Location: In-person event in The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University (Map)

Co-sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities; the Department of Germanic Languages; the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

With speaker Eric Santner (University of Chicago)

How does Kafka’s “cynical” story, Researches of a Dog, intersect with Shakespeare’s sad stories of the death of kings? How does each author locate a kind of freedom at the point of a missing link in the constitution of the world presented in each text, a point where the sovereign and the creature encounter one another in, to use Paul Celan’s phrase, the majesty of the absurd?