On Patiency, or, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

This presentation offers a preliminary series of thoughts on what ‘patiency’ might mean. Patiency is neither patience nor passivity; rather it suggests a kind of active and intentional yielding, in which there is creative potency. Patiency is an opening to resonance: sacred, aesthetic, therapeutic. It has to do with what the sixteenth century magus-philosopher Giordano Bruno called ‘the power to be made.’ Patiency demands that we consider the distinction between surrender and submission. Politically, patiency puts pressure on the presumed excellence of agency as the preferred idiom of self-determination, and thus also on the cult of moralized utility and the aspiration to heroic sovereignty that informs most mainstream public discourse, including the discourse of academic legitimacy.

This talk will be in a workshop format with a pre-circulated paper.

Co-sponsored by the Humanities Council David A. Gardner 69′ Magic Project

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