Invasive Thoughts

Join us as we ask distinguished poet, critic, and translator Rosanna Warren about her literary autobiography, the state of literary criticism, and the role of the poet-critic. Rosanna discusses her literary and painterly childhood in France and her unusual path through the academy; the capaciousness of English in particular; past literary movements like deconstruction and New Criticism, as well as the eclecticism of our current moment; and the "sacred cannibalism" of literary influence. Rosanna concludes by reading her poem "A New Year" (a "train poem", as she explains).

In this episode of Invasive Thoughts, we speak with Miguel de Beistegui (ICREA Research Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) about crisis as one of the basic conditions of contemporary life. Our present is labelled with crises of almost every kind: financial, ecological, democratic, geopolitical, migratory, public-health, economic, and technological. Moving from the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020 to Heidegger, Mallarmé, neoliberalism, and non-Western thought, we ask what these crises reveal about the world we inhabit and the forms of thinking still prevalent among us. Beistegui invites us to think more deeply about what it means to live and act when the shared and fragile ground of our lives—the Earth itself, or Gaia—has entered into crisis.