Muzeul Municipiului București vă invită la Idei în Agora, sâmbătă, 7 decembrie 2024, ora 18.00, la Casa Filipescu-Cesianu (Caea Victoriei 151), cu tema „Culianu’s Afterlives”. Pablo Maurette în dialog cu Sorin Antohi.
Intrarea este liberă.
VIDEO INTEGRAL MAI JOS
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The life and work of Ioan Petru Culianu (1950-1991) have long inspired people from many countries and virtually every field, from scholarship to investigative journalism and popular culture (mind uploading could come up next). This dialogue focuses on Culianu’s afterlives as they appear in fiction. In other people’s fiction, but with occasional glimpses at Culianu’s own, a complex discourse that was co-evolving with his academic writing, was equally sophisticated, experimental and transdisciplinary, frequently mysterious, esoteric, navigating multiple arcane worlds (including the ones we consider his or our own), and eerily prescient. In Culianu’s own words, his fiction was primarily an exercise in mind games.
My guest is Pablo Maurette, a cosmopolitan, polyglot humanist scholar and a sophisticated writer born in the country whose most relevant refference in this context is Borges. His captivating and intense novel inspired by Culianu was first published in Spanish, then in Italian, and recently in Romanian.
At the international colloquium, Ioan Petru Culianu. Lives, Works, Legacies (Iași, 21-23 October 2022, available on my YouTube channel), I have invited Pablo Maurette to speak on the issues above. The abstract of his presentation, „The Ludibrium: Ioan Petru Culianu Revisited in Fiction”, is to be found below. It works perfectly as an introduction to the novel and to our dialogue.
Sorin Antohi
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In the fall of 2014, during my second year as Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, I discovered the story of the assassination of Culianu through a chance encounter with Ted Anton’s book. This discovery led me to familiarize myself with the life and work of Culianu. Inspired by Culianu’s own fiction writing and on his love of metanarrative games, soon after I started writing a novel that is centered on the story. La migración (2020; in Italian, Il tempo è un fiume, 2022) tells the story of Aarón, an Argentine student at the University of Chicago who comes across the chronicle of Culianu’s demise and decides to investigate further hoping to solve the crime. Having inserted himself in the Romanian community of the Windy City, one day the student vanishes without a trace. Twenty-five years later, his friends in Buenos Aires receive an anonymous package that contains Aarón’s diaries. Over the course of a night of drinking and reminiscing, they look for clues in the text which contains, among many other things, a pseudo-biography of Culianu. In an homage to Culianu, the novel is conceived as a ludibrium, i.e., an ancient riddle that some thought contained the key to important secrets about the universe. In particular, the book explores the mystery of metempsychosis, and advances the notion that literature functions as a sort of transmigration, by which images, motifs, and stories travel across time and space embodying the most diverse forms.
Pablo Maurette
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Pablo Maurette (b. 1961) received his BA in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires, an MA in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies from the University of London (Royal Holloway College), and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Between 2013 and 2017, he was a Harper Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. And in 2018-2019, he was a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Maurette specializes in Early Modern comparative literature and the Classical Tradition and his approach is trans-historical, multilingual, and interdisciplinary. His research focuses on the intersections between literature, science, and the history of ideas in the period between 1400 and 1650 in England, Italy, France, Spain, and the New World.
In 2018, he published The Forgotten Sense: Meditations on Touch (The University of Chicago Press), a collection of essays dedicated to the role that the sense of touch has played throughout the Western literary and philosophical tradition, from Homer to Karl Ove Knausgaard.
He also published three books of essays in Spanish: La carne viva (Mardulce, Buenos Aires, 2018), Por qué nos creemos los cuentos (Clave Intelectual, Madrid, 2021), and Atlas ilustrado del cuerpo humano (Clave Intelectual, Madrid, 2023). And two novels: La migración (Mardulce, Buenos Aires, 2020; translated into Italian, Salani, Milan, 2022, and Romanian, Polirom, 2024); La Niña de Oro (Editorial Anagrama, Bracelona, 2024).
Maurette also writes for wider audiences in Lapham’s Quarterly (USA), La Repubblica (Italy), and Letras Libres (Mexico/Spain).
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Sorin Antohi (b. 1957) is a historian of ideas, essayist, translator. Member of Academia Europaea. More at www.sorinantohi.org.
Idei în Agora / Ideas in the Agora is a program devoted to the analysis of the public spirit. It was initiated in 2017 by Sorin Antohi, and is supported by Adrian Majuru. Organized by Muzeul Municipiului București (Bucharest City Museum), in partnership with Orbis Tertius Association. In various formats (dialogue, lecture, roundtable, colloquium, conference), currents, movements, personalities, worldviews, theories, ideologies are engaged. The videos : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv5R2xEgA_M5nzwIUGl8kcQ. The archive: http://muzeulbucurestiului.ro/idei-in-agora.html.
The series started on 21 June 2017, with a dialogue between Gregory Claeys and Sorin Antohi, Marx and Marxism: Utopia, Dystopia, History. 103 events and 3 related events, 132 guests (some came more than once) from 18 countries: Romania (most of them), Armenia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Republic of Moldova, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States.
Starting with its edition number IVC, the series continues under the auspices of Academia Europaea (AE), in the framework of a project to establish an AE Regional Knowledge Hub in Bucharest.
IVC: Transitional Historiography and Retrospective Justice. Colloquium. Convened by Sorin Antohi, featuring Antoon De Baets. 24 April 2024, 18:00 (Casa Filipescu-Cesianu), lecture by Antoon De Baets followed by a dialogue with Sorin Antohi, 25 April 2024, 10:00-12:00 (IICCMER), roundtable with the two, Gabriel Andreescu, Cosmin Popa, Ștefan Bosomitu, and Florin Soare (assisted by Daniel Filip-Afloarei IICCMER), moderated by Sorin Antohi. IIIC Hardy F. Schloer. IIIC: Eliade, Culianu și rădăcinile românești. Florin Cîntic în dialog cu Sorin Antohi (28.05.2024). IIC: AI: Challenges and Opportunities. Hardy F. Schloer talks to Sorin Antohi (filmed on 16.04.2024, MMB Lapidarium, posted on 30.05.2024). IC: Ruptură și continuitate. Ce spune teoria rețelelor sociale? Marian-Gabriel Hâncean în dialog cu Sorin Antohi (11.06.2024). C: Culianu și Eliade. Moshe Idel în dialog cu Sorin Antohi (18.06.2024). CI: 23 august 1944. 80 de ani în retrospectivă. Ediție specială. Intervenții de Sorin Antohi, Dinu Zamfirescu, Stelian Tănase, Alexandru Muraru, Matei Gheboianu, Manuel Stănescu, Simion Gheorghiu, Narcis Dorin Ion, Daniel Șandru. Moderator: Mioara Anton. În colaborare cu IICCMER și Institutul de Istorie „Nicolae Iorga” (Muzeul Național Peleș, Sinaia, 23.08.2024). CII: Mândra Lume Nouă. O perspectivă din 2024. Dorin Tudoran în dialog cu Sorin Antohi. În colaborare cu IICCMER (Lapidarium, 24.09.2024). CIII: Rusia și Ucraina. De la competiție mimetică la război total. Dan Alexe în dialog cu Sorin Antohi (13.10.2024).
În afara seriei, dar legat de ea, au avut loc: România Mare 2.0. De la insula de latinitate la arhipelagul global, conferință organizată Sorin Antohi (23-24.11.2018); Royal Colloquium IV, From Dystopia to Posthistory. Conveners: Sorin Antohi and Gregory Claeys (23.06.2019); The Museum of the Future / Muzeul Viitorului / Museum der Zukunft. Public debate. Volker Rodekamp, Anselm Hartinger, Adrian Majuru. Moderator: Sorin Antohi (3.10.2019). Evenimentele sunt arhivate la adresele menționate mai sus.