, and Kafka’s Uncanny Animals.

Prof. Weber’s interdisciplinary scholarship resonates across literary theory, media studies, and philosophy.