Disarming Intelligence: On the Absence of French Modernism

Disarming Intelligence: On the Absence of French Modernism

This talk examines the transformations in "intelligence" since the Third Republic. Ranging from Proust, Valéry, and Bergson to contemporary theorists like Malabou, it analyzes the role and limits lent to the category of "intelligence" in modern French literature, criticism, and thought. It argues that we cannot understand how this tradition views literary creation and criticism, as well as its own political situation, without accounting for its fluctuating conception of intelligence.

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Zakir Paul is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature, French, and English at NYU, where he also directs the program in Poetics & Theory. His book manuscript, Disarming Intelligence: On the Absence of French Modernism, examines the role and limits lent to "intelligence" by early twentieth-century French writers and thinkers. His articles and reviews have appeared in MLN, boundary 2, Romanic Review, Germanic Review, L'Esprit Créateur, Critical Inquiry, and JML. Editorial work includes a special issue of SubStance on recent approaches to reading Maurice Blanchot and translations of Blanchot's Political Writings, 1953-1993 (Fordham UP, 2010), as well as Jacques Rancière's Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Verso, 2013).