When: Friday, 19 April, 2–3pm
Where: 407 Babel Building, The University of Melbourne Parkville Campus
Dr Patrick Kennedy, The University of Melbourne
“Victor Hugo, Theopoet: Re-reading the divine in Les Contemplations, Dieu, and La Fin de Satan“
Though well-known as a prolific nineteenth-century author and écrivain engagé, Victor Hugo is less remembered for his idiosyncratic view of the divine and its intersection with issues of religion and politics in his poetry. Indeed, criticisms of institutional religion and political theology are prominent across much of his musings in verse, displaying a strong penchant towards castigating those whose visions of ‘ce Tout-Puissant myope et ce Très-Haut fourbu’ fell short of his own understanding of God. Yet, across many decades of scholarship on this subject, few interpretations of his poetic works have directly interfaced with the disciplines of theology and the philosophy of religion. This seminar will offer an overview of readings of several of Hugo’s exile-period poetic works (Les Contemplations, Dieu, and La Fin de Satan), as studied in my book project, that demonstrate how contributions from key thinkers involved in the ‘theological turn’ to the field of phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Emmanuel Falque, René Girard) can be employed to analyse representations of religious experience in these texts. In particular, the concepts of a fractured subjectivity (Chrétien) in Les Contemplations, the idol and the icon (Marion) in Dieu, and the problem of autonomy and mimetic desire (Girard) in La Fin de Satan will be discussed as constituting new perspectives from which to approach Hugo’s often antagonistic representations of humanity and the divine.
Presenter
Dr Patrick Kennedy is a Senior Tutor in French Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has recently completed a PhD thesis at the same institution and is currently in the process of converting this material into a book manuscript. His research interests include nineteenth-century French Romanticism, intersections between literary criticism and phenomenology, and the philosophy of religion.