Stanford Humanities Center
Lord
The cage has twisted into a bird
and devoured my hopes
Lord
The cage has twisted into a bird
What to do with this fear
Alejandra Pizarnik
Thomas Mann states in The Magic Mountain that when we wait, we perceive duration “as an obstacle,” a reflection that has at its center the question of what happens to us when we wait, and the meaning we give to time and existence while we are waiting. It is a reflection, more than on the future, on the present as well as the perception of those things that affirm our idea of permanence. What form should we give to this waiting time when a life circumstance allows a research project and the experience of a new everyday life to coincide?
On the one hand, this form materializes with the perception of a voracious temporality linked to daily life, to the events we do every day. On the other hand, there is an attempt to discipline the overflows of routine in an effort to stop the inner chaos. Between the voracity and the overflow, the affections emerge as a site of salvation, the affective commitment making signs to orient me. But it is a call that wishes to differentiate itself from the jubilation and exaltation of something not yet achieved. It reminds me, on the contrary, of the daily condition of fragility that constitutes us and that, in spite of everything, raises us up every morning to launch us into the usual decisions. This way of waiting, like that of writing, involves then the feeling of another temporality, finite, with deadlines, defined in terms of its fulfillment. And after all, what does it mean to wait? It is a question where permanence is involved, and that which makes us fragile as long as we persist. It is a question about the material and affective conditions that constitute us while we wait, about what happens when we turn that waiting time into a project, into a life and writing plan.
What do we write or dream out of the fragility of this hope? What questions do we ask ourselves from our daily waiting? These questions constitute us in a secret way, but they also run silently through our writing projects. They are present, with equal potency, in what constitutes us as ethical and affective subjects. The certainty of this fragile hope would allow us to be attentive to the contents of the questions we investigate, to the facts that challenge these questions. It is, Mann insinuates, as if the amount of time that is devoured in waiting also defines the borders of hope: states of mind, daily decisions, ways of writing and dreaming. Because, finally, these questions about the meaning of waiting are questions that concern our language and our responsibility, they are questions about how we decide to belong to the present, they involve the possibility of perceiving in the obstacles and fears, despite everything, an overture through which a little tranquility and hope can be heard.
Join the colloquy
Join the colloquy
Hope: The Future of an Idea
more
This year at the Stanford Humanities Center, we asked our fellows to reflect on questions of this kind. Their work ranges from the esoteric to the immediate, from the deep past to the present moment, and across the disciplines from music and art history to philosophy and education. Our aim here is to create a repository of informal thinking about the presence of hope in what we do, not only as scholars, artists, and practitioners but as people living in the twenty-first century.
It is natural to say we live in a hopeless time, as climate change, war, authoritarianism, and other dangers loom over us. Without dismissing the force of despair, this Colloquy proposes to recover the grain of hope, not as a two-dimensional response to three-dimensional problems but as a complex problem on its own. The title of the Colloquy, in which we call hope an idea, is meant to signal this approach.
The contributions collected here, while conceived from many distinctive intellectual and personal positions, are best discovered in twos and threes. Read or watch one, then another and another, at random. Imagine these items as belonging to a virtual conversation, which stands in for the exchange of ideas that takes place every day at the Center. Some of the contributors are professionally connected to the problem of hope—for instance, the historian of philosophy Pavlos Kontos is now writing authoritatively about hope in Aristotle’s thought—while others accept our invitation to fold the topic into their projects or their lives as scholars. Some simply register the place of hope in their lives.
Finally, we bear in mind that, even when it is concerned with historically remote cultures or recondite questions, research in the humanities is always about the present and the future. It is through the lens of the present that we address every question, which means that, except for the most circumscribed topics, we seldom produce definitive answers; instead we tend to offer arguments and interpretations that work for our moment, to be improved by the knowledge and perspectives of our successors. Anticipating that conversation with the scholars of the future, we send off the fruits of our research hopefully to posterity. This Colloquy aims to render hope where the present meets the future.
