Lectures and Keynotes

Here you will find videos featuring lectures and keynote presentations that have been added as a part of the Legacies of the Enlightenment Project. Feel free to adapt these materials for use in your classroom. These materials may NOT be used for commercial purposes. (For more information about copyright information, please follow the content licensing link at the bottom of the page.) If you would like to contribute a lecture or keynote presentation, please contact us via our Humanities Commons Group.

Eli Clare’s HIVES Keynote Presentation

In November 2020, our collaborators, the HIVES Research Workshop and Speaker Series, invited disability activist Eli Clare for a series of talks and workshops. Eli Clare’s book Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure attempts to navigate the ill-logic of the terms “natural” and “normal,” with their seemingly irreconcilable perspectives on the disabled body. Clare discusses the ways that disabled people often find themselves caught living in-between these terms, where their lives, which can be described as natural variations on embodiment, are often categorized as abnormal. In the reverse, strategies for existing and use of adaptive technology that don’t abide by ableist, heteronormative societal expectations (to wit: “normal”) are viewed as unnatural. Clare notes “Normal and natural dance together, while unnatural and abnormal bully, threaten, patrol the boundaries. Of course it’s an inscrutable dance. How does unnatural technology repair so-called abnormal bodies to their natural states of being? Dismissing the distinctions between normal and abnormal, natural and unnatural, as meaningless would be lovely, except they wield extraordinary power.” (Clare)

This state of in-betweenness is addressed in Clare’s keynote lecture “Notes on Cure, Disability, and the Natural World” accessible in HIVES’ “Recorded Events.”

Clare, Eli. “Notes on Cure, Disability, and Natural Worlds” first given at San Diego State University, 2013.

Petra Kuppers Keynote in partnership with HIVES

In partnership with the HIVES Research Workshop and Speaker Series, on December 5, 2019, Petra Kuppers led us adrift on her stories and poems, slipping through silvers and slivers of bodies. Between reading from her queer/crip collection of speculative fiction Ice Bar and closing with the opening of Gut Botany, her book of poetry full of orange sturgeon, she honeyed our ears.

Dr. Monique Allewaert’s keynote presentation from the Legacies of the Enlightenment Workshop

Dr. Monique Allewaert’s keynote took place during the first Legacies of the Enlightenment Workshop, October 5-6 in 2018. “I called this talk “Turning the Light,” and this is a play on the title of the book Insect Luminescence. What I’m trying to do with this title and in this book is I’m trying to think of a figure to think about knowledge production in the colonies, and I’m using the figure of the firefly or of these bioluminescent insects that are discussed by natural historians in the 18th and late 17th century partially because supposedly Arawak and Caribs would use these bioluminescent insects in hunting as well as in the decoration of their homes and their bodies.”

Morality Naturalized in La Mettrie’s Machine Man (and Violated by Sade)

Morality Naturalized in La Mettrie’s Machine Man (and Violated by Sade), Lecture by Dr. John Grey

Materialism had a bad reputation in eighteenth century Europe. Many held that materialist philosophy would, via the slipperiest of slopes, lead its proponents into degenerate, immoral, and irreligious behavior. Materialist authors in this tradition responded to such criticism by developing naturalistic moral theories; typically, these were theories according to which humans are by nature inclined toward some canonical moral virtues, and by nature averse to some moral vices. Materialists who pursued this strategy, like Julien Offray de la Mettrie, had a nice reply to their critics’ moralizing: there are purely natural forces causing humans to tend toward virtue and away from vice, so recognizing that humans are merely biological machines will not lead to moral decay. But this argumentative strategy has an interesting flaw. It requires us to draw a line between those passions that nature dictates we act on and those that nature dictates we resist. Yet (as the writings of the Marquis de Sade suggest) philosophical naturalism, drawn to its logical conclusion, makes it difficult to draw such a line in any non-arbitrary way.

Sex comes to the Bastille: the Marquis De Sade and the French Revolution

Sex comes to the Bastille: the Marquis De Sade and the French Revolution, Presented by Dr. Ronen Steinberg

On July 3, 1789, a little after midnight, several men entered a cell in the infamous prison of the Bastille and snatched a prisoner who was sleeping there. They hurled him into a coach waiting nearby and drove him, naked, to the insane asylum at Charenton. This prisoner was the Marquis de Sade. Ten days later, the people of Paris would storm the Bastille in one of the most memorable days in modern history, thus beginning, in effect, the French Revolution. This talk examines the relationship between the Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution. As a nobleman, he was suspect. As the author of scandalous works, he had a good chance of ending up on the guillotine. Yet as a committed troublemaker, he must have loved the glimpse of anarchy that the Revolution afforded to contemporaries. In this talk, we will follow the Marquis’ multiple brushes with the Revolution. We will examine what he thought about its politics. And we will look for the traces of its dramas and disappointments in his writings.