Event date: Monday 6 October 2014, 5.30 – 7 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room (first floor, room 117 – see floor plan)

“Statelessness and the Poetry of the Borderline: André Green, W. H. Auden, and Yousif Qasmiyeh”; given by Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of East Anglia)

“Traumatic testimony has long been the genre of choice for those wanting to give voice to the rightless of our times. But can trauma really capture the transcultural complexity of territorial violence? There are many ways of moving across a border, or indeed, as is the case for millions today, living on a border. In his 1976 essay, ‘The Borderline Concept’, the psychoanalyst André Green wrote: ‘I can be a citizen or heimatlos (homeless), but to be borderline – that is difficult for me to imagine.’
This lecture takes Green’s writing on the borderline as a starting point for reflecting on the condition of statelessness. For Green, to think seriously about the borderline is not so much to establish it as a category as to risk an imagination adequate to its shifting geographies – frequently he compares the task of imagining borderline states to the writing and reading of poetry. How might we describe a poetry of the borderline? And how might such descriptions help us think again about the geographies of modern writing? The second part of this lecture turns to two poets from different ends of the same history of exile and displacement: Auden, whose voluntary 1939 departure from England coincided with the first convulsions of national frontiers in Europe, its colonies, protectorates and mandates, and the Oxford-based Palestinian Yousif Qasmiyeh, whose writing captures the reality of borderline existence with a particular clarity.”

Reading (click to download):

• André Green, ‘Le concept de limite’, La folie privée: psychanalyse des cas-limites (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), translated as ‘The Borderline Concept’, On Private Madness (London: Rebus Press, 1996).
• Étienne Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’, trans. J. Swenson, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
• Yousif Qasmiyeh, ‘Holes’, See How I Land: Oxford Poets and Exiled Writers, ed. Carole Angier, Rachel Buxton, Stephanie Kitchen and Simon White (Coventry: The Heaven Tree Press, 2009), pp. 47-50. ‘Holes’ is also published in Modern Poetry in Translation 3. 12 (2009).
• W.H. Auden, ‘Look, stranger’, Look, Stranger! (1936) (London: Faber, 2001).

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia, where she co-directs The Writing and Rights Project. She is author, most recently, of The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (paperback, 2014). Other publications include The Destructive Element (1998) and The Writing of Anxiety (2007). She is currently completing a new book, Reading Statelessness: Rights, Writing and Refugees.