This presentation will be conducted in-person and through Zoom. Zoom account registration is required, please register in advance here.

World, in many of the major philosophical traditions of the last century, presumes a totality of things, a form of being that exists through the sorting of subjects from objects, objects from things and things from unseen forces. And while “world,” and “life” seem to offer vectors for utopian thinking (“another world is possible”), these totalizing concepts have also been predicated upon anti-blackness and from the elevation of the human above all other forms of life. Rather than holding out for new worlds, revitalized notions of life, or remade utopian dreams, this lecture begins with the premise that world-making as we currently conceive of it can only proceed by way of unworlding, world unmaking in which concepts such as the human, subject, object, animal, vegetative are tipped out of their hierarchical formations and disordered in meaning and in their relations to one another. My talk follows a series of aesthetic experiments from the 1970’s to the present that revel in collapse, destruction and ruination.

Jack Halberstam will be joined by Ivan L. Munuera and Sanjana Lahiri for a conversation after the lecture. 

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press).  Halberstam’s latest book, out in 2020, from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy. 

Ivan L. Munuera is a New York-based scholar, critic, and curator working at the intersection of culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices in the modern period and on the global stage. He is visiting professor at Bard College and Barnard College-Columbia University.

Sanjana Lahiri is a B.Arch thesis student at Cooper Union whose current work engages with community gardens. She is a co-founder of Cooper's Architecture Lobby chapter. 

The in-person lecture is open to Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff in room 315F. This event is accessible to the public through Zoom only.