15 April 2021 Loneliness and Technology: Thinking Loneliness

Thinking Loneliness is the sixth event in our series of The English Association’s special interest group on Loneliness and Technology.

What is the relationship between loneliness and the history of thought? How have thinkers thought about loneliness through time? The reinvention of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Europe saw an influential upheaval of the relation between solitude and sociality. Whereas aesthetic experience might remain a lonely state in practice, its ability to conjure the human faculties into a state of ‘free play’ was thought to register its inherently communal nature, which Hannah Arendt understood to form the core of an unwritten and arguably still unrealised political philosophy. Like solitude, loneliness has also been a site of philosophical fantasies: of self-presence and self-sufficiency, but also of the possibility of disposing with, or escaping from, markers of identity or difference, including race, class, gender and sexuality.

This event brings together scholars whose work has addressed loneliness at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, and queer theory. We will be asking: what role has loneliness played in the history of philosophy? How has it structured philosophy’s attempts to establish the foundations, possibilities and limits of both subjectivity and community?

Samantha Rose Hill is Assistant Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Bard College. She also teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in New York City. Her essays on Hannah Arendt, Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School, poetics, aesthetic theory, and the history of political thought have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar, OpenDemocracy, Theory & Event, Contemporary Political Theory, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, and Amor Mundi, among other publications. She is the author of two forthcoming books: Hannah Arendt (2021, Reaktion Books) and Hannah Arendt’s Poems.

John Paul Ricco is Professor of Contemporary Art, Queer Theory, Aesthetics & Ethics at the The University of Toronto Mississauga. He is an art historian and queer theorist especially renowned for his work on Jean-Luc Nancy. John is currently completing two monographs. The Intimacy of the Outside: essays on the erotic aesthesis of the common, and Extinction Aesthetics: The Collective Afterlife of Things. John’s recent writing has appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review and Qui Parle, among many other venues.

Christopher Law completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Postmodern Culture, Modern Language Notes and European Romantic Review. He currently teaches at the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Kelvin College.

Loneliness and Technology is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that has been set up to think about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them. It’s designed to initiate discussion around how we think about loneliness as a political history of emotion, how literature offers us a space to nurture solitude, and how technology induces and resists feelings of isolation.

The aim of the project is to investigate how a range of fields, as they struggle to adapt to the digital, depend on literary elements to convert feelings of isolation into more productive forms of solitude and loneliness. The intention is to provide a forum to think about the challenges to teaching and working online in the current climate, and literature’s role in providing us with the emotional skills to manage that adaptation.

It is designed as a cross-sector and interdisciplinary project that seeks to draw on expertise in the fields of literature, psychoanalysis, digital humanities, mental health, architecture and the history of work and education to bring together researchers and prompt discussion around how we relate to the digital and what it’s possible to do with thinking and feeling.

Planned projects include a seminar series that will run in the spring and a special issue of Issues in English in the autumn.

Anyone interested in joining the group or who’d like more information about it is invited to contact Dr Jess Cotton.