Marci Shore, Hegel or Job: Reading Lev Shestov in Wartime Kyiv
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Marci Shore (Yale University)
"Hegel or Job: Reading Lev Shestov in Wartime Kyiv"
“Men respond only faintly to the horrors that take place around them, except at moments, when the flagrant, savage incongruity and repulsiveness of our condition suddenly presents itself before our eyes with irresistible lucidity, and compels us to look at ourselves," wrote Lev Shestov, the Kievan Jewish philosopher, in 1905. "Then"--he continued--"the ground slides away from under our feet." For Shestov, philosophy began when reason confronted the borders past which it proved impotent. Its task was not to provide certainty, but to teach us to live in uncertainty, in our groundlessness.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy.
This lecture is the Keynote lecture of the Conference, Philosophical Readings of the Book of Job.
Marci Shore is professor of history at Yale University and a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, is forthcoming in March 2024. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Eurozine, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the book project she is currently completing about phenomenology in East-Central Europe tentatively titled Eyeglasses Floating in the Sky: Central European Encounters that Took Place while Searching for Truth.