Calendar of Events

Seuls en Scène brings celebrated French actors and directors, as well as promising early-career artists, to Princeton University and the local community to present their work, introducing American audiences to dynamic and engaging French productions. This year we are thrilled to resume the French Theater Festival in person in collaboration with the 51st Edition of […]

Is language a “place” you call home? How do migratory patterns influence the stories we tell? Sámi-Swedish writer Linnea Axelsson, Professor of Creative Writing Aleksandar Hemon, and Translator-in-Residence Saskia Vogel join editor, critic and poet John Freeman in conversation and with short readings from their recent works. Axelsson’s forthcoming American debut Aednan, in Vogel’s translation […]

Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000) was one of the tightest and brightest thinkers of the 20th century. Trained as a classical philologist in the most German sense of the word, Timpanaro also maintained an unwavering, antagonistic, and near life-long commitment to the realisation of socialism. But his intellectual contributions go well beyond one or the other sphere […]

The first task in this talk will be to suggest, by drawing on linguistics, literary texts, myth and scripture, that in many pre-modern cultures poison, hypocrisy, politics, and communication were intimately related concepts. In these cultures, communication could be thought of as profoundly ambivalent, capable of both deceit and revelation. The dangers of this ambivalence were often imagined in terms of poison, and specialists in communicative action often represented as poisoners.

This talk will consider the diagonal line as a technique within thought. Inherently formal and spatial, if not also graphical, the diagonal or oblique line has played any number of important roles: from the diagonal of the unit square (which nearly destroyed Pythagoreanism and, later, played an important role in Plato’s "Meno"), to the clinamen or oblique swerve in Lucretius, to the modern intervention of Georg […]