Catarina Barros
The next session of IFILNOVA’s Experimental Seminar on Philosophy and Literature will take place on July 2, from 4:00 to 6:00 PM, in room SE1 of Colégio Almada Negreiros and online, via Zoom. The session will be hosted by Catarina Barros (IFILNOVA) who will talk about “autotheory” based on the book Não Escrever [com Roland Barthes], by Paloma Vidal (Tinta-da-china, 2023).
To join the session on Zoom, click here.
Abstract
For a while, I thought that my master’s thesis, on autobiography and feminism, would be dedicated to thinking about writing and about life-writing as a feminist practice. In this sense, my text would be a text of texts, a feast of emancipations: political, literary and academic. However, in writing the dissertation I encountered the same old snags: doubt and fear, a sense of powerlessness and irrelevance. The dissertation did not set me free. It was not, it turns out, the psychomagical act I thought it could be. What spell was keeping me from myself, keeping the ghost of an insatiable book, its tutelary figures and its judges, hovering over me?
In Não Escrever [Com Roland Barthes] (“Not Writing [with Roland Barthes”), Paloma Vidal brings together five texts that merge the theoretical and the autobiographical, the personal and the conceptual, the literary and the philosophical, thought and the body, creation and criticism. Starting from Roland Barthes’ unwritten novel and the course The Preparation of the Novel, which Barthes taught from the end of 1978 to the beginning of 1980, Vidal crafts a loving and restless critique in which she tries to understand “what surrounds the moments when it becomes impossible to continue writing”. Written at (and made possible by) the university where Vidal teaches and researches, these texts seek, however, to “re-signify the relationship between teaching, theory and writing, by understanding knowledge as situated and relational”. In this seminar, I will try to read this collection in the context of what is now known as “autotheory”, reflecting on how, by unsettling dominant epistemologies, the book opens up new ways of doing theory and understanding life.
Bio
Catarina Barros has a degree in Philosophy and a post-graduation in Women’s Studies and is currently preparing a dissertation on autobiographical writing and feminism. For many years she was a copywriter and blogger, having published various genres (prose, poetry, essays and theatre) in anthologies and magazines.
If you are interested in hosting a future session or in receiving more information about this event, please contact Ana Falcato at anafalcato@fcsh.unl.pt. All are welcome.
Event supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the projects UIDB/00183/2020 and UIDP/00183/2020.